How To Start a Blog for Your Business [Step-by-Step Guide]

Key Takeaways

so someone possibly surrounded by ninjas has told you that you need to start a blog for your business but how do you actually do that it can all feel quite overwhelming but luckily if you follow these six easy steps starting a blog for your business and making a success is very simple so how to start a business blog step 1 set realistic expectations for your blog you need to know what your intended outcome is of your blog are you blogging because you want to get more traffic if so then you're going to be blogging about the sorts of topics that people are searching for but maybe you're going to be blogging because your customers always ask you the same sorts of questions and rather than having to answer them every single time you want to send them two blog posts well if that's the case and you want to make sure that your posts match the questions that your customers are asking that are helping them to convert you might be blogging for Thought leadership so you might be blogging about your industry not necessarily questions that people are asking but your take on particular topics the goal being to establish your business as a real authority in your space pick up lots of links and get some attention you might be blogging for things to share out on social media in which case you might want to make your post a little bit shorter bite-size tasty chunks you might be blogging for credibility so you might be showing case studies and examples of your client work or you might be doing absolutely all of these but the important thing is that you know what your objective of your blog is before you start because that's gonna help you identify exactly what sort of posts how in-depth they need to be but the most important thing obviously is that you know what your objectives are because that's gonna help you define what you're gonna be writing about how long your posts are gonna be at what sorts of format your blog will take step 2 is to make sure that your blog is nice and visible on your website so you might add it to your top menu if you're in WordPress this is really easy to do just go to menus and then add your blog that way if you're an e-commerce site for example and you have a really large and crowded menu then you might need to put it somewhere else such as a top menu or even put it in the footer although obviously if you put it in the footer you're going to be getting traffic to it you might also call your blog something else it doesn't necessarily have to be called blog some people call their blog news or articles or tips advice questions all those types of things can be a blog but just in a slightly different format it all depends what your goals are the next thing that you want to do is choose a layout and style guide now it's really important that your blog is consistent so doing things like deciding what sorts of images you're gonna have with each post and whether you're gonna be using stock images or you're gonna create the images yourself on canva or you're gonna have a designer create the images that's really important to give your blog consistency if you look at someone's blog and you see they've always got the same style of images it elevates your impression of that blog whereas if you look at another blog and some of the images like stretched and squished and pixelated and random different sorts some are cartoons some of photos it really doesn't give a good perception so make sure you're really consistent with the images that you use you'll also want to be consistent on things like capitalization of your blog titles even length of your blog titles as well so are you asking a question for example how do I start a business blog or are you giving tips how you start a business blog you'll also need to think about how users will navigate through your blogs so whether you have your blog's categorized and then they can see all of the blogs in that category or whether you have them in date order so they just click Next and they go to the next post this will depend heavily on the sorts of things that you're sharing about and if you're sharing across lots of different topics or if you're going really deep on one particular topic if you want to see a blog that ticks a lot of boxes you could do worse and check out the H rest blog so here's one of their post we can see we've got a nice image which looks to be looks to be custom made which is great it's nice cartoony but the image isn't too big that it pushes all of the content below the fold so I can still see where the content sits now it's nice and easy to read because it's in a fairly narrow column here and that's also gonna work well on mobile we've also got this great author bio at the side here which tells us a little bit about Joshua why he's credible about this topic and gives us links to follow him if we like it so that's fantastic but if we look at the post itself we can see there's some images in here we've got bullet points and to kind of break up the text and make it a little bit more readable we also have links through to other posts on the hrf site too which are going to be useful for people if they want a bit more info about that particular topic we've got links to external tools and you should never be afraid to link out to other websites although it's often a good idea to make sure those links open in a new window so that people who click on them don't lose your original post we've got this like Johnson box type thing here with a background screen again which kind of breaks things up and draws your eyes for that section so here this is the kind of equivalent of their call to action let's not forget this is a really really in-depth and useful post as well all of the images make it nice and easy to read through and it's really informative and useful don't worry I'm not going to read it out to you so this is a great example of a blog post in this blog post ranks really nicely for small business SEO which is a very competitive term then we've got a bit more about Josh at the end here so how they can improve this even further they don't really have a call to action to try out ATF's specifically although they do have these kind of internal links to different parts of the a h4f suite but maybe offering people a trial in some kind of sidebar call to action could be a good way of turning the visitor into a leader so step four is to analyze your target audience because you want to make sure that you're writing for that person and a good tip here is to turn your entire target audience