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I work with a lot of small businesses and often they have no clue on what to blog about.  In  this post, I will (hopefully) inspire and give a boat load of ideas and topics that any small business can easily borrow and apply as a post to their business blog(s).

Blogging is really, really easy once you understand three things:

1. What it is
2. Why it’s important
3. What to write about

What is small business blogging?

I say what is “small business blogging” because I think it’s really different than other forms of blogging.  Generally speaking, blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic.  Typically most blogs give the ability of readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (Art blog), photographs (photoblog), videos (Video blogging), music (MP3 blog), and audio (Podcasting).  Microblogging  is another type of blogging, featuring very short posts (example: Twitter).  Right now you are reading a blog post.

Now when it comes to small business blogging I think business should create content that is more geared towards your local area as in creating a hyper blog and focused around solving your clients/customers problems.

Why Small Business Blogging is Important

The benefits of blogging for a small business is endless but just list off a few:

1. Gives your business more of personality
2. Creates more valuable content for your customers
3. Gives your local company more chances of being found online
4. Helps being listing in Universal Search and Real Time Search
5. Gives a reason for clients/customers to come back to your site(s)
6. Engages in conversation with your clients and customers
7. Can help in establishing your business as the authority in your niche
8. Will improve SEO efforts
9. It can be easily syndicated to other hot content sharing sites (like: facebook, twitter, youtube, blogger, etc)
10. And so many more benefits!

With how simple technology makes it to blog today, there really is no excuse for a small business not to blog.  Often the biggest objection I get from small business owners is a concern over time.  Well my answer to this is: outsource it! Or leverage your smart employee(s) knowledge.  Give them access or make them an author on your blog(s) and let them blog about their knowledge.  Now I still think a owner should write some posts and take some ownership over their businesses blog, but it’s totally not necessary.  So don’t give me an objection of “not having time”.

How Often Should a Small Business Blog?

As much as possible! As long as you follow these 2  simple guidelines:

• You have something intelligent to say
• Your content is useful and relevant to your industry or location

What Can a Small Business Blog About?

Here is a list of 50 ideas:

1. Write a signal post about each of your products and/or services
2. Write a post on a client using your products
3. Write a post on the most FAQ of each product or service
4. Write  ways your industry will change this year
5. Create a list of the best industry resources
6. Attend industry events and blog about them
7. Comment on an industry-related conversation going on in LinkedIn or Google Groups
8. Comment about other videos in your industry
9. Comment about other blogs in your industry
10. Comment about other tweets in your industry
11. Search Google News for relevant press releases and news about your industry Write your own take
12. Report new trends in your industry
13. Report relevant news about your industry
14. Break down the new laws that will affect your niche in
15. Interview someone well-known in your world and profile them
16. Rewrite an old post with fresh eyes and new ideas
17. Have a chat with a competitor and blog about it (again, with permission)
18. Debunk common myths in your industry
19. Talk about upcoming events you are hosting
20. Report on your local seminars and local meetups
21. Write a post about the minutes of your meetings (if publicly appropriate)
22. Create a list of the  books that someone in your industry should read
23. Create a list of blogs that someone in your industry should read
24. Create a list of videos that someone in your industry should watch
25. Write about conferences people in your industry should attend/speak at
26. Write a post about the top tweets in your industry or your very own top tweets
27. Post a photo that is related to your industry and comment on it (make sure you have rights to publish the photo)
28. Hold a contest on blog – reward best comments, most comments, or something that fuels conversations about your industry
29. Create a poll on your blog and you can blog about the results later
30. Visit other blogs and invite a guest blogger to post on your blog
31. Post photos from your company party/team building workshop
32. Find a question on Yahoo Answers or OnStartups and respond on your blog
33. Why you’re different (or better) than your competition
34. A video tutorial showing how to use your most popular product
35. The FAQ’s your sales people hear about most
36. Post a testimonials a blog posts
37. Blog about other places you are adding useful content: Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc
38. Answer questions left in your comment section
39. Share a case study
40. Review other competitors products and services
41. Review industry related blogs and books
42. Share a time when your company made a mistake and talk about what you’ve done to correct it
43. Praise your best customers
44. Give something away to one of your blog readers, kinda of a contest
45. Feature customer’s success stories with your products/services
46. Create a video introducing your team to your community
47. Introduce new employees and mention how they enhance your products/services
48. Write about local issues/challenges
49. Write blogs posts mentioning your other syndicated content (press releases, videos, etc)
50. Write what’s next for your company

Nonetheless, there is no shortage of things to write about.  Post can just be a few words and others can be 1000′s of words.  Feel free to use as multi-media like photos and videos to spice up your posts.  Be sure to have fun and write to keep the attention of your audience.   Write interesting headlines and make sure your posts have an easy to read layout with lots of sub-headings and bullent points.  Remember most people skim and don’t read.  Make it easy for them to skim.  If it’s hard to read they’ll bounce off your blog.

