Are you a business owner who wants to interact better with customers, come up quicker on Google searches and increase website traffic? Then start blogging, Marcy Mitchell, a digital marketing consultant, told her female audience at the Southwest Colorado Women’s Small Business Conference last week.
Now in its fourth year, the business conference attracted almost 200 attendees from across the region. This year’s theme focused on women redefining business.
The theme reflected the unique approach that women bring to business, said Joe Keck, director of the Southwest Colorado Business Development Center, which helped host the conference. Several women at the conference mentioned that redefinition includes more of a focus on multitasking and balancing work and family, Keck said.
Breakout sessions at the conference included women’s psychological connection to money, developing a core business strategy and enhancing focus and concentration at work and home.
Mitchell’s breakout session showed businesses and nonprofits how to create a powerful Web presence. She hammered through the ins and outs of WordPress websites and pressed women to find the time to blog and reach out to customers through social media. Websites with blogs receive 55 percent more visitors than those without, according to HubSpot, a marketing software company. And the average number of views per blog post increases by almost three times if the posts are shared through Facebook and Twitter, said Mitchell, who owns Pagosa Springs-based MTECH Internet Marketing.
“Your website is your hub of your marketing activities,” she said.
Mitchell recommended WordPress for website hosting because it is the easiest choice for clients who want to maintain their own sites, and it has lots of plugins that allow for additional features. It’s also a great blogging tool, she said. With 60 million users, WordPress is the world’s leading blogging platform.
With so many ways to publish, disburse and collect information, Mitchell encouraged women to start slow by writing one blog post a week. After a month, the four blog posts could be compiled into a monthly newsletter, she said.
Blogging establishes you as a thought leader in your industry, Mitchell told women.
“What do you want to be known for?” she said. “It’s not just the logo, it’s also articles you’re putting out there.”
Constantly adding new content to a website creates a bigger source of searchable words and phrases, boosting the chance that the website will turn up in a list of search results. Writing also distinguishes a company’s brand and its voice while the comments section of blogs provide an opportunity for customers to comment on the business’s product or service, Mitchell said.
The Small Business Development Center has received feedback that blogging does help local businesses drive more traffic to their websites, Keck said. But the center tries to encourage business owners to take a multi-channeled approach that combines digital marketing with more traditional forms of print and radio advertising, Keck said. In rural areas, print ads in regional newspapers are still quite effective in terms of return on marketing investment, he said.
“People get news in a variety of different ways,” he said. “Most businesses can’t just have an online-only presence to survive.”
ecowan@durangoherald.com
