Top New Year Blog Post Ideas for Small Businesses
Offer giveaways
Holidays are about sharing good wishes so offer free consultations, downloadable e-books with tips, examples from the industry and how-to advice to potential customers. Deals for a limited time are sure to draw attention. Use your blog to introduce new services or available product upgrades to a select number of people initially to create buzz. You can also share special offers and coupons from your e-commerce sites on your blog to advertize to different audiences from your usual channels at no cost.
Share numbers to gain confidence
You have the statistics on products and services that were hits with your customers in the past year. Reveal these numbers in your blog along with insights on why and how you plan to continue to cater to customers' special needs and individual tastes. {C}{C}{C}{C}{C}
You can also share the successes of various holiday seasons and focus on sales made on Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas Eve. Customers who follow your social media profiles and participate in interactions are interested in details of your online popularity such as the number of people who participated in your Thanksgiving contests or number of pictures you received from followers from your Christmas greetings collage. Thank your followers for their enthusiasm and participating in your social media communities.
Highlight individual experiences
Apart from sales numbers, experiences and interactions shared by customers with your team members, sales people and service staff make for solid content. Such customer revelations add value to your blog, differentiate your business from competitors and make new visitors take notice of your company. Do not forget to highlight experiences shared by actual customers. You can also include behind-the-scenes stories of how product were developed or unusual customer problems were resolved.
Plan ahead and share notes
This is typically a slow news time, as there is not much to report from most industries. That's why this can be a good time to plan ahead and talk about what you will cover in your blog during the year. Summarize what you’ll be writing about (or hope to write about) in the coming months. Provide insights about your experiences in the past year and lessons learned from them. Ask for your readers’ suggestions for what they would like to read or if they can contribute in any way to your blog. Do not miss any opportunity to have a two-way conversation with blog visitors. You can also involve your followers by asking about their goals and how you and your business can contribute to their achievement in 2014.
Hold contests with exciting prizes
Are you planning to host contests in your local community in the first few weeks of the year? Go ahead and talk about them on your blog. This will definitely get you more traffic and possibly more registrations. Make it relevant to your business by offering products or services as prizes. For example a car service station can offer free service coupon to winners. Better yet, you can offer something more extravagant to contest winners—movie tickets and restaurant vouchers, weekend trips or exotic gift baskets with high-end cosmetics/personal care products, hand-made chocolates and bottles of champagne. Highlight these prizes in your blog to create excitement around the events.
What are you planning for your business blog in this new year?
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