If you follow the above suggestions you should have no shortage of topics to blog about for you business.  Let us know below in the comments on your blogging efforts or questions you have about small business blogging.

Google Maps has been testing with several different sponsored listing models in late 2009 and early 2010.  It looks like they have finally settled on “tags” as their way to monetize the maps.  Recently, they rolled out this sponsored feature across the USA.  If you have a business in the US, you may have noticed something that looks like this:

What is a Google Maps Sponsored Tag?

See the image below.  Notice the yellow tags beside some of the listings.  This is what a sponsored “tag” looks like:

I personally think it makes listings stand out big time.  if you are an early adopter in your local area, you can get a real advantage and get more clicks by having a “tag” before your competitors jump on the bang wagon.

Now I think this “tag” is only worth the money if your business is listed in the 7-Pack.  If it’s not there, then your listing is basically invisible anyway, so why spend the extra dough.  Instead spend it on a good Google Maps SEO company to get you in the 7-Pack then invest in the “tags” sponsored listing.

Some other Sponsored Benefits:

• You can easily and inexpensively highlight your listing on Google from Google Places.
• Potential customers in your local area will see what you think is most important or unique about your business.
• You can track the effectiveness of your tag with your Google Places dashboard.
• You will be charged a low $25 flat monthly fee, with no bids and no keywords required.
• There is no additional work or ongoing management needed.

What Can You Highlight With a Google Map’s Tag?

You can decide what type of enhancement you’d like to show with your business listing. You can only pick one at a time, but you can change or remove the tag whenever you’d like.

You can select any of the following tags:

• Website for your business
• Photos of your business
• Videos of your business
• Coupons for your listing
• Menu for your restaurant
• Reservations page for your business
• Posts for your business

The tag types you can select depend on what information you already have available in your business listing. If you want to highlight a video, for example, you’ll first need to add a video to your business listing. Once you’ve done that, the option will show up in the menu for your enhancement types.

Note: “tags” don’t affect the local algorithm, but they do stand out (assuming you are listed in the 7-Pack) for your main local keyword phrases.  For strong rankings in Google Maps you need to understand Google Maps SEO.

Let us know in the comment section (below) what your thoughts are on Google Maps new sponsored listings?

Often I have customers and/or subscribers who need to verify their business’s listing in Google Maps (now known as Google Places) and you can do that 3 ways.

What Google does is they send you a PIN # by one of your business’s listed contact details:

• Automated Phone Call
• SMS Text Message
• Mail (Good old snail mail)

However, sometimes the phone and/or text option does not work or is not available. Usually because if you try to verify via the phone you will only have 3 chances to get it right before it will force you to do the verification via the mail.

The reason I wanted to make this video is because often many small businesses owners can easily mistake this postcard for junk mail.

I wanted you to see what it looks like so you don’t miss it. If you are a business owner you may even want to show your employees this quick video too. This is one postcard you do not want to miss!

Social search is not going away.  It is important for small businesses to get involved with the major social media sites especially now that social search is a part of the search results pages for people who belong to your social circles.

I believe small businesses should have several social profiles.  One that is personal for the actually owners or CEO’s.  One that represents the business (that can one day be sold with the business) – yes great social networks are worth big, big bucks! And savvy small businesses will educate and leverage their employee’s to participate in work social accounts.

The social sites I’d focus on are:

• Facebook
• LinkedIN
• Twitter
• YouTube

Then get a G-mail account and set-up your Google Profile and connect your social networks to it.  I’d also use Google Reader to follow current industry news for your business.  (Feel free to use the above links to connect me to your new social accounts)

Google Maps can be a mess.  Often it can produce duplicate listings for business(s) which can cause many issues when you are trying to get your Google Map Listing to rank well (ideally within the 7-Pack).

Sometimes its Google Map’s fault and other times it’s Merchant’s fault for  not understanding how Google Maps works.  Regardless of how you ended up with a duplicate listings, its never a good thing.

When you have a duplicate listing it causes inconsistencies which can result in unwanted merges, division of reviews and/or citations and a myriad of other unwanted actions.

If you find yourself with double listings on your business, here is how to merge properly them according to Google:

I follow these exact instructions often and it works like a charm.

Out every 10 clients I have, I find 30-40% of them have some sort of duplicate listing issues.  This is typical and a fairly easy fix.

Now this only works if your duplicate listing is “not claimed”.  If you find your listing is “claimed” and you do not have logins for it then it could be hijacked.  In this case you need to go to the Google Map Help Forum and begin a thread, and pray the Google Gods that an G-Map employee will read your thread and investigate it.  This is one reason to make sure you have claimed your listing(s), just for security sake.  I can’t tell you how many listings in Google, Yahoo, & Bing are unclaimed – Crazy!

Let us know if you have any questions about merging Google Maps in the comment section below.

