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Writegeist
Business Writing 101: A Reader-Focused Approach
Why your small business blog posts might not be getting the traffic you expect
I recently met with a group of local small business owners and asked them what type of workshop would be most helpful to them. They came from a variety of businesses: realtor, clothing designer, chocolatier, comic distributor, personal trainer, commercial packaging supplier, life coach… but they all had one common goal: they wanted to learn how to blog and post regularly about their businesses.
At around the same time, I’ve spent the past several months on what I’m calling a side-quest. I invested in a local magazine franchise in an attempt to start my own business. I cut it short as I discovered two important things: almost all of the small businesses in my area not only had zero budget for advertising, but they also all wanted free press. The industry term, as I learned, is “earned media”, but most of them were asking for earned media coverage without actually earning it first. The second thing I learned is that I’d rather give small business owners the tools to write about themselves and their business in order to help them earn the media than cajole them into buying ads in a magazine I had yet to create.
