Marketing A Local Business-Write Better Blog Articles
Marketing a local business is taking on new forms today. For example, you can promote your local business everyday by writing short useful blog articles that relate to the theme of your small business.
We are not talking about writing Pulitzer Prize quality articles either. Just short, to the point articles your readers would enjoy reading.
Here are 5 tips to help you write better blog articles and then quickly promote them online for your local business.
1. Create a swipe file for ideas for your future articles. These are ideas you get from your customers questions, TV., newspaper, your competitors websites and so on.
Your articles can be anything your readers would find interesting. It has to be worth their time to come back to your blog or to subscribe to your RSS Feed.
2. Do you really understand your audience? Developing a profile of your customer base will help you create short blog articles that fit their profiles.
You always want to write about things from a needs-benefit standpoint. Be sure what you are writing addressing their needs and then keep in mind how it benefits them specifically.
3. Stay on point and keep your articles short. Blog articles only need to be 100-200 words to get your point across. If you find yourself writing more consider breaking it into 2 articles.
As much as you would like to think you are really impressing your readers you can impress them more by valuing their time. Get to the point and wrap it up.
4. Write in a friendly tone. Be conversational and informative. When you are writing to someone like you are talking to them you keep their attention better.
One strategy that does work is avoid using big words that try to impress people. Just write like you talk and you will never have a hard time writing.
5. Proofread your article for spelling and grammar. Microsoft Word is good for this. So is Open Office which is free to download. By just taking a minute to look your article over you can quickly catch mistakes and correct them.
One final point is bookmarking your blog articles to social directories where they can be found. Using a bookmarking tool such as OnlyWire.com is helpful for hitting more directories with one click.
If you are going to bookmark manually try and get your article into your Facebook, Twitter, and Stumbleupon accounts. This is where the people are hanging out online today. Facebook has over 400 million members and building a friends list is easy to do.
So is building a followers list on Twitter. Bookmarking to Stumbleupon is quick and you can choose the category for your blog article to be placed in.
These are 5 points on marketing a local business by writing better blog articles and taking that extra step to successful bookmarking. If you do this on a consistent basis more people will read your articles and the search engines will reward you as well.
Jeff Schuman helps people make money online and his local business website helps small business owners grow using the internet.
5 Article Marketing Tips For Local Business Owners
I know from personal experience that local business article marketing can produce great benefits.
The local businessarticles we have done for LocalBusinessGroup.com have helped us get over 1800 backlinks in less than a month.
We do all of the things we offer in our local business marketing package. This includes article marketing, press releases, blogging, video marketing, submitting to directories, and analyzing our website and how our online promotions are doing.
Let's talk about a few article marketing tips right now in this short article.
1. Provide your readers with good content.
No matter how great are your title or your resource box is, you will not be able to drive people to your website if they don't find anything valuable on your content. Remember you need to impress people first before you can get them to click on your resource box.
2. Get your articles out on the world wide web.
Take advantage of all the leading article submission sites and directories to easily boost your exposure and the number of your inbound links.
3. Use keyword phrases all throughout your content.
Think of the search engines and work to impress them so they will give your articles higher ranking. Sprinkle generous amount of popular search terms all throughout your content while observing the acceptable keyword density which I feel is 1%. This means you use yoru primary keyword phrase no more than 4 times in a 400 word article.
4. Write more articles.
Spend more time writing and strive to produce 5-10 articles per day. This may sound like a lot fo work, but you can pass your competitors if you do this. Another approach is you can hire a local business writer such as our company to do this for you.
As well as generating more inbound links for your website that can boost your page ranking, you'll also stand great chances of earning the trust of your potential clients when you write more. This is very important so you can get these people to do business with you in the long run.
5. Write useful information.
Remember your main goal in writing your articles is to inform your readers. Don't use a lot of technical jargon in your articles and avoid using big words just to impress them. Make it easier for your readers to get the message that you are trying to get across by using simple terms as much as possible.
These are several local business article marketing tips that will help you improve your Internet marketing efforts if you implement them. Article marketing should be a big part of your online promotions.
Jeff Schuman owns LocalBusinessGroup.com. They help local business owners use the Internet to grow their small business in their own local market.
Email Marketing For Local Business Owners: The Basicis
Let's keep it simple and go over what you need to do local business email marketing the right way. It is not hard to do and you can quickly get started in just a few steps.
1. You need an autoresponder and for that I suggest Aweber. They are one of the most popular online auto responders.
The service runs around $20 a month and let you follow up with thousands of names and email addresses. It's very easy to get started with and they offer training on how to use their system.
2. When using an autoresponder you want to build a sign up form and then place the code on every web page you have. If you are promoting your local business properly you will have website visitors coming to your site on pages other than just your home page.
For this reason placing your sign up form on every page gives you a chance to build your mailing list faster. Doing this will help you increase your business as you can follow up with people over a period of time.
3. Offer something free such as a report that gives him valuable information relating to the niche your business is in. This is what will encourage visitors to your website to subscribe to your mailing list. This does not have to be anything real long, but it should include unique information that would make your website visitor want to read it.
4. Set up a few follow up messages in your autoresponder in advance. These only need to be around 200 words in length and should offer helpful information or something your reader would find interesting.
The advantage of having them prewritten is you can schedule them to go out via email in advance and then forget about them. This automates your email marketing campaign and makes following up with new subscribers very easy.
5. Consider publishing a tips newsletter and send it out on a monthly basis. This is an excellent way to maintain contact with your email subscribers and keep your name in front of them. This is also a good way to sell new products as you can promote things directly in the body of your email newsletter.
These are a few of the basics that will help you do local business email marketing more effectively. Placing a sign up form on your web pages when building your list will give you a tremendous competitive advantage in the marketplace as most of your competitors are not doing this.
Please visit our local business website today if you enjoyed this article by Jeff Schuman on local business email marketing. We help small business owners use the internet to grow their business in their local market with local business marketing. Check us out for local business news and updates today.
