Tag: start a business blog

The Business Blog Planning Process

Starting a blog about your business is an ideal vehicle for communicating information about your business with existing and potential customers.

This allows you to interact in a better with your site readers, post news and announcements about your industry, company and products or services, increase brand awareness, trust and loyalty, promote special offers and so much more.

Many businesses, in fact, no longer use a traditional website, but are now powered completely by “blogging” software (e.g. WordPress), which can be designed in such a way as to provide both the business and its users with all of the functions and capabilities of a website and a blog.

If you want to have control of your own web marketing and don’t have the time, need or desire to learn “web programming” languages such as HTML, then you should consider starting a business blog.

So … How do you get started on creating a blog for your business?

Simple! Take a look at the diagram below, then go through the article on this page before you do anything else… We’ve even included a Planning Worksheet you can download to help you. Also, feel free to contact us after going through the information below if you have any questions or need any help.

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The Planning Process for your Blog

For this process, you should look for a planning worksheet, you could get a template online.

Once you have one on  your computer, grab some extra paper and a pen so you can jot down your thoughts and ideas on the Worksheet as you follow along with this tutorial and make sure to shut out all distractions for the next 30-60 minutes.

Your Blog Goals

Whether you are starting a blog about business or a personal blog, the first step is to define a clear goal for your blog and make it as specific as possible.

What do you want your blog to do? If your blog could help you achieve anything you want, what would you specifically want it to help you achieve?

For example, you may want to start a blog to inform your customers about your products or services, promote products or information about a specific niche, provide tips or training information to existing and potential customers, build trust and loyalty for your brand, post special announcements and updates on planned events, or simply to generate more traffic for your site and interest from online users.

List whatever it is that you want your blog to help you achieve on a blank sheet of paper.

Once you have written your list, you should be able to identify one or more goals for your blog.

Go through the list and pick the goal that has the overriding importance above all others.

Write down this goal on your worksheet (in “Your Blog Goals” section) as “Goal 1“.

Now, go back to your list and the repeat this process to find two more goals and list these on your Worksheet as “Goal 2” and “Goal 3“.

Once you have identified at least 1-3 goals and written these down in your Worksheet, go back to “Goal 1” and ask yourself how you can measure this goal. In other words, what are the objective, quantifiable metrics or benchmarks that need to be completed or fulfilled in order for you to achieve “Goal 1“?

For example, this could be getting a certain number of new leads to submit an inquiry each week via a contact form on your site, or “X” number of new subscribers or members signing up to your newsletter, opt-in form or membership site per week/month, etc…

Keep this section flexible enough so you can modify it anytime you need, or as you start getting more data or feedback from actual visitors and users on your site.

Naming Your Blog

Once you have clearly identified your blog’s goals, the next step is to name your blog.

This is an important step, so take the time to think carefully about coming up with a good name for your blog and start brainstorming ideas.

Try to think beyond just using the name of your company. Put yourself in the shoes of an online user who is looking for the very thing you sell and try to come up with a name that would entice users. You can be creative with your name, but try to avoid being “too clever”. The same advice goes for choosing a catchy, memorable or a stand out name. It can be a fun or quirky name, but avoid anything that could be made to sound offensive.

Go online and do a little research to find out what other companies in your industry or niche are naming their blogs.

For example, if you are thinking of starting a blog related to food or cooking, a quick search online for “cooking blog” reveals some great blog names like: “Smitten Kitchen”, “Cooking With Amy”, “A Chef’s Daughter”, “Shockingly Delicious”, “The Rambling Spoon”, “Worth The Whisk” and more.

Get inspired, make a big list of names and then narrow these down.

Once you have narrowed your list down to the best choices, repeat the same process as above to craft a blog description, tagline or slogan for your blog.

Your blog description should be concise and should inform the reader is as few words as possible what your blog is all about. For example, in one of the cooking blogs we came across while searching online, the blog description was “Fast, Fresh, and Simple Recipes Easy Enough for Tonight’s dinner.”

Including keywords in your blog name or blog description can also be useful.

Once you have completed this step, it’s time to look at your domain name. If you feel that your business blog should be its own entity and have its own domain name, then by all means register a new domain name for your blog. In our blog training tutorials we also show you how to quickly and easily find lots of available keyword-rich domain names that you can register for your new blog.

Technology

Once you have settled on a name and a description for your blog, the next step is to focus on the technology that will host, support and power your online marketing vehicle.

In this step, you need to decide whether you will hire a company to create your blog, make your blog design and manage your hosting, or do it all yourself.

We can advise you on this step, so feel free to contact us to discuss the technology platform that would be most suitable for your blog and for achieving your business goals. We can help you understand the costs and benefits of using reliable web hosting providers such as the ones we use and recommend, and also explain the benefits and advantages on using a powerful and flexible blogging platform like WordPress to give you full control over the creation and management of your online content.

Define Your Target Audience

Once you have a clear understanding of the technology involved in creating a blog for your business, it’s time to define as precisely as possible who your target audience is.

Begin by asking yourself important questions, such as the ones listed below:

• Who are you writing to? Who is your ideal blog reader?
• What do they want and need? What are they searching online for?
• What problems are they facing that you can help to solve? Why are they searching online for solutions?
• How does your audience like to consume information? Do they prefer video to images and text? Do they need downloadable content? Do you need to create visual, audio or multimedia content to keep your audience engaged?
• How do they see themselves? Who do they form relationships with? How do they dress and behave? What do they buy, eat or consume? What magazines and books do they read? Where do they prefer to live? What do they indulge in during their spare time? What are they self-conscious about?
• What do they expect from your blog? What kind of information are you willing to provide online for free or for a fee? What kind of information are you unwilling to provide online for free or for a fee?

