We’re so excited to announce the first installment of our Q & A! It’s a monthly series where we answer any and all of your marketing questions. We’re all about helping you grow your businesses and we couldn’t think of a better way than directly answering your burning questions! So pull out your pen and paper and get ready.
Is it really that helpful to write your own blog that is connected to your shop?
Absolutely! The power of a small business is that people can connect with the owner. You might love Nike but you can’t get to know their CEO via Twitter or Facebook. A blog allows your fans to get a peek into your life, which makes them become even more attuned to your purpose (and thus bigger fans). A blog could be about your day to day life with exciting business news. Or it could offer advice if you’re a service provider. Or it could show examples of your work to let people see more of what you have to offer. Or it could share some how-tos to get your readers interacting with you. Want some ideas of great blogs that connect readers with the business in a personal way?
- Sarah Jane Studios shares how she balances her illustration business with her family life. Her blog is so popular, we once saw her sell one-year of commission portraits in just 10 hours! Yep, you read that right.
- A Beautiful Mess is the blog of Elsie and Emma, who own a brick and mortar shop called Red Velvet. They use their blog as a means to share their philosophy and love for crafting a beautiful life.
- Tara Swiger uses her blog to feature and interview other knitters, inspirational ideas, and business advice. She’s really helping her customers on a variety of levels and showing she understands that they want more than just a nice sweater from her yarn.
What are some tips and tricks to get featured on a popular blog?
First, make sure you have great photography. Popular blogs have a reputation to keep, after all, so they’ll only feature work with photos that meet their requirements and general feel. You also want to make sure those blogs actually feature work from other people. If they do, you’ll want to send them a short email that shares your purpose, a little bit about your work, and your press release or photos. You definitely want to show that you’ve been reading their work for a bit and reference things that have been posted recently. It’s always best to make your pitch emails personal because it shows you actually care about the work the writer puts into their blog.
How often should you post on your FB page and Twitter. I don’t want the “negative feedback”, but I also don’t want to be a ghost. What is the happy medium to boost sales and awareness without bugging “fans”?
We’re going to tell you a little secret: no one sees your Facebook feeds as often as you do. Nor does anyone read all of your blog posts. Facebook feeds swallow updates like whales swallow krill. You could post three times a day and most people will only see one of those posts. As long as you post one time a day, you’ll be sure to stay on people’s radars. One way to get a better feel for how often you should post is to ‘like’ the Facebook page of another business that you see as a big success (one that you look up to). How often do they post? What sorts of posts do they share? As long as you’re not posting every hour on Facebook, you won’t be ‘bugging’ your fans. After all, they’re your fans because they WANT to know what you’re up to.
I have my own site. Can I put SEOs on it somewhere using WordPress? (PLUGIN CALLED SEO FOR WORDPRESS FOR YOUAST – GIVES YOU IDEAS)
First, let’s get clear on what you DON’T want to do when it comes to SEO.
- Cram all of your pages full of your keywords in an unnatural way. No one wants to read content that has ‘knitted scarf’ in every sentence. It feels fake, it’s boring, and we all know what you’re doing (and we don’t like it).
- Put SEO keywords in the background of your page in white font. Google bots will catch you and will flag your site as a spam site.
- Only have one keyword. It’s boring and your customers don’t want to read about your ‘intricate gold jewelry’ over and over again.
Now, we don’t want to scare you away because SEO is a great way to get your website to rank higher in a Google search. We recently had the most amazing guest post on our site by Janet Walker that shows you How to Get Search Engine Users to Find Your Product.
In answer to your question about WordPress though, WordPress has a great plug-in for SEO that gives you suggestions for keywords and shows you how your page/site will rank for that keyword.
Got a burning marketing question you’d love us to answer? Have a problem you’d like some advice on? Email us at [email protected] and we’ll put it in the line-up for next month’s Q & A! And please let us know in the comments below if you enjoyed this first post in the series.
{Featured image via Charmois Craft Party}
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