When I first started blogging it was to promote a company I was a sales manager for. That company was a fence contracting business and I was looking for different ways to bring more customers in the door. A good friend of mine suggested I start a blog and write about fencing.

Later that year I decided to start my own fence contracting business and was going to need a website for it. I contacted that friend that suggested I start a blog and asked him to design a site for me on Wordpress. He was happy to design my site. Since I had already been blogging on a free wordpress site, I already new my way around the admin page of a wordpress site so the transition was easy.

Benefits of Blogging:

  • If you own a business where you are looking for local customers, a blog is absolutely the best option in my opinion. I was able to make the top 3 on Google for “[your city] fence” within only months. This alone is a big reason, and probably the most important reason to blog promoting your business.
  • Blog sites can be updated as frequently as you want without having to go through your webmaster to get them to do it. Google really like sites that make frequent updates instead of 5 or 6 static (meaning the content always stays the same) pages.
  • You have control over the content, so you can write content that has the keywords you want to rank for in the articles.
  • Blogging has built in SEO (search engine optimizing) benefits to help your site rank better on the SERP’s.
  • On a blog, you have the option to make your site “interactive” by allowing people to comment and ask questions.

There are many more reasons, but those are a few.

What will I blog about?

This is commonly used as a reason not to blog for local business. Business owners tend to think they won’t have anything to write about. This is not true either, you just have to be creative. As a fence contractor I wrote about multiple topics on my blog:

  • Ordinances: I lived in a fairly large city with multiple “towns” around it, and there were different codes in each town. I made an article out of each one. This not only gave me material, but I found it was not easy to find this information, so if it was hard for me, it would be hard for my customers. Not only did this give me topics and the ability to get all the surrounding towns in my titles (ranked for those towns along with “fence” easily, but my customers were able to find this information on my site easily.
  • Projects: I wrote about projects we were doing, along with some pictures and a description of the project, the title again had the area I was doing the project along with the term “aluminum fence installed” in it, which again helped me rank for that town in the searches.
  • News: There is always news in any industry, if you can find news about your industry, write an article in your own words and even link to the source of the article.
  • Specials: If you are running a special, write about it so you can promote it.
  • New Products: Do your own “press release” of sorts on your site when new products are offered.
  • How To’s: How to’s are good in almost any industry.

There are many more, but these are some of the ones I used.

I Don’t Know How to Blog:

If you can write an email, you can blog!

There are other things you have to do to promote your site, but through blogging I was able to sell $50k+ worth of fence projects in months during our season. My advertising budget was less than $100 per year. 100% of my customers came from the internet.

Conclusion:

If you are a small business owner, you really should consider “blogging for business“. It helped me tremendously in a brand new business, and the best part was most of my competition didn’t know what blogging was or why I was ranking so well.

My customers appreciated the vast amount of information available on my site, and I KNOW it helped to land projects I wouldn’t have normally received.

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