This is really cool.  Not sure when Google LBC released this new feature, I haven’t heard anyone speak about it yet. I was in tweaking a couple of things with a fairly new client’s account and I noticed a new feature called “Post to Your Place Page”.  It looks like this:

And then when it goes live it looks like this:

This new feature is really, really cool. I hope they are not just testing and to only watch it disappear in few weeks. I think this new feature can be used in so many interesting ways. 

You can see here (in the example image above) that I am testing with my client as a daily call to action.  I am going to take a few clients and write a daily call-to action on their Google Maps Listing and see if it pulls in some extra sales fro them. 

It’s a great way to get small businesses to login and interact with their Google LBC more, creating a habit of using G-Maps.  Which I am sure Google wants.  The more interaction they can get with SMB’s the more ways they can then eventually monetize it.

This call-out reminds me of Twitter a little.  It’s a micro message meant to be daily.  It looks like whatever you write will expire in 30 days so they are pushing SMB’s to keep the call outs current.

Has anyone else seen this yet…? Tell me what your thoughts are about this new feature in the comment section below.  How do you think a small  business owner can use this new feature to increase sales & conversions…?

I noticed there was quite a few people who were having trouble understanding how to edit and/or delete their Google Maps Coupons on the G-Maps Forum.  It looks like some of merchants where dealing with a bug, but some people just didn’t know how to navigate around on the Local Business Center.   This video tutorial is for the ladder.    Let me know if it helps…?

To Upload, Or Not To Upload, That Is The Question:

This has become a current question I have had to ask and consider with one of my more recent clients.  This client has several hundred locations via a franchise and they want to monitor & optimize their Google Maps listings.  The question we had been pondering is… would it better to bulk upload or hand submit each location’s listing…?

My thoughts are, it depends on whether you care to have full control over your Google Maps listing or not.  Here is what Google says about bulk uploads:

However, this means that a listing submitted in a bulk uploaded isn’t trusted the same way an individual listing is. The information you submit in a bulk listing may be combined with other, third-party information and the best result displayed. Your listings will therefore look a little different than a single, verified listing on Google Maps, and can still be edited by the community. Bulk listings will take up to 2 weeks to appear in Google Maps. If you want to submit ten or more listings and verify them, you’ll have to submit each one as an individual listing.

A listing added as part of a bulk feed will look much the same as one added individually, with a few key differences: you won’t see the phrase “Provided by the business owner.” Source

With that lack of control it looks like  we most likely hand submit for this client, even though it will take forever. I personally like to have our clients be able to control as much of the data possible.  I’m a control freak and I think most business owners are too.

I know that Google created a “Whitelist” Google Maps bulk upload, but I have never used it and don’t know anyone who has yet (love to hear from someone, if you have used it).  The “Whitelist” form is here, should you need it.  What I like to know is if you get “Whitelisted” do gain back full control of your G-Maps listing(s)…?  If anyone knows the answer, please let us know below in the comment section or email direct.

At this time, while not having full control over your listing I would opt to hand submit each listing. If Google Maps changes their rules to bulk uploads and gives the Merchants more control then I would of course opt to do bulk upload on an account this large.  Maybe someone can shed some light on the “Whitelisting” process and that’ll possibly change my mind.

What would you have done if you had set-up 100′s of Google Maps profiles…?  Would you hand submit or do bulk upload…? Let us know in the comment section below.

Personalized Search

So we are quickly approaching 2010 and its becoming more apparent what is on Google’s agenda. It looks like they are moving forward to add a couple new elements to Universal Search.  It looks like ‘personalize search’ and ‘real time search’ are two major elements of universal search that is not going away.

Real Time Search

These real time search results will draw from Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and numerous other sources.  Just another reason to make sure you have your SMB social profiles filled out and create a strategy to be present with these social sites.

The personalized search results will be customized based on 180 days worth of your searching habits.

What do you think of these new blended search elements…? As a user do you like the idea of your search results being personalized?  Do you like that you can see the opinions of your peers in the search results pages…?

How do you think this will affect your SMB search engine marketing strategies for 2010…?

It looks like there are more shifts taking place in the Local Search with Google.

Today one of my favorite bloggers (Greg Sterling) in the Local Search Industry writes about how Google has sent out physical window decals to these 100,000 businesses for them to display in their windows.

Now what is so cool about these window decals is that consumers will be able to use their social mobile technology to interact with Google’s Place Pages by simple scanning the bar code on the window decal into their smart phones.

They’ll be able to see:

• Hours of operation
• Cards accepted
• Reviews
• Brands carried
• Menus (if applicable)
• User-generated content
• Coupons/deals (if they exist)

They’ll also be able to “star” businesses for later recall or write reviews if they’re inclined.   I wrote a post (a year ago or more) about the power of these new smartphones and how they will become an integral part of marketing for Small Businesses.  We are just looking at the tip of the iceberg of Local Search Marketing here.

Check out the full details on these Place Page’s window decals here.