Carmen Rane Hudson

Do you struggle to come up with content for your small business blog or website? Are you having trouble deciding what kinds of content your target audience is hungry for?

Yahoo! Answers offers a great solution. It can provide you with direct insight into the exact questions that potential customers might be asking about your products or services. To get started you’d simply visit Yahoo! Answers and run a search for one of your target keywords.

For example, a roofing contractor might be targeting the keyword “roof leaks” since that’s one of the reasons why many people call a roofing contractor in the first place.

Make sure you choose “Search Y! Answers” below the green bar, and not “Search Web” above the green bar. The “Search Web” bar will kick you into a Yahoo! search engine query.

You will typically get thousands of results, and for once the large number of search results is great news! That’s because a large percentage of these questions represent questions that could be turned into useful, relevant blog posts for your site.

For example, the “roof leaks” query brings up some of the examples below:

Granted, many of these examples aren’t exactly grammatically correct or even very coherent, but you can get the gist of most of the questions. Some of these examples won’t necessarily be helpful to you, either. Asking about landlord-tenant disputes when the roof leaks would be a great blog post for the appropriate kind of lawyer, of course, but not for a roofing contractor.

However, the very short list above offers at least three blog posts if you look closely:

• How to Detect Roof Leaks
• How to Fix Roof Leak Stains
• How to Fix Minor Roof Leaks

You know your business, so you might be able to pick out even more. For example, you might be able to tell what the user “ghassan” is trying to get at when he’s talking about his shingles, because it might relate to one of the very common questions that you get from your customers every single day.

Now that you know real customers are asking these questions you can simply answer them on your website. Share the content on your social networks and know that you’ve already given your website a better chance of being found because you’ve taken the time to give customers exactly what they want.

However, you can take it a step further.

If you want to take this method a step further then you will need to create a Yahoo! account. Then, you can come back to Yahoo! Answers, where you can call up each of the questions you used to develop your blog posts.

Now you can write an answer that looks something like this:

“I am a professional roofer in Minneapolis and I’ve answered your question in great detail on my blog.” Then, simply add a link back to the appropriate post to generate some immediate traffic.

Yahoo! Answers rank well in the search engines too (and not just Yahoo!’s search engine). This means you increase your chances of being found, either directly or indirectly.

If your target market is another business you can work a similar process by using LinkedIn Answers. This will put you in touch with higher-end customers and markets.

As you can see, even B2B customers have roofing questions. Don’t neglect this avenue even if you’ve traditionally sold to consumers. Businesses have deeper pockets, after all, and this might offer you some insight on targeting higher-end customers on your website.

Mining people’s questions for content ideas ensures that you will never have to struggle to find something to write about. Yahoo! Answers and LinkedIn Answers constantly receive hundreds of new questions every single day.

Today’s Action Items

• Search for relevant key phrases on Yahoo! Answers & LinkedIn Answers.
• Develop at least one blog post from this search.
• Write your post and post a link back to the post on Yahoo! Answers or LinkedIn.

There are over 8 million people on the social media network, Pinterest, and 80% of them are women. If those aren’t drool-worthy figures for a business targeting women, then I don’t know what would be.

In addition, Pinterest is an incredibly visual medium, which means it is pretty much perfect for showing your potential clients and customers what you can do.

Businesses such as jewelry stores, clothing shops, cake decorators, and wedding planners are all perfect candidates for Pinterest. One business that I particularly like is interior design and will use this business as an example in this blog post.

To get the hang of Pinterest start thinking of it as a visual blog. Your goal is to tell a story in pictures.

What to Do

Once you set up your account you should strategically plan some boards. Boards should generally have no more than 15-20 pins on them to avoid looking cluttered, but you can create as many as you want. You could go as simple as: “Bedroom, Bathroom, Living Room.”

Alternatively, it can be as complex as the Pinterest account by Interior Design Pros with boards for “Remarkable Bedrooms,” “Sustainability,” and “Fun With Kids Community Board,” to name just a few. They have over 25 boards!

While many people use Pinterest to share other people’s designs that they’ve found floating about the Internet – just things that they like or enjoy – you would ideally be taking pictures of your own successful designs, uploading them, and using the small space beneath the picture in order to tell their story.

You are a “contributor” when you upload your own pictures, and they tend to spread faster because nobody’s seen them before. There’s room to place your URL in your profile and in the blurb beneath the picture. If you want the picture itself to get people back to your site just upload the picture to your website and “pin it” from there.

