After you launch your website, it’s a great idea to start a regular practice of blogging for your small business. Especially if you’re a female solopreneur.

Should you blog for your expertise or consulting business? If you ask me, you’ll get an emphatic YES! It’s a great way to build authority and connect with both potential and existing clients.

Blogging for your business is about two Ts: Trust & Traffic and can be a great low-cost marketing tool.

This type of blogging is a little different than blogging as a business or a hobby.

Unlike a blog as a business, where the goal is to monitize your traffic, the goal of a business blog is to get readers know like and trust you, better understand what you offer and ultimately work with you.

Consider these stats:

B2C companies that blog generate 88% more leads per month.
Businesses that blog have 55% more website visitors than ones that don’t.*
(Source *HubSpot, “100 Awesome Marketing Stats, Charts, and Graphs” )

When you write and maintain blog, You need to consider three types of readers when creating your content.

In order of importance they are:

Potential clients: Once people find you get them to ‘know like and trust you’
Existing clients: Keep the customers you do have engaged with your business
Google: So people that don’t know about you can find you

Let’s start by looking at the first group.

#1 Potential Customers

Once people find you, they need to get to ‘know, like and trust’ you enough to find out more, maybe get on your list and even purchase one of your services. Your blog helps you do this.

When you write this kind of content you should do your best to use your authentic voice, write about your customers needs and aspirations.

Write content that demonstrates that you ‘get it’ when it comes to solving your clients problems

Your text should not be sales-y or overly self promoting. It should be generous and empathetic.

You can and should help your readers to get to know more about you, as appropriate. Ultimately people like to do business with other people.

Not every post needs to tie directly back to your offerings or your clients needs (although the majority should). You can write occasional posts that talk about the behind the scenes of your business or other topics that might be of interest to your ideal customer.

Keep your tone disarming. The vibe should be: ‘come on in, let me know if I can help you’.

Things to write about:

Customer success stories
Tips and education to help them with their problems
Ways they can benefit from your services

Ultimately, good blogging is really about good storytelling

Telling your story is a great way to introduce yourself to your potential customers. Depending on your business, this shouldn’t be the main emphasis of most of your posts, but you can sprinkle your content with examples.

#2 Existing Customers

Blogging is also great for keeping existing customers engaged. Repeat business from existing customers is easier than attracting new customers.

Here are some things you can write about:

Industry news that’s of interest to them
What’s new (but not too sales-y or spammy)
What’s going on with your business?

This kind of content will be of interest to potential customers as well. Clients who have worked with you will just have a deeper context when reading it.

#3 Google

Let me start off by saying I don’t think you should start a blog solely for the purpose of SEO. I’m firmly in the camp that you should write your blog for human readers not search engines.

Having said that, a regularly maintained will help people find you through Google. By posting fresh content, ideally once a week, you end up on Googles radar more than you would otherwise.

Even better if these posts are SEO (search engine optimization) friendly and contain Keywords.

I’ve written that SEO is complex subject. If you want to learn more about SEO, keywords and keyword research start with this free, six part free series ‘1-Hour Guide to SEO’ from SEO Moz or you can take my course on starting a basic keyword list.

Once you understand the importance of keywords and keyword phrases you can start doing some research on which makes sense for your business.

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A simple, step-by-step course to creating a keyword list and optimizing your website to start getting more clients using SEO.

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Gradually incorporate your specific keywords and keyword phrases into your blog content. These keywords are going to be important when crafting blog posts for getting your content and site to show up in Google results.

There is also a way to write and structure you posts in a way that is SEO and Google friendly.

For example:

Include keywords in your blog title
Make sure to use Headers 1 & 2 in your posts
Add keyword-rich captions to your images
Make sure the blog post URL contains keywords

When done right, your blog can be a 24/7 Sales Rep for your business

If you can only post once a month, that’s better than nothing. Ideally you should post once a week. At the beginning of the year or the quarter think through a list of blog topics to write.

More best practices to consider:

Always ask yourself if your content is interesting to your ideal client
Pepper your blog posts with CTAs (Calls To Action)
Add an option to sign-up for your mailing list at the bottom of every post
Cross link to related posts
If related to the post content include customer testimonials
Posts should be at least 600 words, even better if they’re over 1000
Amplify your posts; repurpose snippets on social media and your newsletter
Have a complimentary business guest post on your blog and guest post on their business blogs

But I’m running a business not a blog!

I’ll be honest, sometimes I feel this way too! Writing blog posts take time and effort.

Maintaining a blog is just one of the many activities in your marketing efforts. With a little planning, preparation and focus you can keep a blog going. Here are some ways to do that:

Create a posting calendar, make sure it’s realistic, then stick to it.
Write and schedule posts when you have down time. If there are seasonal lulls or other times when your biz is quiet, ‘pre-load’ posts and schedule them
Invite guest posters - Think about guest posters; complimentary businesses that have interesting info for your customers/benefit from your audience
Regular series can help. That way you’re not constantly scratching your head for topics (ex. ‘Get Fit Fridays’ ‘Detox Dienstag’).
If inspired create ad hoc personal content; repurpose an instagram photo and write a couple of sentences about it if it might be remotely interesting to your audience (get to know me, authenticity, behind the scenes)
If necessary keep it short. Think: the length of a quick email. I can only manage a long 1000+ word post (often referred to as a ‘pillar posts’) every couple months or so.

In the end, you aren’t a full time blogger and shouldn’t expect that of yourself.

However keeping and maintaining a blog regularly is a great, free way to engage your potential and existing customers in a deep, intimate way.

Not sure if blogging is right for you? Let’s talk about it in a strategy session.

Yes, let's talk about it

What is the Best way to Blog for your Expert Business?

Should you blog for your expertise or consulting business? If you ask me, you’ll get an emphatic YES! It’s a great way to build authority and connect with both potential and existing clients.