You’ve realized that setting up a blog for your small business is a powerful aspect of any marketing strategy, helping to generate leads and more clearly define your brand. Now comes the part that many new business blogs find a little tricky: coming up with enough small business blog topics to begin generating regular content. Luckily, we’ve got you covered with ten must-have small business blog topics that will spark interest in your services or products, organically boost your web traffic, and even help you grow a reputation for thought leadership in your field. Best of all, these business blog topics work effectively for any industry. These are the essential blog topics for small business that you can return to (in different, unique iterations) again and again.
Here are our top ten:
1. Challenge the Status Quo
One very effective way to position your product and business model as unique and stand out from the pack is to publish blogs challenging the status quo of your industry. Instead of simply rehashing the same old, same old that customers can find on any blog, use your blog to demonstrate how your business is different and how it presents a unique solution to consumer needs or desires.
Verblio’s (formerly BlogMutt) CEO Steve Pockross did just that when he published this post arguing on behalf of a unique crowdsourced model for business blogging.
2. Why Did You Start Your Business?
Why did you start your business? What drives you to continue to work hard and pursue success in a competitive field? Using your small business blog to tell the story behind your passion helps infuse your blog with the sort of compelling authority and leadership that customers respect. These types of posts also give consumers a peek behind the curtain, which helps them feel more personally connected to your brand and purpose.
Posts written by the CEO or company founders are often interesting to read, but you can also focus on team members and employees who are just as passionate about your product as you are. This post from one of our writers called How Writing For Verblio Changed My Family’s Life is compelling, personal, and does a great job of offering a behind the scenes look at what motivates Verblio’s pool of powerful content writers.
Another option is to have a writer interview you or someone from your team. For an example of a founder interview done well, check out this Zendesk interview with the founders of successful start-up Bombas Socks.
3. Answer Frequently Asked Questions
Do you tend to field the same questions from prospects and existing customers over and over? While a clear and concise FAQ section is an important component of many business websites, you can also use these questions as jumping-off points for more in-depth answers via blog posts.
For example, thisVerblio post dives deep to thoroughly answer the question “How do I outsource my business blog?” Asana, the popular project management app and software uses the frequently asked question, “What is the difference between a task and a project?” as a starting point for this blog that delves into the differences between the two and points out why both are useful.
4. Speak to Customer Pain Points
What are the problems that lead customers to seek out your services? Blog posts focused on customer pain points—and how your service or product provides the best solution—are a great way to demonstrate how well you understand your customers, while also working as subtle promotional pieces.
Since for most small businesses, prospective customers are motivated by a variety of pain points, this topic can keep your content stream full for quite a while.
Many Verblio customers know they should outsource their blogging and other writing tasks to freelance writers, but have no idea where to start. This post speaks directly to reducing this customer pain point and provides a helpful five-point breakdown of how to go about hiring freelancers.
5. Review or Compare & Contrast Peripheral Products
Another popular blog format is the product review, or compare and contrast post, which breaks down the features or pros and cons of peripheral or complementary services. These posts help position you as an authority on various products in your industry, while also potentially attracting visitors who don’t yet realize how much they may need your product.
This Buffer blog post discusses the importance of photo sizing when using images for your social media content, and then breaks the topic down in detail by social media platform. Also in the realm of social media management, this Verblio post presents an honest and clear comparison of three different social media services.
6. Get Case Studies on Your Front Line
Case studies are super effective and interesting to read because they provide real-life examples of how your product has helped a customer. They go into more depth than testimonials and are considered more trustworthy because they involve data and convincing visuals.
A Verblio customer spotlight focused on a luxury vacation rental in Dove Way, Maine combines engaging storytelling (and a few well-placed images of gorgeous New England scenery) with crystal-clear stats demonstrating how Verblio has helped the customer’s business.
Case studies that include specific metrics tend to be much more convincing to readers. For another example of how to combine narrative with stats in a case study, see this HubSpot post about a private school that used HubSpot to dramatically increase their web traffic.
7. Use Storytelling as a Default
Storytelling allows you to paint a vivid picture of your company’s brand, while also conveying authority, credibility, and authenticity. Your customers get to learn more about your company’s vision while also picking up on valuable lessons in a particularly enjoyable way.
This post from Verblio’s founder Scott Yates tells a compelling story while advocating against being overly pedantic and judgmental about grammar. Storytelling posts allow you to stretch your creative wings while making your brand suddenly feel much more interesting and less limited in terms of topics.
8. Showcase New Product Launches
Any time you launch a new product or service, you have an excellent blogging and social media opportunity on your hands. Posts focused on new products should describe the product in easy-to-understand language, and also describe how the product solves problems and reduces pain points for customers. You don’t want your customer to just learn facts about the new product—you also want them to know how it relates to them, make them care about it, and hopefully, drive them to bring it into their life.
Let’s head back to Asana’s blog for an excellent example of a post centered around a new product. This post explains their new Boards feature in a way that is useful, exciting, and not too blatantly sales-y.
9. Invite Customers Behind the Scenes
Inviting your customers behind the scenes to get a glimpse of how you run your business, or design and produce your products, helps you become more approachable to your customers.
The Honest Company’s blog finds this approachability tactic so effective they have an entire category of their blog devoted to behind the scenes posts.
10. Discuss Your Business Mistakes
Describing a mistake you made as a small business owner—and how you learned from it—gives your blog a down-to-earth vibe that customers tend to find endearing.
This Shopify guest post aimed at e-commerce business owners is a strong example.
And another not directly related to business but a fascinating story and subsequent lessons about failure hails from our own Molly Krumholz’s How To Fail At Anything: 8 Lessons From An Adventure-Gone-Awry.
The Top Takeaway for a Small Business
Sometimes figuring out what to write is half the battle when it comes to blogging for small business. We hope this list of must-have, foundational small business blog topics has sparked your creativity and motivated you to begin harnessing the power of a thoughtfully put together blog.
