First office day of 2016.
Time for new beginnings. Fresh starts. Goal setting. Plans. Resolutions. You know the drill. Set a goal for yourself, and your business.
My biggest goal. Blog more frequently. At least twice a week between this blog and the one over at mattryan.co. Here will be almost exclusively WordPress business focus while over there will be more of a reflective, personal nature.
How to Do This
To help get the habit formed, I am participating in an online blogging workshop offered by WordPress.com. I have my first blog there (exploringnewopportunities.wordpress.com) but as of today, I’ve moved it to a self-hosted WordPress site that I am in the process of developing. Since all of the WordPress website development done by Cap Web Solutions is built on the Genesis Framework, I figured it fitting that my blog live in that world too. ‘Walk the talk’ so to speak.
This blog will serve a number of purposes. The primary being that it will serve as the main marketing tool that Cap Web Solutions uses to get it’s name out there. The best way to increase the amount of traffic to your website is to regularly provide new content. I tell my clients that every day. I build small business websites using WordPress so that my clients can easily update their web content without dedicating too much time to it. They need to focus on their business, the parts that they do best, and let their website handle the other stuff.
Inspiration
Last month I attended WordCamp US in Philadelphia. It was the inaugural WordCamp US and the organizers set a very high bar for a quality event. The opportunities for networking were amazing and the education sessions were awesome. At a networking event the first evening, I met the owners of a small mid-west website design and development company, Susan and Amy, of SUMY Designs. They explained the very simple secret to their business success – they blog almost every day. Not long posts mind you; just enough to keep their audience coming back regularly AND keep the Google BOTS happy. Exposure turns into the interest which turns into prospective customers. Once you have a prospective customer, well, then, it’s the combination of your skills, portfolio, availability, pricing and so on that wins the business. Could it really be that straightforward? I have to try that.
Cap Web Solutions’ business has all been word of mouth to date. While happy customers can be a good source of referrals, they can’t be the only source. A small business needs to have multiple paths to become known.
Blogging 101 pops up at just the right time. I tried this about a year and a half ago, and while my blogging went well during the workshop, it fell off quickly once the daily prompts stopped hitting my inbox. The time demands of starting and growing a business overwhelmed me. My focus turned to working in my business, rather than working on my business.
What You Will Find Here
I plan to use this month-long exercise as a way to ignite a blogging habit that will live on well after the workshop completes. I will post about new client websites that Cap Web Solutions launches, tips and tools I use in the business, and a tutorial now and then. The website support and maintenance side of the business offers a variety of topics to talk about, from how to recover a lost password, to formatting a blog post just right or getting the size of that perfect image under control.
I think that these topics will appeal to not only current website development or support customers, but more importantly, potential customers needing help with their own websites. If nothing else, I would like to become a resource for trusted tips on how to tweak a WordPress website built on Genesis. There are a number of resources currently available, but none with my voice.
Success?
By this time next year, I’d like to see the number of subscribers to this blog increase, and the number of new clients double. I think this is doable. Stick with me for a while. Let me know what you think in the comments below. I promise to keep this a conversation, that is, two-way communication, so that we get to know each other a bit.
Now that wasn’t too bad. I’ve completed the first assignment in this Blogging 101 workshop from the Blogging University at WordPress.com.
Onward and upward.
Amy says
Looking forward to reading your posts!