1. Make Time, Start Early

A mistake made over and over is that people just don’t make time for their Writing, leaving something to last minute will cause a heap of stress. We recommend you start a week earlier to when you aim to publish, do this and you won’t have deadlines looming.

You don’t always have to publish right away either, make use of the draft function and come back to it later if you get stuck, start it early and you’ll have ample time to do this.

2. Know The Goal

Before writing anything understand what the goal of the post will be.

If you know what information and what action the post is meant to be making before hand then the writing will flow – If you don’t have a clear goal; what you write won’t be worthwhile.

Part of this will be knowing any keywords you need to include in your title and post, for more on
keywords see our post Keywords – the foundation of everything.

3. Update Often

Updating your blog often is a vital thing to do, a slow blog is a useless blog. You should aim for a blog post per week, and to be sure to use social media like Facebook & Twitter to link back to your blog and stir up interest on a regular basis. Reach out to customers in this way and you’ll never be short of subject matter.

If you don’t think you can manage to update your blog at the very least once every 3 months, then its probably better you stick to other methods of marketing.

4. Stay with the times

Seasonal change or new fads are great things to keep in time and reference to with your writing.

Whether its a new craze or new season swinging in, you can use it to your advantage, promote a new item in store which has ties to the latest ‘in thing’ or feature a next season deal.

5. Be Interesting

Tell stories, share histories, be interesting!

This is key, if you want people to read your blog then you’ll have to be interesting, share your passion for your business. People love stories and the histories of the products they’re buying.

Always post photos with the text, photos are the backbone of social media, they’ll keep things interesting and turn any bland text into a lively, full, interesting page.

Share the stories of staff, show you care for your employees, photos of happy employees lighten a site up and radiate a warm, pleasant image of your business – being a good, ethical business is more important than ever.

Small business owners are reknown for their passion for their work – share your passion and spark with your readers and they’ll always come back for more.

6. Help People Out

Linking to & promoting other products sounds a ridiculous idea, but its actually a very good thing to do, so long as the business it benefits isn’t a rival in the sector.

By reviewing products & the services of others’ you’re providing people with a useful service, help someone out and they’ll be sure to visit your site again.

A very crafty way to play this out to your full advantage would be to review something which you currently sell or already provide, for instance, a salon would write a review on a certain shampoo they sell in shop.

7. Keep It Short

Lastly, make sure you always keep it short. Remember that people will be reading your post on a screen and don’t want to be reading great walls of text.

If you do have to write something long and very wordy break the text up regularly into small paragraphs. Online newspapers do this perfectly and serve as the best example.

8. Publish and promote

Tell everyone about your new blog post:

• Social Media – post a link of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google + and Delicious
• Email your database telling them you have a new blog post that’s just been published
• that they might find interesting
• Comment on other blogs saying you like their post and here’s one you’ve just writtenwhich they may like