How to Start a Blog for Your Business

Blogging for your business can be a great way to connect with customers and create a connection with them. It can also help promote your products or services and give you a voice in the industry. According to HubSpot, business blogs can increase web traffic by 55%, which is essential in a marketing environment dominated by SEO. However, starting a blog can be a difficult task. There are many caveats involved in getting set up and deciding what is right for your business.

In this article, I will be covering a step-by-step guide on how you can get started in creating a blog for your business. If you are still not convinced, here are some facts about blogging that might get the message across:

• Content can improve your brand image and consumer perception of your brand.
• According to Optinmonster, leads that come from SEO traffic are more likely to convert.
• Up to 81% of consumers trust blog content. (BlogHer).

How to Start a Business Blog

Now that you are convinced on how important creating a blog for your business is, let's get into the good stuff. This section will cover the steps for starting your blog from scratch. You may already have some of these points covered and in that case, just move to the next point!

Steps for getting started:

1. Choose a CMS
2. Identify Goals
3. Stick to Your Niche
4. Research Your Audience
5. Perform Keyword Research
6. Brainstorm content strategies

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Choose a CMS

A content management system (CMS) is software that helps you create and manage your blog content. If you already have a website, chances are you have a CMS in place. However, if you don’t have a website or are starting from scratch, WordPress is the best option.

WordPress is the most popular blogging platform and is used by some of the biggest brands in the world, including The Guardian, Forbes, and Mashable. In fact, WordPress accounts for over 43% of blogs in the world (W3Techs). WordPress is free to use but you will need to pay for hosting and a domain name separately.

You can still add a blog to standalone websites, depending on how your business is set up, however, to get the full benefit of content marketing, a CMS system is a must. It allows for tracking, extra features, updating, formatting, SEO, and much more.

Identify Goals

Before starting anything else with your blog, you need to identify what goals you want to achieve from it, for example:

• Get more organic leads
• Increase website traffic
• Increase product purchases
• Improve brand awareness

Your goals will directly impact the type of content you create and where that content fits into your marketing funnel. For example, you wouldn't focus on content such as product guides that are in-depth, bottom of the funnel content for your product if your goal was to get more organic leads, as these 'visitors' wouldn't know anything about you and would need other forms of content.

Setting goals will also help you when it comes to content planning and structure, which I will cover further down. If you don't have any goals and just want to use a blog for company updates or news, that's fine too.

Stick to Your Niche

Your business will fall under a certain niche already, and it's important that your content reflects that. Your blog will need to produce content surrounding that niche in order to show Google that you are an authority in that area and that is what your website/content is about. For example, if your business was selling fish tanks but you started writing content about sharks, it wouldn't reflect what your business is actually selling.

This can make it difficult to create content ideas, but that's where creativity comes into play. Taking the example above, you could write about shark types that could fit in a fish tank (if it had any SEO value). The point is to always keep the content within the topical area of your business and what you sell/do, otherwise, you could end up attracting the wrong visitors/leads that never convert.

Research Your Audience

After you have decided on your niche, it's time to research and identify your target audience. Knowing your target audience is essential for creating content that appeals to them and helps you achieve your goals. You should already have some familiarity with your audience from understanding your business, but some extra research may be required.

There are a few ways you can identify and research your target audience:

Google Analytics - if you already have a website, looking at your Google Analytics account will give you insights into the type of people that visit your site, their location, age, gender, interests, etc.

Surveys - if you have an email list or social media following, you could send out surveys to get feedback on what type of content they want to see and what problems they need solving.

Facebook Insights - if you have a business page on Facebook, you can use the Insights tool to see detailed information about your page followers such as age, gender, location, and interests.

Once you have an idea who your target audience is, you can start creating content that appeals to them directly. Remember, your goal is to attract the right type of visitors to eventually convert them into leads or customers, so make sure your target audience is at the forefront of your mind when creating content.

Perform Keyword Research

Keyword research can come at many different stages of content planning/processes, however, in this instance, this is keyword research to identify those words that you want your business to rank for specifically. Going back to the fish tanks example, some keywords to focus on here could be:

• Fish tanks
• Pet fish
• Betta Fish

These are the high-level keywords you want to go for and dominate, and would then be your basis for generating content ideas. So you would take fish tanks, and then research other keywords around that to get supporting content and so on.

