Many small business owners have severe writers block. As I discuss in another post recently titled "The problem with (and solution to) Blogging for Entrepreneurs", an effective way of getting a blog rolling is to use your own personal voice when doing so. However, even that seems like a herculean task to someone who is wearing as many hats as most small business owners are. Who has time to blog when you are the CEO, CFO, primary technician, head salesperson, chief janitor, cook, bottle washer, and everything in-between?
Ultimately, though, if that is what is going through your mind... you are over thinking it. Your blog posts don't need to be epic opuses of perfectly written text and seamlessly integrated images. They just need to be... written. With that in mind, lets look at the bare bones essentials of a good blog post:
Catchy title: think of the way newspapers would write headlines. That is the title for your blog post, a headline. Make it short, make it catchy and most of all make it concise. Nobody wants to read a post if the title doesn't even show up on their screen without a carriage return.
Some content: notice i said "some" not "a lot" or even "great". Again, it does not need to be perfect. It just needs to be. I read an article from a sports reporter in the star telegram today about the cowboys and he wrote "I am not hear to say..." and he gets paid to write for a living! Don't stress about anything except getting it written. All else can be forgiven... except if there is too much. The cardinal sin of most bloggers is too many words. Keep it short. If it needs more than a few paragraphs to get the idea out, write a second post and make it a series.
Nice picture: find a good, inexpensive (not free), image to include in your post that sums up the idea in one picture. It should be easy to view at multiple sizes because your content could and will be viewed on all kinds of different screens. It should also not be free because, well, there is no such thing. You might get away with adding a pic from google images for a while, but sooner or later you will get the dreaded cease and desist letter or worse get served with lawsuit papers. Just pay the buck it costs for a stock image that is web sized and keep on blogging.
Thats it. Write, post, repeat and you will see lots more inbound traffic to your website.
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