See Jane blog part I: Meet my business blog guinea pig

Jane Hamill, of Fashion Brain Academy, is a business consultant for fashion designers.  She has also graciously offered to be my business blog guinea pig.  I’m working with her to optimize her blog and promote it through social media, article marketing and SEO.  We’ve just started…here is Part I of where we are so far.

Jane Hamill runs  a great business.  For years she worked as a successful clothing designer as well as a store owner.  She’s been there, done that in the fashion world, and now she helps fashion designers — up-and-coming or established — with the business side of fashion.

How Jane’s blog fits into her overall business

Jane’s blog is just one way she reaches customers.  She also has:

• An excellent email list that she’s been building for years
• A Web site which includes all of the information about her services and online courses
• YouTube page with videos for fashion designers
• Twitter and Facebook accounts

The beauty of the blog is that it establishes her expertise.  One of the best things about Jane is that she’s got enough practical, on-the-ground knowledge about running a fashion business to fill a couple of phone books.  If you check out the blog, you can see immediately that she does NOT need help coming up with content.  Other major plus: Her writing style is fun AND clear, and she loves making instructional videos (she teaches fashion business courses at a local college).

A few things could be better

One of the reasons I approached Jane about working on her blog is because business blogs help improve Web traffic and I knew a few things could be better right off the bat:

• Her posts, while full of valuable knowledge, didn’t have a lot of keywords in them.  I wasn’t yet sure what her keywords should be, but she rarely used the words “fashion” or “clothing line” — instead, she talked to her readers as she would a live audience of fashion designers, where everyone speaks a common shorthand, but which may not be so great for search engines.
• There was no way to share her posts — you’d get to the end and be stuck.
• There was no way to subscribe to her posts, either by email or RSS.

Establishing goals for Jane’s business blog

Before we made any changes, though, we went through Jane’s business and discussed how the blog could fit in.  Jane’s blog should:

• Be easily findable by Jane’s targets, either through search engines, social marketing, etc.
• Be engaging to her audience
• Build up Jane’s credibility and expertise
• Lead customers to both free- and paid-for products and services

The goal of all this effort, of course, is to make money – turn prospects into customers – but at the same time build a real community of fashion designers who can learn from Jane and each other.

What would you improve on Jane’s blog?

In Part II I’ll get into some of the basic changes we made right away, and what I learned along the way. Stay tuned!