You don't need to have keywords determined for all content here. You just want to identify the primary keywords. Other keyword research will be carried out when you hire a writer to actually create a piece of content and at other stages of planning.

Brainstorm content strategies

Linking into your goals, keywords, and topic, now you have to start planning content ideas. A content planner allows you to start brainstorming ideas and slotting them into your schedule. This will ensure you have a consistent flow of content being published and that it is all supporting your business goals.

This can be done in a number of ways, but I prefer to use a content planner. This can be just a basic table with columns for the title, type of content, publish date, keywords, and any other notes, or it can be an elaborate spreadsheet that serves as a content hub for your entire business - ultimately it will depend on how you like to work.

For example, here is the content planner I created and use: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rGGNbK_UFSZ9alTsoOJkJTGO51P9I9zqmM2BNPfMwK8/edit?usp=sharing

You can use a content planner to get down all of your keywords, content ideas, publishing dates, internal links, writers, feedback, and much more. This should be something that is updated regularly and used often, to avoid wasting time.

A tip for brainstorming - Invite all stakeholders to brainstorm content ideas for your business - even external, as you will get many more fresh ideas using two heads rather than one!

If you're struggling to come up with ideas, here are a few prompts you can use:

• News stories related to your industry/niche
• Industry news and updates
• How-to guides and tutorials
• Tips and advice
• Lists and roundups
• Product/service reviews
• Case studies and success stories
• Guest posts from experts in your field

A note on content planning

Ensure that you understand the different types of content and their purpose, as HubSpot has outlined here with their post on different types of blog posts. You should have a good balance of different formats to cover different audience needs.

Create a Content Calendar

Linking into the point above, you also want to create a content calendar. This will be a form of calendar that tracks the stages of drafts to publishing to updating content. This will help to ensure that your content is being published on time and that you have an overview of all content being created. A regular schedule is essential for keeping search engines interested in your site and also your audience!

You can integrate this with your content planner to make it easier, but some might find that too confusing on one sheet. There are also content calendar tools out there that can help with this - such as CoSchedule.

Your content calendar should answer the following at the very least:

• Who is writing the content? (Writer)
• When is the content being written? (Draft)
• When is the content being published? (Publish Date)

Choose a publishing schedule that links in with your business goals. For example, if you have a goal to get more sales of your product, increasing content production leading up to Black Friday will be essential. If you don't plan this in your publishing schedule, it can be missed or posted at the wrong time of year.

Hire a Writer and Editor

No matter who you are, when running a business, you cannot run a blog for that business at the same time. In order for a blog to be effective and yield results, it needs full-time care ideally. However, at the very least, you should hire a writer and an editor to use their expertise in creating top-quality content.

A writer will understand how to craft a story and get your message across in an engaging way. They will also be able to produce content at a fast pace, which is essential if you want to keep your blog updated regularly.

An editor will look over the content and make sure that it meets all the requirements for publication. They will also be able to offer feedback on how to improve the content and make it more engaging.

If you don't have the budget to hire someone, consider finding a freelance writer or editor who can help you out on a part-time basis.

Establish Processes

Whether you run your blog in house, hire someone new, or work with a freelancer, setting up the processes for managing the blog is essential from the offset. This will link in with the content planner and calendar, but it narrows down into the actual content writing itself. For example, if you hire a writer:

• Do you want to brainstorm topic ideas?
• Do you want a meeting every week to review content?
• Do you want to see a draft for review before publishing?

This will depend on your style of working but should be ironed out from the beginning to make your content creation processes effective.

You may also decide to include one of the following:

• Creating a style guide - so everyone knows how you want the blog to look, what type of language to use, etc.
• Developing an editorial calendar - so you can plan out when content will be published and ensure a consistent schedule
• Establishing a review process - so all content is checked for quality before it goes live
• Creating templates - this will help to speed up the writing process and ensure a consistent look for all content

All of these processes will help to make sure that your blog runs smoothly and that all content meets your high standards.

