Racking your brain to come up with new topics for your blog? For small businesses this shouldn’t be hard. 

By rizalgeo from flickr

If you know what you are selling – whether products or services – you know better than anyone the barriers that you face to get your message across. 

So the first step? Write about what you know. You are the expert here, right?! 

Ok, but it gets a little more complex than just writing what you know. You also need to write what other people want to know. 

The best way to find what people are REALLY looking for is to do your research. Public Relations professionals have 4 categories of research required before planning any kind of marketing strategies including your company/ product/ services, the consumer, and the market. 

If you haven’t received your step-by-step guide to doing your research given in SM101, then here are some of the essentials:

1. Research your company name on twitter and google

2. Look at your competitors and industry leaders, what are they doing well and what can you do better?

3. Research the trends surrounding your product or services

4. Do your wordtracker SEO key word research

I have heard stories of years ago when professionals had a hard time finding a web designer. It is hard to believe because today it is almost like getting hit with Quickstar: they are EVERYWHERE.

The problem?

All web designers have strengths. And all web designers have weaknesses. But there is so much information out there that there is no way for the “rest” of the world to tell what strengths should be stronger.

So, we are going to start a guide. A guide to avoiding web designabees and finding a good, quality designer who knows what they are talking about.

To start us off today. Look for a web designer who:

1. Doesn’t pretend to know everything. (I promise they don’t)
2. Can name several SEO tools off the top of their head (Here’s a Wordtracker article about SEO)