You have traveled the world, bought diamonds in Antwerp, have taken thousands of photographs during visits to diamond mines in Africa, won awards for your custom jewelry designs, and have a wealth of knowledge spanning back through all your years as a jeweler. Your career has been fulfilling and enjoyable.
It's too bad no one know about you.
Why not? Because you don't make time to blog about your experiences as a jeweler, about the trips you've taken to benefit customers, about the unique designs you've created that are now treasured family heirlooms, or about the happy couples that you've helped.
Blogging is probably the most important method of achieving "people optimization" for your website instead of search engine optimization, but it takes time. According to Wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute it takes one minute to compose 19 words from scratch, which means it would take about 30 minutes to write 500 words if you already know what you want to say.
Blogging is not like writing a book where you have to worry about every word you choose and if those words are even needed. It always takes more time to write fewer words. In a blog post you can prattle on with more freedom to be entertaining, be informative, and share an experience. In all reality it will take more than 30 minutes to write a single blog, more like 90 minutes.
Optimizing your website for people requires lots of writing. Every blog post added to your website has the chance to answer a question that one of your customers is asking. You should add a minimum of one new blog post to your website every month.
If you have the budget, you should delegate or outsource the blog writing. Of course you might be wondering how to outsource the writing of your own career experiences. You don't think every celebrity memoir was written word-for-word by that actual person, did you? Let me explain how to do this for the non-celebrity...
First, dig up all those trip photographs, custom jewelry sketches and photos, design awards, and thank you letters from happy couples. Give all those mementos to your ghost writer and let them decide what would look good in a blog post.
The ghost writer could be one of your employees or it could be someone you hire from the website www.odesk.com. You can find a copywriter on oDesk.com for $20/hr or $6/hr; it all depends on the level of experience you want to hire and from what country.
You're going to need digital versions of your awards and thank you cards, and for that you will need a scanner. Let the ghost writer interview you for each memento. Share whatever story comes to mind and let them write the words. Ask the ghost writer to record the conversation instead of taking notes, the process will be a lot faster for you. Just make sure you articulate and enunciate well during the interview so the recording is clean.
A simple 5 minute telephone interview should result in about 800 spoken words which should be plenty of source material for the writer to create a good blog post.
Until you find a ghost writer you can trust don't let them post the blog entries to your website directly. Instead you will need to read the blog, edit as needed, and then post it yourself.
Using oDesk.com to find a copywriter is easy; finding a good one is another matter. You may go through several writers and a bit of wasted money before you find one that works will for you or carries your written voice the way you want. I recommend just hiring a copywriter with a lot of experience that charges $20/hr and not waste your time with someone less expensive. Then budget 3 or 4 hours for every blog post, or $80.
If the $80 isn't in your budget then you simply have to do it yourself. But I'm guessing that your time is more valuable running your business than the $80 you would spend per blog post.
