7
Jun
2010
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.
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