A blog is an important tool in your marketing toolbox. When combined with your website, email newsletter, customer database, and ecommerce system, you will have everything you need to develop and run your business online. But how do you start a blog for your business and what can you do to ensure its’ success?
Here are five critical things you should do before you cut the ribbon and dedicate your business blog.
1. Why are you doing this and what do you hope to achieve?
It may sound silly, but you need to address this question before you get started. what is the purpose of the blog? Is it to explain your services? To establish yourself as an expert? Maybe you want to create leads by offering information that you require registration to read or download. Whatever your goals, you need to define them. As a rule of thumb, your blog should help assist you in meeting your business goals in general.
2. Who is your target audience?
This is critical for any blogger. You must identify a target audience to help you craft your content and also for marketing purposes. If you’re a car dealership your audience is potential car buyers, if you’re blogging about plants you’ll want to write to people with green thumbs. Usually, your ideal reader is similar to your ideal customer or client.
3. What do you want your readers to do?
This directly correlates to the goals you set for your blog. If your blog is a lead generator, then you must have very clear steps for guiding your reader to subscribe to get blog updates and/or get your lead generating content. If you are trying to get people to share your blog posts with their social network then you’ll want to write it in an engaging manner and make it easy for the reader to share it.
4. Who’s going to blog and how much time do they have?
Listen: If you can’t commit to writing blog entries (GOOD BLOG ENTRIES), then you’re not going to be successful and you’re going to look bad to your customers if they even bother to peek at your blog. The most effective and successful blogs are those with fresh, new content posted at least two to three times per week. Can you do that, or do you have an employee or freelance writer who can? Will you have a team of bloggers or will it be one voice?
5. Have you made an editorial calendar?
If so, why the hell not? Maybe you’re not sure what an editorial calendar is. One of the first things you need to do is make a list of 7-10 keyword-rich categories. Once you determine the categories (or subtopics) of your blog, you can plan your content calendar. If you plan on posting three times per week, then plot out post ideas for each of your categories – try to post an entry to different categories. Brainstorm topic ideas, as many as you can think of. Then, fill in your calendar. Try to stay several weeks ahead of the game by having at least 12-20 articles in the pipeline to be published. If you’re posting about topical issues, think hard about whether that’s a good idea – it will require discipline and time. Even if you want to do that, you should be able to write “evergreen” blog articles that can be published anytime regardless.
If you ponder these five questions BEFORE you launch your business blog you’ll be off to a good start. Good luck.