Optimize for SEO

This is the most essential step in this guide and often one that is overlooked. The goals you set out to achieve with a blog, will likely always link back to SEO. If you are just writing content and throwing it out there, you aren't likely to see results. Each piece of content needs to be adapted to the likings of the search engine robots so they favor it above other results - of course this is linked too with other SEO factors such as technical SEO.

In this instance, I am referring to on-page SEO and content SEO. Now, this isn't something you can just “do.” It's a profession and you should look for a writer and editor that is actually experienced in SEO or the alternative is to hire a full-time SEO that can work on all areas of SEO, including content. Either way, it's important that you optimize every piece of content to benefit from it.

If you aren't familiar with SEO, here are some of the basics that you need to consider when writing a blog post:

1. Use relevant keywords throughout the content - these are the terms that people will search for in order to find your content.
2. Optimize the title and meta data - the title and meta data are what appears in the search engine results pages (SERPs), so it's important to make them as effective as possible.
3. Use images - images can help to break up the text and make your content more visually appealing. They can also be optimized for SEO by using relevant keywords in the file name and alt text.
4. Use external links - linking to other websites can help to improve your SEO. Just be sure to link to high-quality websites that are relevant to your niche.
5. Use internal links - linking to other pages on your website can help to improve the SEO of those pages.

Create a Content Marketing Plan

Creating a blog doesn't stop after the content is published. You need to get the word out. That's where a solid content marketing plan comes into effect. This can be done similarly to the content planner, where you have a spreadsheet that tracks everything. Things you want to include in your content marketing plan will be:

• Social media platforms to share on
• Forums to post on
• Influencers to collaborate with
• Outreach for links
• Email newsletters to include the post in

Basically, you should consider every form of promoting your content that's relevant to your business. The more people that see it, the more will share it, the better it will perform in search engines, and the more impact it will have.

Measure Performance

Once you are up and running with your blog and have everything running like a well-oiled machine, it's time to start getting into the data. What works well? What doesn't? You want to start looking into your analytics and how people are interacting with the content, this will help you with a number of things including:

• Better placements of CTAs
• Identifying what length of content works best
• Understanding how effective images and videos are
• Where your audience is coming from
• Which links do they click on and where in the blog
• If they click around looking for other items
• If popups make them leave

There are hundreds of different factors you can analyze when it comes to performance. The idea is to identify what is effective for your audience and then tailor your blog strategy to that.

Other Business Blogging Tips

If that isn't enough, here are some other useful tips for your blog:

• Install analytics - this should be one of the first things you do after setting up your blog. Analytics will help you track everything from who is visiting your site to how they found you, what pages they looked at, and how long they stayed.
• Update content regularly - Google loves fresh content, so it's important to keep your blog updated with new posts on a regular basis. This doesn't mean you need to publish a new post every day, but aiming for a couple of times per week is a good goal.
• Make it easy to share - make sure that there are social sharing buttons on every post. This will make it easy for people to share your content with their own networks.
• Include CTAs - every blog post should have a call-to-action (CTA) at the end, whether it's to sign up for your email list or download a free guide
• Repurpose content - once you have a few blog posts published, you can start to repurpose the content into other formats like infographics, video, or even an ebook
• Write for your audience and OPTIMIZE for search engines, DO NOT write for search engines - this is one of the most important things to keep in mind when creating content. Write for your audience first and foremost, and then optimize it for search engines.
• Proofread everything - make sure to proofread every blog post before you hit publish, as errors can make you look unprofessional.
• Include images - posts with images tend to perform better than those without, so make sure to include at least one image with each post.

Now that you know how to start a blog for your business, it's time to put these tips into action and watch your traffic and conversions grow. Remember to keep track of what's working and what isn't so you can continue tweaking your strategy until you achieve the results you want. A blog is a great way to connect with your audience and build a brand.

I help companies and individuals establish a blog from scratch, create content strategies, and write content. This is in addition to providing content marketing and digital marketing services, particularly SEO. Contact me here if you would like to take the leap and get your content marketing strategy underway.