Be Sure to Share and Socialize

You might also save a few boards for promoting other people. Perhaps there’s a product you go to again and again for your designs – a special board is a good place to share those sorts of things, and you should follow that vendor as well.

Speaking of following, you’ll want to follow people on Pinterest just as you would on other social networks like Twitter. The principle is much the same: you want to find people you like, follow them, re-pin some of their stuff and grow your base of followers. Save a board for things they like as well. You can do a location-based search on Pinterest, so if you’re a Minneapolis interior designer just type “minneapolis interior design” into the search box.

It’s a good idea to set aside a little time one day a week to find and re-pin other people’s content. You can also comment on other people’s content, which is a nice way to highlight your expertise. Just make sure you don’t come across as “salesy.”

Make Your Site “Pin Friendly”

Pinterest is easy to use and is downright addictive as well. That means it’s easy to encourage other people to use it. You just need to make sure there is a “Pin it” button on your blog or website and that it appears on every page or post.

This makes it quick and easy for Pinterest enthusiasts to give you a quick “impulse” pin, which means that you get traffic that you didn’t have to create yourself – always a plus.

Today’s Action Items:

• Set up your Pinterest account
• Set up at least one board
• Find 100 people to follow
• Set aside a certain amount of time each week that you will spend on Pinterest.
• Add Pinterest share buttons to every page on your site or blog posts.

In a previous post I talked about how plumbers could use Twitter. This tutorial will teach you how to get started (no matter what business you are in)!

Step 1: Create Your Account

Creating an account on Twitter is very straightforward. Simply fill out the form and follow the directions. Twitter is extremely user friendly and there isn’t anything that should give you too much trouble.

Shortly after you fill out the preliminary information you’ll be taken to a screen that will allow you to fill out your profile.

Tips on Creating Your Account:

• Choose a username that relates to your business name in some way, or use your own name. Usually you’d use your own name if you’re a solo operation and you’d use your business name if you’re speaking for your business.
• Decide on a photo. If you’re a solo operation then you’re going to want to add your photograph, just a head shot of your smiling face.
• Since most contractor businesses are very location-specific you will want to be sure to enter your location.
• Enter your website. This allows people to follow you back to your home page, which is how you will generate leads from Twitter.
• Fill out your bio. You only get 160 characters for this, so get right to the point with what makes you unique. If you’re a plumber, for example, you might say: “Plumber with 35 years of experience,” or “The fastest plumbers in Minneapolis!” Don’t just put “Plumber” in your bio because that won’t help you distinguish yourself.

Step 2: Look for People to Follow

Go to the search box at the top of your screen to find people who you want to follow. As a plumber or other contractor it’s going to be useful to follow people in your local area. Simply scroll down to look for interesting tweets from people who you think might hire you: anyone who lists themselves as a “Mom” or “Dad” might be a good bet, for example.

When you see someone you want to follow just click on the hyperlink with their name on it and then press the follow button.

A good portion of these people will follow you back, which is how you start building relationships on Twitter. I recommend starting with 100 people. That’s not so many that you look like a spammer but it’s not so few that you won’t be off to a good start. Each week when you come back to Twitter look for 5 more people to add to your list.

Step 3: Start Adding Content

It’s very easy to add content on Twitter. There’s a small box under your name. Simply enter the content into the box and press the “Tweet” button. In the screen shot below I put what my plumber yells at me nearly every time he comes to fix my garbage disposal (I forget! I’m sorry!).

If this were my plumber I’d like his follow up tweet, perhaps, to be why I can’t put pasta in the garbage disposal, but that’s a good tip for now.

Note, you can use a #hashtag to note the subject matter of your tweet. For example, if you want people to know you’re talking about plumbing you could add the “#plumbing” hashtag. This is a really good idea, because it helps people who want to search for content just like yours.

Step 4: Schedule Twitter Time

You may have heard people complaining about all of the ways which social media in general (and Twitter in particular) can be a time suck. I recommend simply corralling the little blue bird by scheduling a little time each week to handle it.

I like to handle my Twittering on Mondays, and I like to keep the schedule as regular as possible (though I’ll be the first to admit I’m not always as consistent as I should be). When I do it, I take the following steps (in order):

First, I click on the @Interact tab at the top of the page. This tells me if I’ve gotten any @mentions. If I have, I like to tweet a thank you to the person who did it.

Do this by scrolling over the Tweet and pressing the reply button (see the screen shot below). You will see a new Tweet window pop up with the person’s @username right at the front of the Tweet.

