If you are a startup or business owner, you must have heard the term ‘blog’ or ‘blogging’ several times. If those terms have always sounded alien and irrelevant to you, think again. Blogging can be the single most definitive game-changer for your business or startup. One of my recent articles was on the subject of organic marketing versus paid marketing. That blogging you could be belittling is central in driving organic marketing. It is the core of what is termed content marketing. Today let us delve into how you can start a blog for your business. First off, what is content marketing and its tenets?
Content Marketing And Blogging
This is a marketing approach where you draw, engage, and retain an online audience by sharing relevant and engaging content with them. In essence, you want to attract prospects, turn them into leads, get conversions, and turn them into repeat purchase customers. That audience is akin to you building a community around your business.
You can share relevant and engaging content through sending newsletters, posting social media posts, articles (or blog posts), videos, and podcasts, among others. One way to be able to do that is to start a blog. A blog is a website where users can reflect, share opinions, and discuss various topics by commenting on posts on the site. The posts, usually in the form of articles, usually appear in reverse chronological order. Here is how you can start a blog for your business:
Ideation
This should be the first step and you should take due time on this. This involves the conceptualization of a mental image or the synthesis of ideas. The assumption is by now, you would have made up your mind to start a blog. By ideating, you decide what type of blog it would be.
Let us suppose you want to start a blog for your consumer electronics business. You must muse on whether or not you will be writing the blog posts. Bear in mind that you can outsource other people to write for you. Will you be posting content detailing the features of the various items you will be selling? Will you post content in the form of reviews of items you sell? Will you maybe post general content where, for instance, you post an article discussing microwaves?
These are just some examples of the type of blogs you can choose. Any of these approaches can draw, engage, and retain customers. Your thrust here is to refine your ideas to have a clear picture of what type of blog you want to start. This will be vital in informing the actual development of the blog, i.e. the website.
Technical Modalities
This stage involves the designing and development of the website. This starts from foundational things like domain registration and web hosting. This will be followed by site design than the actual building of the website. I would encourage you get your blog set up by professional experts. They will be pivotal in offering you the necessary guidance because they know all the technicalities.
You just have to assess their track record; they must have developed real-life functional websites. That will provide you with enough bases to ascertain their capabilities. You can get hosting from companies like Web Zim.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The success of blogging is tied to SEO. You need to take time to appreciate what SEO is all about. Blogging will be useless if you are not consciously working on SEO. Recently I did an article on SEO or Meta Title tips; make sure you check it out. It delves into some of the SEO aspects that can optimize your content. However, that was just the tip of the iceberg. There are several other components to SEO you will need to learn. Some of them will be directly connected to the website’s technical elements, e.g. page design.
Your web developer can help you in those regards. Other non-technical aspects you can learn and master over time. For example, understanding the principles behind keyword densities, keyword stuffing, clickbait, and the like. It is important to note that SEO is so vast that it is a lifelong effort to learn and apply what you learn. There is an article we published some time back that can help here as well. It is on 8 Costly Mistakes To Avoid In Setting Up New Websites.
Publicity
You will need to publicize your blog and several simple, cost-effective ways to do that. One is to set up social media accounts, e.g. on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. You then share snippets and links whenever a new blog post is up. Two, you can set up WhatsApp groups where again, you will share snippets and links whenever a new blog post is up. Three is to build an email list to send out newsletters containing, e.g., new content updates. The idea is to have new blog posts almost daily; it depends, of course, but being regular and consistent is the key. These are just basic publicity strategies but there are more.
Those are the simple steps to follow in starting a blog for your business. You need to start a blog to build your brand if you have a startup or business. It is tried and tested; countless success stories to draw inspiration from.
