It’s not a secret: businesses that blog generate more leads and make more sales than those who don’t. Despite these proven benefits, though, many business owners put off launching their own blogs due to the perception that it’s difficult. Fortunately, it’s easy to start a blog and doing so can provide a serious boost for your company.
Here’s what you need to do:
Decide on a Blogging Platform
There are dozens of blogging platforms available on the web. HubSpot and WordPress are two of the best-known and both are hugely user-friendly and ideal for first-time bloggers. There’s a lot that goes into actually launching your business blog, but there are plenty of helpful tutorials on the topic.
Establish Your Goals
The first step to everything you do in your business is to establish your goals. When it comes to a blog, ask yourself the following questions:
- What do I hope to achieve from my blog?
- What are my reasons for starting a blog?
- What do I intend to give to my audiences?
By answering these questions, you’ll be well on your way to identifying your key business goals, which can help you define your objective and meet your goals.
Determine the Purpose of Your Blog
Believe it or not, the purpose of your blog may be different than your goals for it. This is because goals generally pertain to your brand, while purpose pertains to your readers. To define your purpose, you’ll want to consider what will make your blog stand out (i.e. – what readers are gaining from it) and how you’re going to make your information something readers want to read. Defining your purpose can help you cater to your audience better and pull ahead of your competition quicker.
Research, Research, Research
A blog can’t find success without readers, and you can’t create great content without knowing who those readers are. If you’re going to attract an audience to your blog, you need to understand who you’re trying to attract and how you can craft content they find useful, relevant, and interesting. By determining your target audience, you ensure that you’re hitting the mark with your contend and setting yourself up to earn qualified leads.
Determine Your Content Schedule
Now that you know who, what, and why you’re writing for, you’ll have to determine how often you intend to do it. It’s tough for a blog to succeed without a consistent posting schedule and you’ll soon find that regularity is the key to blogging success. Maintaining a consistent content presence gives your readers something to look forward to and helps them rely on your content.
To determine how often you should post, consider how much time you can reasonably commit to blogging each week and how many pieces of content you can write without sacrificing quality. Blogging schedules vary for everyone, but determining what yours is can help set you up for blogging success.
Welcome Your Writers
Unless you’re just getting started as a company, it’s likely that your business blog will be comprised of several writers. Blogs require a huge amount of content and, often, the task of maintaining a blog is too much for just one person, especially when that person has other company responsibilities. For this reason, you’ll need to decide whether you’re going to bring other writers into the blog with you.
Other writers can help share the burden of content creation as well as assisting you in building and maintaining an editorial calendar and interacting with readers. If you’re going to build a team of writers, your next decision will be whether you’re going to hire freelancers or recruit people from your in-house team. Both options have benefits and drawbacks, which you can read about here.
Develop Your Editorial Calendar
Earlier in this process, you determined your level of blogging frequency. Now it’s time to create your editorial calendar. An editorial calendar acts as a to-do list that helps you plan content in advance, build content concepts, and ensure that you’re publishing unique and varied content. There are plenty of tutorials on building an editorial calendar, and it’s important to remember that the most important piece of the whole exercise is to come up with great ideas and plan them in advance.
Nurture Your Brand
Your blog is a fantastic place to build your brand identity and ensure that you’re communicating your message, values, and ideals clearly to your customers. You can do this in everything from your design to your content, but it’s important to stay consistent across the board. This means developing your voice, your company POV, and your branding. Ideally, customers should be able to identify your content just by looking at it.
Market Yourself
Once you’ve developed your blog, take to the web to share your posts. This can help expand your blog’s reach and ensure maximum social sharing.
Hit Publish
While all of the steps we’ve mentioned here are important, by far the most important aspect of maintaining a business blog is to publish content. Content is what helps you connect with your readers and it’s what helps you stand out from the other company’s in your industry. Test your content, find out what works and what doesn’t, and continue to develop your content strategy. It may take some time but, eventually, you’ll become proficient at generating leads and high levels of customer engagement.
Conclusion
While starting a company blog may seem like an extensive process, it’s really quite simple. By following these tips, you can have your corporate blog up and running quickly. For more tips on starting your company blog, contact Bigfoot Media. Bigfoot Media is here for all of your digital marketing needs and would love to help your business create a game-winning strategy.
Call us today for a FREE consultation or shoot us a quick email to learn more.
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