On Saturday this week, I'm celebrating another Daily Golden Nugget milestone--it's the 4th anniversary of when I published my first Nugget. Four years, and still going strong.
Blogging can lead to a lot of opportunities for business and in your personal life. I find it extremely rewarding. If you haven't started blogging yet, then read through this series of Nuggets to help you get started.
As a consultant and business coach, I often explain to people how to find topics to blog about. Most people worry that they will run out of topics after 3 or 4 blogs, and can't even comprehend how they could ever get up to 10 or 20.
Earlier this week I was interviewing Tyson, a representative from Yelp who was helping me with my upcoming JA NY seminar, and he also wanted to know how I could always come up with new blogging topics. I explained how I got started by measuring and running reports on the raw data I have access to, but what I report on every day has grown into so much more than that now.
Let me explain how you can grow your own blog into something sustainable, and interesting, like I have.
The first step is to get started. Overcome your fears and inhibitions and just do it. Again, refer back to these Nuggets to help you do that.
The first few topics you write about should be easy stuff that you tell customers all the time. I'm talking about explanations of how you will repair a piece of jewelry, or how you look at a diamond through a loupe. You could write a few blog posts about the birthstones, and if you want an easy 12 blogs, you could write one for every primary birthstone.
I will generalize and say that all new bloggers start out with grand ideas of several topics, but then they realize those topics are not very interesting once they start writing. This is a reality check moment when you either throw up your hands and walk away, or you figure out how to make the topics interesting.
Stories usually help. Would you bore your customer with those topics or would you share a story that they are interested in? Stories are the answer. Call them anecdotes if you like.
I was naive when I started blogging 4 years ago. I had grand ideas to write about dozens of search engine optimization topics. But just like I explained above, I suddenly felt worthless after the first month.
As I look back over my initial 20 Daily Golden Nuggets, I realize that many of them were simply long answers to frequently asked questions from customers. I turned them into 300 - 400 word blog posts (imagine that, only 300 words when this one is already 457 words, hah!) instead of simply answering them on an FAQ page.
As it turned out, I really didn't even cover SEO topics, but started with a lot of online marketing because it was what my customers were asking about. Think about that for a moment; I had my own plan of topics, but when I sat down to do it, I concentrated on the questions from my customers.
Can't you do the same? What are the typical things your customers always ask you about? I'm talking about questions they ask in the store and questions you get through your website's contact us form. Don't forget to ask your employees for questions customers ask them. Turn each question into a blog post.
Each of these FAQ type blog posts will help with your long term SEO because they add content to your website. The same questions people are asking you in person are the same questions people are asking Google. Your blog will turn into "content magnet," which means Google will be able to match your blog to questions people frequently search for. Interesting content magnet blog posts also get shared socially and occasionally other bloggers will link to them. Again, this is all valuable SEO.
Your blog will eventually turn into a sales tool. You can lead future people to those same "answers" when they call or email you with those typical questions.
Four years ago, when I ran out of questions, I started writing about current trends on the internet, new mobile applications, and online marketing. I made sure to write everything so my target audience (that's you) would understand it. That means I tried to avoid the techno babble as much as possible, and I thoroughly explained techie words when I needed to use them.
As an example, and to put this into jewelry terms, you should never randomly throw around diamond words like "fire," "brilliance," and especially "scintillation" without explaining what they are. These words will produce the same eye-glazing effect that my techno babble would do to you, particularly when the words already mean something else to a layman and they're not adjusting definitions. Oh, it was "fire." Okay, does it have smoke, too? You need to break it down for them.
Once you are done with all the FAQ type blogs, and the birthstones, and any other topics you had in mind, you should start looking at current trends for more blogging inspirations.
The Jewelry Information Center (jic.org) always has a lot of good blogging ideas you can tap into. Take a look at this post about the JIC that I wrote two years ago for specific ideas.
The seasonal color announcements from Pantone can be another possibility for continuing blogging topics. Explaining how to match each color to different types of jewelry, gemstones, and metals could turn into a full blog post for each color. That's 5 or 6 posts right there!
I have email subscriptions to several SEO news websites. Even though I get a lot of emails it's easier to have them come to me rather than look in a newsfeed app or refer to multiple websites. These emails help keep me current with technology and trends.
Apply the same technique to the jewelry and fashion industries so you can stay current. Write about the latest fashion trends and how they can be paired with the jewelry you carry in your store.
I now have multiple sources of new information to write about. I do, however, always write about my first hand experiences, my research, or make sure to reference multiple/credible sources of information. I rarely write about current trends or the latest technology unless I feel I can provide a reasonable speculative point of view on the topic.
As a jeweler, you should not use my blogging approach when writing about current trends. Current trends in fashion and jewelry must be blogged about as soon as you get the idea.
I'd love to hear about your own blogging ideas or hurdles. Leave a comment or message me through one of the social networks. You can always find me with my typical @matthewperosi username.
