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1. Your logo! You would be surprised how many businesses forget that the blog needs the same brand as the business to work as a form of brand awareness building. A logo is great for awareness of your brand and your first key element needed. It gives your blog site a face to your readers, something that they can remember it by. Your logo is a subtle and very effective way of making your readers remember what your blog is all about and in turn, remember what your business is all about and what its products and/or services offered are.  2. Clear navigation bar The navigation bar should be easily accessed, straightforward and simple. Your readers are after the content of your blog. They do not want to have to deal with too much design. Much like your content, your navigation bar should also be user-friendly. 3. Social sharing buttons within blog posts You can increase your chances of going viral by making your content easily shareable on social media. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram buttons can be easily setup on your website to be accessed on all of your webpages.  4. Proper typography Your font style, colour and size can affect how well a reader perceives your blog posts. True, it is the content that matters but they need to read it to find that out! If the font isn’t very easy on the eyes, you will lose the readers before the end of the post. Never use font less than 12px! 5. Responsive design (mobile-friendly layout) If you really care about your visitors and how they view your blog, make it easier for them to navigate your site in any screen sizes especially for mobile users. In 2018, the present is mobile. 6. Related posts, most popular posts and latest posts. These three things assist in keeping your blog site as organised as possible as it can help readers get to know what’s the latest, what’s trending and other posts related to what they are reading, further increasing traffic and subtly giving readers more reasons to stay. 7. Breadcrumb trail If possible, add breadcrumbs to your blog site. It makes navigation so much easier and helps readers understand where what topics they are reading belong to. 8. Tags or categories What makes tags so important is that they not only keep your blog site organised but also allow search engines to know what ‘topics’ are covered by each post, acting like keywords. They are crucial.  9. Comment box. We can’t be clearer on this point – use every single opportunity to encourage interaction between the business and your readers. Use a ‘call-to-action’ – a line or two telling or asking your readers to do something – on every post, at least once. Once you have a large enough reader base, they will discuss the content of each post on the content box and may even provide additional insight that you can use later on. 10. About page & contact info These are simple pages that are quite self-explanatory and they are necessary because they complete the overall professional look that you will want your blog site to have if you want to attract readers and increase overall traffic. 11. Service/product pages and payment options Blogs are made for a reason and it’s not just to give valuable content. It is your way of advertising to your readers as well. Make sure that you capitalise on your reader base and further increase traffic by including a services or product page in your blog site. If possible, include payment options as well to make everything easier for your consumers.  12. Blog sign-up form (and/or newsletter sign-up form) Email marketing is extremely powerful so allow your readers to receive your blog posts and/or newsletters by email. Used in this way, the content builds brand awareness, consumer trust and loyalty. Make use of it. 13. Google analytics Google analytics are great as it gives you concrete numbers that will show you what is wrong with your blog, what is missing, how you can improve it. Look at each blog post over a period of time and learn from the results – promote those posts that do well and edit/rewrite those that don’t. 14. SEO tools SEO plays a very important role in driving traffic and putting your site on the map. Use tools to come up with proper keyword placement, frequency, etc. so that you drive traffic to your blog site and get your site ranked higher and higher in search engines. This checklist hopefully will help you see if you have all the essential elements on your site. Once set up, most of these things need very little attention. You can focus on keeping the quality of your content high so readers keep coming back. Need a little help with your blogging? Get structure, support and a great big boost to get your blogging bringing in business in our six-week coaching programme. Click here to check out the next available online programme: 
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Instagram can deliver customers for small businesses. The key is to do what is effective and skip everything else. Do you know what you should be doing or do you feel like you might be wasting your time? Do follower numbers matter? Not as much as you think. Are you posting great content? Great! Now you've got 20% of the job done, spend the other 80% of your time actually doing what you need to do to build sales from Instagram. Learn exactly what you should and shouldn't be doing to successfully run your own Instagram marketing in our online course. In this online course, we'll work through techniques to find prospective clients on Instagram and turn them into leads (giving you their contact details) so you can turn them into clients. Find out more and book here.  The session will suit you if you are:
You will need:
You can expect:
Registration is usually only open for a short period so we can spend our time helping you throughout the course but right now, it is open: 8th April 2020 until 31st May 2020. We hope it helps. Price: US$49 - 480kr - £42 - €44 Price now: US$29 - 280kr - £22 - €24 We hope this helps too. We take payment in most currencies through Paypal. You don't need a Paypal account to pay by card. Find out more and book here.  Our workshops are designed for small and start-up businesses and people turning hobbies into businesses. They take place at our office in Danderyd, (north Stockholm). Below are the sessions we are running this coming autumn:
The cost of these two-hour sessions is 690 kr inc MOMS per person in advance by SWISH to 0709247260. For more information or booking, please get in touch with us at www.myownmarketingcoach.com or email zen@myownmarketingcoach.com. Would you like more customers for your small business?