You don’t have to enter much more than “@username Thanks for the mention!” in the box. People appreciate the shout out. It helps them promote themselves just as they’ve promoted you with the mention. If the mention was something a little more personal, if a question was asked, or if a comment was made, just respond to it just as you would respond to a normal invitation.

Second, I read over my Twitter stream. I only usually go back about 30 tweets since getting back to the last thing I’ve read is generally impossible. I’m looking for anything interesting to Re-Tweet. This is a quick and easy way to load your Twitter stream with content while promoting someone else. You can do this simply by hitting the “Retweet” button beneath the tweet.

Third, I post something interesting that I wrote myself. This is where referring to my Twitter for Plumbers post is very useful:)

Finally, I look for 5 new people to follow. Twitter makes it pretty easy with the “Who to Follow” feature on the left hand side of the page. You could also run another hashtag search, just to keep things location specific.

That’s it! If all is going well people are also deciding to follow you without you doing too much more, which means that your follower list, and thus your audience, is growing.

There are a few other tricks, bells, and whistles, but these are the basics of what you’d need to know to put Twitter to work for your business!

Today’s Action Items:

• Set up your Twitter account
• Find 100 people in your LOCAL area to follow
• Send out your first Tweet or Retweet
• Write up your Twitter schedule

This morning I was over on PlumberSEO.net and I happened to notice they published an article on plumbers and Twitter in Plumbing and Mechanical Magazine. Like most small business owners many plumbers don’t spend a lot of time on Twitter because they can’t quite figure out what to post on it without turning it into a massive waste of time. Fortunately the article offered some fantastic solutions.

Tweet Daily Maintenance Tips

While the article didn’t specify maintenance tips as a daily activity I’m going to jump right in and tell you they would be great daily content. Tweets like, “Don’t ever put pasta in your garbage disposal” are pretty much golden for daily content. They’re nearly universally useful and they’re extremely actionable.

If you want, you could include a link to a blog post on your website that explains why pasta is so deadly to garbage disposals. You can probably think of hundreds of silly things that people do to their plumbing every single day: share them with the world. You can probably also think of a few simple things that people could do to avoid costly plumbing problems. Tweet about those too.

Tweet Product Recommendations

Though it wasn’t covered in the article, I could add product recommendations to this too. If there’s a particular tankless water heater, for example, that you find yourself recommending to your customers again and again this is great information to share on Twitter.

Tweet Advice for a Specific Situation

Someone tweets: “Help! My kid flushed a hairbrush down the toilet!” Jump in like Superman and save the day with a specific tip. Don’t forget to include the @sign to reply: @Susy Detach the toilet from the floor to get it out (or however you’d answer that question). Again, if the answer is longer than that you can Tweet, then write up a quick blog post and direct them to your blog for the answer.

This of course means that you’re going to need to keep an eye on what people are saying about their plumbing situations. That means running some pretty simple searches on Twitter. The article suggests searching for “#plumber.” To this I would add: “#toilet,” “#garbage disposal,” “#drain,” “#sink,” “#bathtub,” “#shower,” and “#hot water heater.” If people are going to gripe about their plumbing problems they will do it by griping about the specific equipment first.

When you run these searches you’ll also find other great content written by other people. There is absolutely no harm in simply “Retweeting” this content. Simply hover your mouse over their tweet until you see the “Retweet” option appear (it looks a little like a recycling logo). Press the button and you’ve accomplished several things.

First, you’ve essentially added content to your Twitter feed that you didn’t have to work too terribly hard for: always a plus. Second, you’ve shown that you’re part of the community by promoting someone else, again, always a plus. It keeps you from hijacking the conversation with your attempts to promote. This strategy was stressed in the article.

Tweet Photos & Events

The article shared a few more great tips too, such as taking photos of your plumbing business at work or posting useful videos (perhaps you could do a “how to” video on extracting hairbrushes from toilets!), since people enjoy both of these things. According to the article you could even create webinars on common plumbing problems and then generate buzz with, “Three days until the Toilet Trouble Webinar comes out!” followed, the next day, by “Two days until the Toilet Trouble Webinar arrives!”

Your Twitter To-Do

I know the last thing you want to do is spend a ton of time on Twitter, so here’s my suggestion for today. Jot down 30 things that you’d like your customers to know—30 recommendations you find yourself giving them day after day, like “don’t put pasta down the garbage disposal,” or “close the top of your toilet so stuff stops flying in there,” or whatever you tell them. Then simply Tweet one of those tips every day, crossing them off of your list. In 30 days you’ll have a following and a rhythm and can productively move on to some of the rest of these tips.