MacDonald on Marketing

Posts Tagged ‘blogging’

Every small business owner is an expert. The secret to attracting visitors to your website and building their trust in you is to share your expertise generously online.

What’s your area of expertise? Hotel and restaurant owners know their region’s tourist attractions inside out. Real estate agents have lots of information about relocating to their communities. Printing company owners may be experts on wedding invitations or brochure design. Exterminators know all about preventing and dealing with pest infestations. Professionals like lawyers, accountants, veterinarians, health practitioners and dentists all have answers to people’s questions.

Remember, to be an expert, you do not have to know more than anyone else knows about your topic — you only have to know more than 95% of the general population.

Positioning yourself as an expert is a gradual process, and you must resist the temptation to flog your products and services; instead, take the time to build your credibility. Become a trusted expert and the sales will follow!

Here are five starting steps to leverage your expertise into more visitors to your small business website.

Find out what people want to know.

When your customers, friends, family and neighbors ask your advice, what questions do they ask you? Start brainstorming a list of questions and topics to write about. People type all sorts of questions into search engines too. Do a little keyword research at Google Adwords and WordTracker to find more questions and to find out which questions are the most popular. Come up with a list of five to ten popular questions to get you started.

Add information pages to your website.

Add an information or FAQ section to your business website. For best search engine results, use a separate HTML page to write about each separate topic or question. (I’m going to be talking about how to optimize your site’s pages for search engines next week, so make sure you add our RSS feed to your feed reader or sign up for email updates.)

Start a blog.

Blogs are the single biggest bang for your buck in terms of generating visitors from search engines and links from other sites. If you have the time to write something fresh and on topic at least once a week, blogging is the best way to share your expertise on a topic and build relationships with your customers and potential customers.

How do you get a blog? The best option is to have a web developer integrate a blog as part of your small business website. If you don’t have the budget for this, go to WordPress.com or Blogger.com and sign up for a free hosted blog.

Once you are blogging, take some time to participate in the blogging community by reading related blogs and making informative, focused comments. You’ll be able to get a link to your blog from your comments, which will invite people interested in what you say to come take a look.

Participate on forums.

When people are interested in a topic and have questions, they frequently turn to online communities called forums or bulletin boards. These forums provide a place where people can register to post questions and comments related to their interests. There are forums on every topic: diets, beauty, legal issues, hobbies, travel, you name it. Search Google and identify the most popular forums related to your business.

Forums each develop their own formal and informal rules and guidelines about participants’ behavior. Take the time to read and get to know the tone and rules of the forum before you jump in and participate. You may be allowed to post your business site URL in your signature — check the forum rules and if this is permitted, do it. Take time to post good insights and advice instead of just pushing your products and services; gradually you will become a respected and trusted authority.

Add our RSS to your reader or sign up for free email updates to make sure you don’t miss my follow-up posts on search engine optimization. I’ll show you how to turn the inbound links you will generate by sharing your expertise into higher search engine rankings.

Do you have more ideas about how to share your expertise with people who are looking for information and solutions? Please post in the comments!

Photo credit:  Mai Le

Welcome to MacDonaldOnMarketing.com. I’m Catherine MacDonald, Internet entrepreneur and small business owner. I’ve been involved in Internet marketing since 1998.

Over the years, I’ve learned a lot about the process of marketing products and services online. When my husband and I founded our web development firm Simply Brilliant Solutions and started developing websites for our small business clients, we noticed something. As our job of creating a website for a client finished, the client’s job was just starting: attracting visitors to the website and converting those visitors into new customers. Many of our clients, experts in their own industries but unfamiliar with online marketing, were unsure how to get started. That’s the reason for this blog.

I aim to make MacDonaldOnMarketing.com the place for small business owners to come for tutorials, tips and fresh ideas about web marketing. I’m not going to be writing posts full of insider jargon and obscure technical debates. We’ll be discussing the basics of online marketing in a way that anyone can understand.

The topics I’m going to cover include:

Small business websites: Internet marketing obviously starts with your website, and we’ll discuss tips and strategies to make sure that your site starts you off on the right foot.

Ecommerce: You may already be taking orders and payments online, or perhaps you are making plans to do so. Ecommerce can help you increase market share and expand into new markets, and we’ll be discussing the different options in easy-to-understand terms.

Search engine optimization (SEO): Everybody wants to get top results on Google and other engines, but most people don’t know how to make this happen. I’ll show you what needs to be done to improve your search engine ranking.

Search engine marketing: SEM is a fancy name for buying paid listings in search engine results on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis. Google Adwords is the most well-known example. Learn how to get the best value for your SEM dollar.

Blogging: Writing a blog (you’re reading one now) can be one of the most effective online marketing strategies for small business. Learn how to increase search engine rankings and build a loyal customer base by creating a blog your customers look forward to reading.

Social media marketing: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and more — find out how to leverage communities like these to make it easy for your happiest customers to spread the word.

Email marketing: We’ll look at good and bad examples of email marketing and discuss how to build a list of people who want to hear from you about your products or services.

Analytics and feedback: How do you know what’s working and what isn’t in terms of attracting visitors to your site and turning those visitors into customers? We’ll talk about ways to track your website traffic statistics and invite feedback from your visitors.

Questions, comments, or feedback about these topics and my posts? Please jump into the conversation in the comments sections of the posts or email me at catherine@macdonaldonmarketing.com.

If you’re a small business owner interested in getting the most out of your Internet presence, subscribe now. Thanks for visiting and come back soon!