Fashionista Nikki Parkinson is known as one of Australia’s best business bloggers. Here she shares her tips on how to build a successful blog for small business owners.
In 2008, Parkinson was the editor of a glossy fashion magazine on the Sunshine Coast, where she styled glamorous models and had her finger on the pulse of the fashion industry. But after 20 years of a career in journalism, she decided to pack her bags to launch her own personal styling business.
At the time, someone advised her to start something called ‘blogging’, to help market her new enterprise. She launched Styling You, about how the latest fashion trends could be incorporated into your wardrobe. She now describes it as “the best accidental business decision that happened to me”.
The Styling You blog became such a huge success (it currently receives 110,000 page views a month), that it’s taken over Parkinson’s personal styling business and she is now devoting the majority of her time on the website. In fact, earlier this year, Styling You won the overall award at the inaugural Best Australian Blogs Competition run by the Sydney Writers' Centre.
“I love blogging because of the immediate connections you can make with readers. Having worked in traditional media, I would sometimes get feedback from readers, but because blogging is so accessible, either directly on the blog or via Twitter or Facebook, people can easily contact you and talk to you. And I think what makes it such a fun medium to work with,” she told Smarter Business Ideas.
Here are some of her tips for budding small business bloggers:
Don’t be boring
A blog should offer inspiration or advice or help to the reader. Your reader is investing their time in coming to your page. If they feel like they’re getting something back from it, they're going to not only return, but they’re more likely to come and buy from you when they’re ready, if you’re selling products or services.
Do inject some personality into your blog
Inject some personal content into the business blog. If you’re the only person in the business, that’s easy but if there’s a personality or a culture, then there are ways to personalise that. I was working with a Noosa-based jewellery store with an online presence. I told them their location is a great thing to remind people of on the blog every day with posts such as, “Having a cup of coffee overlooking Laguna Bay” and that kind of personal association, so the customer thinks of their last holiday where they bought a necklace and has a connection with the business.
Do be consistent
I see a lot of bloggers, particularly business bloggers - and that’s because of how busy business owners are - who start by going hard with the number of posts they write. Then there’s nothing for three months.
There’s nothing worse for a reader to discover a blog where no-one’s updated it for a lengthy period of time. So when you decide to blog, you need to be consistent about what you can comfortably post every week. Don’t start writing five to seven posts a week. I’d say you could do one or two a week, then you can build from there when it starts to get comfortable, increase how much you write.
Do market your blog
Marketing your blog through social media channels and an email newsletter is important. You need to know where your target market is hanging out, so you can bring people back to where you’ve got your products and services. Then, you can monitor where your traffic is coming from, which can be all done via Google Analytics.
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