Small business is competitive these days, whether you are a professional, a tradesman, or a working stiff. What do you do to be noticed by clients, customers, or your potential employers? You can set yourself up as a subject-matter expert through blog posts and articles. You can also write for others to create business opportunities coming at you, instead of going to them.
The word is positioning. Make yourself visible to your prospects and they will come to you. Rather than troll for them using industry resources, you can advertise yourself as a great prospect for them.
The simple way to do this is to follow an easy 6-step procedure to professional positioning:
1. Find your venue
2. Write good stuff
3. Promote yourself socially
4. Make them want more
5. Have a sustainable stream of material
1. Find Your Venue
Blogs are important if you get in the appropriate ones.
. Google your topic and blogs that have big followings will appear
. Use a site like Technorati to find blogs for your category or topic
Then, review the blogs you like. Find out their submission guidelines and procedures or write to the editorial contact to help you decide whether they accept contributed content. Next, organize your list of blogs by the topics you write about. At the end, you will have a list of possible publication sites to contact with proposals or pitches each time you create a blog piece on that topic.
2. Write Good Stuff
Your posts need to be informative and easy to read. Yours pieces have an improved opportunity at publication if they inspire awe, so use interesting stories that support your argument. Is your topic or subject not funny, or inspiring? Try to make it an objective “evergreen” piece that will be read repeatedly.
3. Promote Yourself Socially
Promote your blog posts on Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn Groups, and so on. Many bloggers do, but most do not. Making the links to your blog as visible as possible is part of marketing yourself. The byline in your posts is the big part, it gives others a way to get to your site. Well-positioned hyperlinks in the article, while promoting the other person’s blog, raise the visibility of you as a subject matter expert, as well. This process will make a sizable difference in your click-through count, just from the byline links to your site and thus, on your ultimate visibility level.
4. Make Them Want More
Include a website URL as a hyperlink to your website. It gives an avenue for the reader to find out more about you on your site. It also gives a bit more page rank for your endeavors.
Write a short tagline at the end of your piece. A tagline gives the reader more immediate contact data. It can also set a tone for your future communications if you include a positioning statement.
These two items, the website URL and the tagline, give the reader a link to your site for future reference. They can be leads for others to link to you, even if you do not hear from them immediately, or directly. The opportunity here for their future business raises interesting possibilities.
5. Have a Sustainable Stream of Materials
Every week I try to write one to two blog posts. Doing this creates a cumulative material database that shows my experience. It takes a bit of work, but by using this material, you can create other versions of these pieces, parts that address only one point in a post or several. These pieces can be endlessly re-written for different audiences and reading levels. The key point, though, is to make each subsequent piece unique to the Internet world. There are a number of article spinning tools around, but these are only crutches for those who cannot write in the first place and their results generally end up as gibberish.
The best way around the dilemma of re-using a blog post is to hire a virtual assistant. The virtual assistant, with a writing skill set similar to yours, can take a few of your articles and re-craft their ideas into more articles.