Our workshops are designed for small and start-up businesses and people turning hobbies into businesses. They take place at our office in Danderyd, north of Stockholm and help you grow your business. Below are the sessions we are running this coming autumn:
The cost of these two-hour sessions is 490 kr inc MOMS per person in advance by SWISH to 0709247260. For more information or booking, please get in touch with us at www.myownmarketingcoach.com or email zen@myownmarketingcoach.com.
So… you get the idea, so many merits for all the effort of blogging for your business. Did we mention that it is really cost effective? It is almost free! This doesn’t mean it is easy. In fact, many people easily fail to grasp the core concept of blogging for business, as it is more complex than blogging for your own hobby/personal blog. Here are seven fundamental points for business blogging for you to focus on in 2018; 1. Have a plan – just writing out your latest thoughts or recent visit to Starbucks no longer works (not sure that ever did!). A business blog should be well-planned and become a good story that helps potential customers through their customer journey. Think it through before you post anything on your business website. 2. Time – when and how often is also crucial. Imagine yourself that your post is fighting for attention with other posts, news and ads across all sorts of channels that we come across everyday. Planning when and how often to post helps potential clients see, read and interact with your ongoing story. 3. Content – from headline to the last sentence, every word should be useful and in line with the message you want to carry through to your clients. It should either be creative, interesting or inspiring and a well-mixed balance of different formats. 4. Engaging your public or industry influencers – you can hugely increase the effectiveness of a blog post if you see it as the start to a ripple effect. By engaging one or several potential clients, current clients or influencers in a post, you speed up the spreading of the post immensely. It could be as simple as a reference and link to a website, an article or a post with another individual, social media profile or company. 5. Visual – ‘a picture says a thousand words’ cannot be truer than in the case of blogging. Although by visual we mean everything from the choice of colour scheme, the font, the size of the typing, the proportion of the images and everything that we should consider most important to grasp the eye of our readers, we also mean that you must, must, must use one good image that represents the content of the post. It is this image that reaches a whole extra target group. 6. Competition – do you know who your competitions are out there? What do they post on their blog? What topics are on trend right now? What are they missing that could be your ‘in’, in the discussion/conversation? 7. Research – in order to maximise the effect of the business blogging, research is needed. Why? Knowledge is the powerful tool in the vast internet sea; it can help you to stay ahead of the game, sense what direction the market is shifting to and give you inspiration. It can also help you to build authority in your business field – making a more loyal client base and steady sales. You can see who has read which blog posts and topics and understand more about your target market from that. Are you ready to start but don’t know how? We will dig deeper into the art of blogging in future posts, would you like to be kept posted (pun intended!)? Pop your email address in the box on the right to get our blog posts by email.  Is blogging for business something you would like to know more about? Kick start your business blogging with us on 14th March 2018, a two-hour training session costing only 450kr per person. We also have autumn sessions on 26th Sept and 24th Oct 2018. Click here for more information.
Our job is to help you get more customers for your business, especially small and new businesses in Sweden and we've got some great ways to do that. Come and join us at our office in Danderyd this spring if you would like to know lots about the following topics: Most of us can and do use social media but does it bring you new clients or is it just your friends (and family...) that like your posts? In this two-hour session, we'll work through techniques to find prospective clients and turn them into leads (giving you their contact details) so you can turn them into clients. We'll look at two different methods - content and conversation - and how to use them both.  Blogging for business is a training session we run to help you get your blog up, running and promoting your business fast. In the two-hour session on 14th March 2018, we'll work through blogging techniques you can use to get the search engines sending you lots of lovely visitors and the right type of visitors at that. We'll look at the content on your website, talk about what to blog and take a good look at the technical stuff to make sure you get it right.  You've got a great website. Or great enough. If you leave it sitting on the web, will people find it? There are more than 1 billion websites on the net. Are people finding yours? Don't worry! We are holding a 2-hour training session on SEO - getting your website found and shown by the search engines - on Wed 21st March 2018, We'll work through techniques you can use to get the search engines sending you lots of lovely visitors and the right type of visitors at that. We'll look at the content on your website and at the technical stuff, to help you get started.  Our two-hour training sessions run from 12.30-2.30pm and cost 350kr each.
Ask us anything! If you would like some help with a topic not covered in March, please get in touch. We may already have a workshop planned or can help you specifically with your business. |
