A blog is an effective marketing tool that can help position your business as an expert in your industry, which can not only help your current customers, it can also help gain attention from potential customers as well.
How do you start a blog from scratch?
It all starts before you publish your first blog post. Like everything else in business, you need a solid, well-thought-out plan or a roadmap for what you want your blog to accomplish. Blogs can serve so many purposes from being informative to entertaining, so before you start writing, it’s important to follow a few key steps. Doing so will help set your content up for success and ideally will help simplify the content creation process.
Once you’ve created a path and a direction, it’ll help to simplify the structure of your writing process, which can also shorten the time you’ll need to write and publish your content.
Below are a few simple pieces of advice to help you get started:
- Create a strategy that will help you to determine what content you’ll create and/or curate. Your plan should align with your business goals and will help you to determine what content to create.
- Establish your tone of voice and how that will fit with your blog strategy. Everything from your blog name, to your headlines, to what you actually write about is important to the success of your blog and who will pay attention to your content.
- Along with your branding, you need to figure out who you are talking to, your target audience – pull keywords and know what your target audience reacts well to and what pushes them away.
- Set a frequency goal – review the calendar for the next year and determine special topics that you can focus on and figure out how much other evergreen content will need to be developed.
- Develop a distribution plan that will determine which channels you’ll use to share your blog posts. The channels that you choose should tie back to your target audience as there are a lot of differences in who participates in what social media options.
At the end of the day, a blog is an excellent and inexpensive way to share knowledge, build awareness, or find new customers. To make the most of your time, plan ahead, and know what you want to say. A little bit of planning will take you a long way.