A blog is a good way to give your brand a voice and keep your website updated with fresh, relevant content. If you don’t have a blog for your business yet, it’s time to get started. Setting up a blog is fairly simple if you follow these steps.
Determine Your Blog’s Goal
You’re not creating a blog just for the sake of having one. Think about why your business needs a blog. Do you want your brand to become an authority in your niche through posting informative articles? Do you want to build a stronger community and facilitate better interaction with your peers and customers? Determining where your blog fits into your overall online marketing strategy tells you how to measure results, and helps you figure out what to write about.
Choose Your Writers
Choosing the right writers can help give your brand a more human voice, and can help boost its credibility. You don’t have to stick to having a dedicated blogger for all your posts; you can have business owners, executives, and regular employees can create insightful content for a blog. You can also outsource writers to keep your blog updated if you don’t have time to compose blog posts yourself.
Develop an SEO Strategy
Optimizing your blog for SEO is especially important if you want to use it to improve your brand’s online visibility. While you should avoid inserting too many exact match keywords into your content, it’s important to infuse relevant keywords and phrases into your content naturally. Use relevant keywords in your article’s titles, content, and metadata. The length of your metadata should also fall within search engines’ character count limits.
Decide What CMS to Use and Where to Put It
There are a lot of content management systems (CMS) that you can use for your blog. The most popular and flexible ones include WordPress, TypePad, and Movable Type.
You can choose to install these CMS and host your blog on a subdirectory (domain.com/blog), a subdomain (blog.domain.com), on a separate domain, or on a free blogging site like WordPress.com or Blogger. Hosting your blog on a subdirectory is ideal because it can help improve your domain’s “freshness” and establish your brand’s reputation as a thought leader better than a blog on a subdomain or a different website.
Design Your Blog
Your website, blog, and other online marketing channels should have consistent branding. A lot of CMS come with great pre-made design templates that you can customize these using your brand’s colors and logos, but the best way to have a well-designed and branded blog is to have a professional create a custom design for you.
Create a Calendar and Follow It
Create a content calendar to schedule your blog posts and list the topics you want to cover. Having a content calendar to follow helps you make sure your blog is updated regularly, and allows you to determine what to write about. Make sure to also be ready to compose spontaneous blog posts about the latest industry news or trends.
Always keep your readers in mind when creating your blog posts. Visitors won’t bother reading your blog if it’s all about your company and your products. Use your blog to post helpful tips, relevant updates, and useful information. Write in a more casual, conversational tone to engage your audience better.
Promote and Interact
Your blog won’t get read if your audience doesn’t know it exists. Integrate your blog into your other online promotion channels, such as social media and online newsletters. Encourage readers to interact with you by allowing them to post comments on your blog posts, and by responding to them promptly.
Getting your blog set-up can provide a lot more value to your visitors and potential customers. Contact us if you need help with your blog or any other aspect of your online marketing campaign.