by Judith on March 7, 2010
It would seem that yoga is a natural topic for a blog, yet just last week a yoga instructor interested in starting a blog asked the Big Blog Question:
“But what would I SAY?”
Mostly, I responded, you blog about the things you do, things your customers ask about, fun stories, updates on new insights or even products, reports back from yoga conferences (with photos), how-to’s for your yoga clients, and stories about interesting things that have happened around the studio.
Look at your business from your customer’s point of view. What are they curious about?
Some blogs are instructional, and I think I lean in this direction, tending to write the blog that answers a question or that helps a client notch up her copywriting, social marketing, e-marketing and content SEO skills. But that’s just me. I’d share fun stories from around the office, I think, if I had any. But, fact is, things are kind of quiet around this writer’s office. I sip tea, ponder, create, write, optimize, coach clients on social marketing and strategy…
But in a yoga studio?! Wow. There’s action: Workshops, conferences, new instructors, that moment when a yoga student achieves her first inverted posture. That’s photo op time!
If you want to get some ideas on what to blog about, turn to your customers. They’ll have ideas. Count on it.
(Now, that’s great advice. I think I’ll take it. So, let me ask you: what would you like Web Words That Work! to blog about?)
by Judith on March 3, 2010
I was laughing along with a small business blogging client today about her over-abundance of preparation for starting a blog. She’s been gathering materials for almost a year. And today, she said, “Let’s not over-prepare. Let’s just do it.” We laughed. We both know we are way beyond the over-preparing line.
We’ll get the blog designed and set up (by Integris Marketing) and then we’ll begin to populate the pages, as this will be a duo-functioning blog, with static pages plus blog. We know what the pages are going to include – pretty much. We just don’t have them completely, fully, perfectly, exactly, unequivocally finalized.
Sometimes when you are launching a Website, you have all the content pre-organized and written; sometimes you don’t. This is one of the times when you don’t.
And yet, this small business client has all the info she’s going to need, has her strategy for going forward, her customer demographics, and her niche identified. In my book, that’s enough to get started. (Though I can just hear the marketing types tearing hair out; yelling, more data! more data!) Ah well.
I think one of the beauties of a blog-based Website is its ability to evolve over time.
Unlike the Websites of old that required you to write everything and then hand it all off the the IT team, many small Websites today are built on blog platforms, which are basically CMS (content management systems). As you can probably tell, I’m kind of partial to the Wordpress CMS, but I work on several others as well.
We’ll get this small business Website up on Wordpress, we’ll have just a few pages to start and then – Look out. This client’s smart, and I think she’s going to be prolific, too.
