Content Strategies for Small Business Blogs

Whether you want to start a blog for your small business or simply improve the one you already have, you need to have a blog content strategy. A good blog content strategy requires having a clear purpose for the blog, identifying and understanding your audience, deciding who will author the posts, and coming up with a steady stream of topics to write about.

Purpose
It can be argued that every business should have a blog, but that is partly because a blog can accomplish many different objectives. You need to be clear on the purpose of your blog to ensure the content will accomplish your goals.

A small business blog can be used to:

• Drive sales or create leads
• Bring in customers from outside your area
• Establish yourself as an expert in your field
• Help your customers understand what you do
• Create a sense of familiarity or community with your regular customers
• Improve your search engine ranking

Good blog content can often fulfill multiple functions at once, but only if you write with those purposes in mind.

Audience
Regardless of the medium used, effective communication always requires that you know your audience. For blogging, you need to consider what your target audience would like to read, and what style or tone they would be most comfortable with. An audience of busy business executives, for instance, would probably appreciate you being quick, organized and to the point. If you market to stay-at-home parents, on the other hand, a longer and perhaps less serious writing style might go over well.

Authorship
Somebody has to write and maintain your blog. Should you have only one author, or multiple people who share the load? 

It depends mostly on your purpose and resources. Do you want to establish yourself as an authority, or highlight the diverse expertise present throughout your organization? 

Time can also be a factor, especially if you decide to have multiple posts a week. Having multiple authors certainly makes the task easier. For a single-author blog, though, you may still be able to share the load by having a copywriter ghostwrite much of the content, or have someone else simply help come up with topics or outlines.

Topics
Once you know your purpose, audience and author, you can actually start creating the content. 

Coming up with enough fresh topics to cover can be a big hurdle for bloggers, especially if your strategy is to have a high frequency of blog posts. When brainstorming, you can often get ideas by reading industry publications or signing up for relevant news feeds. If you sell particular brands that customers tend to be interested in, you can follow those companies on Twitter. In each case, the goal is to identify current topics of interest that you can develop into blog content.

With a good strategy that produces quality content, you can create a small business blog that produces measurable results.