Friday, March 25, 2011

5 Excellent Small Business Blogs To Learn From

A company blog is a useful tool for small businesses hoping to give others a glimpse into the company while also promoting the company's products and services.

While it's never a good idea to spam readers with irrelevant promotional messages, there are plenty of ways to provide valuable information and resources to existing and potential customers.

Here are five small businesses that are using a blog to reach local communities and showcase the company's experience and expertise. We've outlined exactly what they're doing right as a guide for other small businesses to improve their own blogging activities.

1. Cure Thrift Shop: Showcase products with visual creativity


Cure Thrift Shop is a non-profit organization in New York City that donates 100 percent of proceeds to the Diabetes Research Institute. While the company focuses completely on philanthropic endeavors, it sets up a great example for other retailers hoping to create successful blogs.

Multiple times daily, Cure staffers update the company blog with creative pictures of new furniture arrivals, standout antiques, fashion inspirations and sale alerts.

Cure hosts its blog on Tumblr, which is known for fostering a community that appreciates beautiful photography. The thrift shop's quirky photos of one-of-a-kind objects fit right into the Tumblr mix while also letting followers know what's new at the shop.

2. The Brooklyn Kitchen: Say it with a video


 
Small business owners usually have a fair amount of expertise to share with the world. A blog can be a wonderful place to flaunt all of that pent-up knowledge—incorporating videos, though, can take your advice to the next level.

The folks over at The Brooklyn Kitchen understand the virtue of nicely-produced videos. The team creates how-to videos for its cooking-crazed fans. Whether they're showing viewers how to shuck oysters or clean a blade grinder, The Brooklyn Kitchen crew focuses on providing useful and targeted information in a high-quality format.

One of my favorite videos they've produced is a gem on how to saber a champagne bottle, as demonstrated by co-owner Harry Rosenblum. This is the type of how-to you'd only expect to get from a group of passionate foodies. Readers value that type of expertise, especially when they feel they can't find it elsewhere.

3. Sweetgreen: Think big


 
With seven locations in the D.C. area and one outside Philadelphia, Sweetgreen is a restaurant that offers all-natural salads and frozen yogurts—it's a healthy, sustainable business that immerses itself into local culture. The company's website explains, "We don't believe that you can have a successful business in an unsuccessful community."

Based on that idea, Sweetgreen's founders aim to make a positive difference in their community. The Sweetgreen blog captures all of the community activities that the company is sponsoring and taking part in, along with the usual day-to-day activities of running a restaurant. You can find the team throwing music festivalshosting nutrition classes at local schools, or just concocting mouth-watering seasonal salads.

The blog acts as a central place where all company activities can be followed. The team maintains a great balance between community-focused posts and product-driven updates.

4. Birchbox: Invite guest writers


 
Birchbox, a startup subscription service that enables customers to sample beauty products before buying them, updates its blog multiple times per day, focusing on beauty and health tips. To keep content fresh, Birchbox editors bring in guest bloggers from top beauty and health companies and blogs to share their recommendations.

So far, the guest blogging program has included the likes of Dorothy McGivney, founder of travel newsletter Jauntsetter; Grace Atwood of beauty blog Stripes and Sequins; and Elizabeth Dehn, founder of beauty and wellness blog Beauty Bets.

Creating a guest blogger program is a great way to diversify content and bring in writers with experience and perspective in areas that the company's core bloggers may not be specialized in. Consider inviting guest writers to blog on your site if you're looking to expand into content areas that your company isn't as familiar with. For example, if your company hosts a blog about cooking, but would like to pair those dishes with tasty cocktails, consider inviting a mixologist to help kick off that venture.

5. Emerson Salon: Get social and personal


 
There are plenty of blogs out there that are good at integrating social media, and there is another subset of blogs that excel at identifying the people behind the cog. But there aren't too many sites that manage to blend those two successfully. Emerson Salon, a tech-savvy hair salon in Seattle, is one small business that has tackled that formula and come out on top.

Salon owners Matt Buchan and Alex Garcia run their business with the goal of building a community, both online and offline. On the salon's website, users see a thorough overview of the company's digital footprint, including links to its FacebookTwitter and Yelp pages.

Social pages for the company are to be expected, but Emerson Salon also highlights each of its employees with bio pages for each of its stylists. A typical page includes information on a stylist's professional experience, favorite local spots and interests, along with links to social profiles and a feed of his or her latest blog posts on the site. Each stylist blogs about the latest hair trends and tips, showcasing his unique thoughts on particular topics.

Personal touches on a blog, like adding profile pages and social contact information for individual specialists, make a business seem more approachable.

Your favorite small business blogs

Because small business blogs usually service local communities, finding their blogs on the wider Internet can be difficult. We know we've missed a slew of wonderful, locally-run blogs, so let us know which are your favorites in the comments below.


By Erica Swallow
Erica Swallow is an Associate Editor, Partner Content at Mashable, working primarily on writing, editing and managing supported feature content, with a particular focus on business and marketing. Erica is an international speaker, having most recently spoken at WOMMA Summit in Las Vegas, Social Marketers Summit in Prague and Social Media Brasil in São Paulo.



Image courtesy of FlickrRobert S. Donovan 

1 comment:

  1. This post is awesome..i've been reading tons of crap posts from other blogs, but shows you have a more educated reader base.

    ReplyDelete