Writing blogs for your website is one of the best and easiest ways to improve your online visibility for your wool business. But we know coming up with ideas for your blog content can be tricky: it’s always harder to see what is interesting to your customers when you are the one doing it every day.
If you run another farm diversification business, check out this blog for more ideas.
Why is blogging so useful for your wool business?
One of the best things you can do to improve the visibility of your website yourself is to create targeted blog content that is SEO friendly. To make blogs SEO friendly, you need to cover topics that
resonate with your ideal client and match how they search for your solution or business online. You can use guesswork to do this, but we would always recommend having keyword analysis completed to have a clearer picture of the topics and phrases you should be focusing on. You will also need to make sure you understand how to upload blogs to your website and check the SEO settings while doing this. For WordPress sites, Yoast is a very easy way to make sure you have checked off all the SEO tasks during the upload process.
You can read more about finding your ideal client on this blog, or check out our e-book.
You will notice many of the blog titles suggested in this blog and many on our website have numbers in them. This is for a good reason. Statistically, people are far more likely to click on a blog that is in a list format or has a number in the title. In fact, depending on your industry, it is up to 7 times more likely that someone will click on the blog if it has a number in the title.
The choice of number is also important. Human psychology means we are more likely to engage/notice some numbers over others. Prime numbers such as 3, 5, and 7 are top of this list, but 10 also ranks well, as do odd multiples of 7, such as 21 and 35. For most blog content, I would try to stick to 3, 5, 7, or 10 as any more than that and it can become too long or the quality of the content will drop which has a negative impact on SEO ranking.
Using numbers can also be helpful if you are not a keen or confident blog writer, as it can help to focus your thoughts and encourage you to complete sections of the blog like a checklist, making the process less painful. For example:
5 knitting techniques you haven’t tried before!
Or
10 tea cosy pattern ideas using our range of [insert range name/product] wool
As a wool business, you sell directly to consumers. Blogs can make an especially large impact on direct-to-consumer businesses, particularly instructional blogs for craft-related farm businesses. This could include knitting- pattern blogs, instructional- technique blogs or project- inspiration blogs. These are the easiest blogs to write and tend to be very well received by customers.
We often find that farmers’ wives who set up craft-related farm diversifications will do this craft themselves, such as crochet or knitting for wool businesses. As such, they are likely to have a store of fantastic patterns, advice and techniques that they have used for many years. You can draw on these to create blog content. Instructional blogs help to directly sell your produce by linking the blog to a buy-wool option, but they can also be used to encourage customers to try products they are unsure about. Blog ideas could be:
7 tips for using mohair yarn
Or
Starters guide to needle felting with our [insert brand/product name] wool
Or
Choosing the right yarn for your crochet project
For more farm marketing content ideas, check out this blog.
You can use blogs to educate your customers on your products. This has two main benefits: firstly, it manages customer expectations, which means you are less likely to have unhappy customers. Secondly, it can help to reduce fears around purchases or encourage customers to try something new.
A blog that manages expectations should relate to a frequently asked question or information about how your product is delivered/packaged. For example:
5 things to know about our felting wool products
This could include information about how the wool is prepared, what the box will include, how the box is packaged and how it is delivered.
A blog that reduces purchase fears could relate to educating customers on unusual yarn types or providing guidance on frequent customer concerns. For example:
What is the difference between worsted yarn and Aran yarn?
Or
How do we process wool into yarn?
This blog should include top tips, the pros and cons of each product, and some project ideas that could be linked to other instructional style blogs as we mentioned above.
Education is one of the key benefits of blogging for your wool business. The number of programmes on TV about farming right now should tell you what a huge appetite the public has for education on the farming industry and particularly individual farmers. However, we also know that there is a huge disconnect between the general public and agriculture, so we have to remember that education is key. Examples of blogs that fit this idea include:
Why buy your wool directly from a farmer?
Or
How to check if your wool is from the UK?
The other aspect of education that is important is management methods. People broadly understand the difference between barn-kept, free-range and organic. This is mostly due to the huge campaigns surrounding egg production in the mid-2000s. But people have less concept of how this translates to other types of agriculture. And they are almost clueless about the differences between management practices that are better or worse from an environmental standpoint. Blog ideas could include:
How can sheep farming benefit rewilding?
Or
Why we chose to produce [insert breed], a native/rare breed?
Or
How can different sheep breeds produce different wool types?
Videos are a highly engaging medium for communicating with your audience, and this is especially true of craft-related businesses such as wool businesses. We would highly recommend trying to work video content into your blog. This could be through embedded videos or links to a YouTube channel. YouTube is one of the most effective video platforms for increasing visibility online as it is owned by Google, so videos on the platform will directly benefit your search engine optimisation.
Videos can also be used on social media platforms, especially Instagram, and we will be doing a blog about this for wool businesses in the future.
We offer a marketing coaching package where we can teach you to write blogs and help you come up with your content ideas, amongst other benefits; check it out here. Or we can even simply write blogs for you on a regular basis. Contact us for a quotation here.
