CT Biz Blogs

Here’s the second reason for having a weblog. (Read part one here)
Share your expertise

When you share your expertise and your ideas, you do three things:

1. Show your passion for your business and your chosen work
2. Build confidence in your readers that you know your subject and that you care about what you offer to customers or clients
3. Bring people to your business

1. Show your passion
For many small businesses, this is how it starts — you’re excited about something: trains, arts & crafts, the law, dental hygiene, identity theft, whatever. You decide to put your heart and soul into your work, and to make it your business. Even if you’re in the business because you want to be your own boss, or to work from home, chances are you picked what you did because it sounded at least interesting. And you’ve learned a lot about it.

And it’s not only about passion for your work, but for your customers as well. When you share your ideas, thoughts, knowledge, you show that you are committed to giving people what they need.

A weblog can help you show that passion and that commitment. Here are some ways.

• Showcase work that you’ve done.
• Write articles about topics your prospective clients will find useful
• Publish pictures from happy customers

2. Build confidence

By sharing your ideas and showing your passion, you show prospective customers and clients that you know what you’re talking about. This is a no-risk way for them to get to know you, to evaluate you, to decide if you’re right for them. Reading the Horsefeather’s weblog, you can’t taste their food, but, since a restaurant is about much more than the food, you can taste their commitment to good food and a great customer experience. (Having eaten there, I can also assure you that the food is great!) By reading the blog, I see that food is something they’re knowledgeable about.

Some of the ways a weblog can help you gain customer confidence are by:

• Showcasing the depth of your knowledge with articles and posts
• Showing or linking to examples of your work (or happy customers)
• Demonstrating the breath of your knowledge through links and sidebars

3. Bring people to your business

This doesn’t mean links to Mapquest or Google maps (although those do help if you have a physical location).

If you have a weblog, and start sharing, not only will you increase the likelihood of converting prospective customers into actual customers for the reasons stated above, but you’ll also increase the likelihood of anyone finding you when they search in Google or Yahoo!

This happens through the keywords and search terms that you use in your posts, and through linking.

The more posts you write, the more keywords and search terms you create. When the search engine spiders come crawling through your website, they get an idea of the most frequently used words on the blog, which, for search engines, is what your site is about.

Also, one thing that goes into determining your “ranking” in the search engines is the number of links into your weblog. There are several ways to increase that, but the best way to get links in is to link out. For example, I wrote a post about Andrew Ewalt’s law blog a week ago, and I just noticed he’s added this weblog to his links. (Thanks, Andrew!)

To sum this up, some of the ways you can help people find you is by:

• Consistently writing posts, which build your weblog
• Spread the “link love” around

Believe it or not, there’s much more I could say about all these topics, but I’ll go into more detail some other time.