into just one person that you're thinking about writing for personally if you think about writing for a whole group of people it can be easy to get off track and talk in general terms whereas if you're talking to just one specific person and you're writing this entire post for that person as long as that person matches your target audience that post is gonna be really nice and straightforward to read so our advice here is talk to your sales team find out what sort of questions and issues people have get to know your customers a bit more if you're not customer-facing spend some time budding up with the sales team or the support team so you can get to know your customers the language that they talk and the sort of issues that they have because then you'll be able to write for them really clearly you can also go to Google Analytics and enable demographic and interest reporting this will give you info about their ages genders demographics locations and it help you build up that picture of Who am I writing for step 5 is to do keyword research for your blog now the goal here is not just to identify the keywords that are getting the most traffic we want to identify the keywords that were most able to rank for so there are two different types of keyword you're gonna find informational keywords and you're gonna find commercial keywords an example of a commercial keyword might be something like by røde videomic or by camera microphone that's a commercial term because there's an intent behind that to buy it right I've typed by video Mike so the other type of search is an informational search an informational search for something like this which is a rode videomic might be something like rode videomic versus rode videomic pro okay so that's someone who's looking for information on the difference between the two products and for that type of informational search or something like how to record sound outdoors that's going to be the sort of thing where someone is looking for information rather than just specifically looking to buy straightaway so those are the sorts of searches that you're more likely to get blog post ranking for so a good tip when you're doing your keyword research and you think yeah this would be a great keyword to rank for pop it into Google and see what sort of search results you're getting are you getting for example shopping at if you're getting shopping ads that would indicate that this is a commercial term people are looking to buy so Google is more likely to rank product pages or product category pages if you're getting blogs and if you're getting information sites that's an indication that that might be a term that you'd want to target in a blog post step six is to create a blog schedule so we're often asked how often should i blog it's a little bit like saying how often should I exercise it's not necessarily the number of blogs that you make but the number of good quality blogs that really makes a difference if you're able to make one awesome blog post per week that is fantastic if you've only got the time to make one awesome post per month that is also okay but what you don't want to do is smash out five absolutely trash blog posts in the same time it could take you to make one awesome one because trash is likely to rank or do anything for your business so to summarize how do you start a business blog step number one is define your objectives are you blogging to get more traffic to get more links to position yourself as an authority in your market place to answer your top customer questions whatever your goal is that's going to define to a large extent what you're writing about how you're writing about it and how long each of your posts should be step 2 is to add that blog to your site and make sure it's nice and prominent you want to get people on your blog so include it in your main menu if you can if you've got space step number three is to work on the style guide and layout so make sure that you're being consistent with your images and you have rules for what sort of images you include with your posts make sure you consistent with things like blog titles capitalization the style of your posts as well and of course the calls to action that you're using throughout your posts step four is to analyze your target audience make sure you're writing for the sort of person that you want to attract to understand the demographics age interest all that type of stuff really important to make sure you're crafting each of those posts for that one specific target customer that you're holding in mind at all times step 5 is to do the keyword research to make sure you're targeting the sort of terms which an informational page is likely to show up for so if you're targeting a phrase that has by or has some kind of commercial intention then usually you'd be targeting a product or service page to that sort of phrase rather than a blog post your blog topics when you put them into Google should bring up other informational blog type content and step six is to create a blog schedule that you can stick to make sure it fits around you don't set a really ambitious target of blogging every day if each of those blog posts is going to be absolute rubbish it's always a good idea to go for quality over quantity with blogs because blogging is just one of those things that's subject to the 80/20 rule where 20% of your blog posts are gonna bring 80% of your traffic and that 20% are typically going to be the most detailed most useful or authoritative pieces that you've written so I hope you've learned something today about digital marketing that you can apply to your own campaigns don't forget to hit like on this video if you enjoyed it click Subscribe and the little bell icon to get more digital mark videos from us and don't forget also to leave a comment if you have any questions about this or anything else in digital marketing and if you want to generate more leads and sales from your website then don't forget you can request a free website and digital marketing review from my agency exposure ninja if you go to exposure ninja com forward slash review you'll see that there's a form on that page if you fill in the form one of our team will record you a personal 15-minute video showing you how to increase the volume of leads and sales that your website is generating by improving your conversion rate and also attracting more traffic to your site it's completely free of charge and there's no obligation to use our services at all although of course if we think that we can help we will let you know until the next video see you soon