Many of you will have blogs that relate to your handmade and creative businesses. You know they can be a great marketing tool, and you know that you need to spend some time working on them. But I’m guessing that for at least some of you, there’s always that pull telling you that you should be creating or making and not blogging.
There’s always something that needs doing when we run creative businesses. Whether it’s making a product, taking photos or just trying to keep up with a to-do list that has more things added than we tick off. It can be hard to justify that time to work on the business instead of in the business. If we want to do well, there’s always going to be that fine balance: Marketing vs Making.
We know that having a blog is great for marketing our businesses, but they take a lot of work, so I wanted to give you some tips to not only get your blog working for you, but also make it just that little bit less of that thing you can never make time for.
Have an Editorial calendar that’s realistic and achievable
Editorial calendars are the best. They let you plan your content in advance and let you see the big picture of what’s going up when. But, the trick to really making them work for you is not to get carried away with trying to have content everyday. If blogging is not your main business, then you don’t need new content on your site every day. Think twice a week and plan it in advance.
Think about your product release dates ahead of time and create content that compliments your product
Once you’ve got yourself an editorial calendar (mine is a large desk calendar from an office supplies store and some post-its), write in all your product release dates. If you don’t have any, it could be a good time to make some, they can always be moved if needed. Think about the content you could create that goes with the launch of that new product and how you can be useful to your customers. Try to think outside the box and not only about your product all the time. Your product fits within a niche, think about content that fits within that.
Batch your blog posts
If you’d rather be working on your business than blogging, batching posts is a great way to go. Write your editorial calendar for the month and then set aside a day, (or a few half days) to write as many of the posts for the month as you can. This works well for businesses because your content doesn’t have to match the news. Schedule them and mark them in your editorial calendar as done as you complete each. This also gives you a backlog of posts for when you’re heading into a busy season, and the beauty of having them scheduled is that if you have new content you must share quickly, you can always shift your content around without losing any of it.
Keep it simple
Your blog posts don’t have to be essay length. Write what you need to say on your topic of the day and keep it relevant and lighthearted. You could share some sneak peeks of up coming products or even a little bit of your process. If you want to mainly share some photos, then you only need as many words as fills in the story that’s being told through images. Keep the photography a great quality and think about your customer and what they’d like to know.
Blogging can be a wonderful tool for your creative business and it takes just a little bit of organization to get it running smoothly and allow you to get back to what you do best.
What organizational tools do you use to stay on track with blogging for your creative business? Share with our community in the comments!