The point of this step is to try and create as accurate a profile of your ideal reader as possible. Try to picture an actual person that you can communicate directly with, and present your information to.

If you don’t have accurate market research data about your ideal target audience, then start with a “best guess” and don’t limit yourself too much, but also don’t try to be everything to everyone and appeal to too broad an audience, or you’ll end up confusing everybody and capturing nobody’s attention or interest.

Main Blog Keywords

Now that you have a good idea of who you will be writing to, it’s time to identify the main keywords and keyword phrases you will want to associate with your blog. This will help search engines to connect your blog with your ideal readers.

Ideally, you will want to focus on keywords that have “low competition” and that have a reasonable number of people searching for these every month. Depending on your needs, you may also want to focus on keywords or keyword phrases in your industry that have some level of commercial viability and profitability.

You can identify the keywords with the above criteria using a powerful tool like the Power Suggest Keyword Research

For example, a keyword phase like “overseas adventure travel” has a whole lot more people searching for it every month (> 20,000 searches per month) than the keyword phrase “singles adventure travel“, which currently shows as getting less than 1,000 searches a month.

According to the Google keyword tool, the number of sites competing against one another for visitors searching for “singles adventure travel“, however, is significantly higher than sites trying to rank for a keyword phrase like “overseas adventure travel“. This may be because one keyword phrase relates to a specifically targeted audience (i.e. “Singles” looking for adventure travel), while the other is more generalized.

In terms of the commercial aspects of the keyword phrases themselves, you can find out this information from the Google Keyword Tool if you have a Google AdWords account. Typically, smart advertisers will advertise more frequently and pay more for keywords that are targeted towards a “buying” public, rather than people who are just browsing or researching products or services online.

For example, people who search online for the term “color printer” are typically not as ready to buy a color printer as people who search for “konica minolta magicolor 1600w review”, so if you plan to sell or review color printers on your site, you would want to aim for longer, more descriptive and more targeted keyword search terms (called “long tail keywords”), hopefully with a high amount of searches and low to medium competition.

It helps to have some highly-searched keywords in your blog posts. However, don’t spend too much time or “go crazy” doing keyword research for every post, especially when you are just starting out.

Start simple. Make a list of the top 5 keywords you would like your blog to rank well for in the search engines, make sure that these keywords get a decent number of searches per month and then use these keywords naturally and organically in your posts (i.e. Write for human readers, not search engine robots).

Once your blog starts to attract visitors, you can then study data like “actual” keyword searches used by visitors to find your site from your server logs and use this data to improve your keyword research.

Tip For Business Owners: Avoid using keywords that show extremely low to no monthly searches, or that has no commercial value. There’s no point ranking #1 in Google for a keyword that no one is interested in searching for. Also, if you type the keyword into Google and no one is advertising products for it (i.e. No Google ads show up), then that keyword most likely has no commercial value.

Blog Categories

Decide on specific areas within your niche that people might be interested in learning about and create a list of categories, or “topics” that you plan to blog about.

For example, if you run a travel agency, your categories could include topics such as: “business travel”, “luxury travel”, “exotic destinations”, “holiday packages”, “travel, accommodation”, “travel tips”, “cruises”, “air travel”, etc….

Aim to create an initial list of about 3 – 10 categories. You can always add more categories to your blog later.

Tip For Business Owners: WordPress allows you to create search engine-friendly URLs that include your categories as keywords, so keep this in mind when choosing category names …

Blog Post Keywords / Blog Post Ideas

Now that you have created a list of keywords and blog categories, the next step is to create a list of blog post ideas.

Take each of your keywords and create a blog post topic using that keyword. You can write a blog post about any of the following topics and more:

• Your products or services
• Your company and the people in it
• Your industry
• An event you have attended / plan to attend
• Customer tips
• Reseller training / customer service training information
• What area of your business could you educate prospects about to eliminate sales objections?
• What problem, could you help your customers solve?
• What service, problem or solution could you review to help prospects buy from you?
• What is the most common FAQ you get from customers or prospects?
• Etc…

In another blog post, we show you ways to never run out of ideas for creating blog posts.

For now, just write down 10 blog post ideas.

Blogging Schedule

Now that you have created a list of blog post ideas, the next step is to set up an initial blogging schedule. How often you blog is not as important as how consistently you do it.

Adding new content to your business blog on a regular basis is very important for building readership and for improving your search results. This is the step where you actively market and promote your business, and so it’s crucial that you create a habit of blogging about your business on a regular basis.

For example, start by making a commitment to add a new post each week or fortnight. Decide on a specific day of the week and the time of day that you will sit down to write your post. Allow 1-2 hours to create and publish (or schedule for publishing) each post.

Now, commit to making this into a regular habit. Monitor your results and if you need to, adjust your schedule accordingly. Remind yourself when you sit down to write your blog content that you are investing in your business, because you are working on your business, instead of just simply working in it.

We have added a couple of Blog Editorial Templates you can use to help you schedule your content creation …

Blog Editorial Calendar Template Overview Spreadsheet

Blog Editorial Calendar Template Details Spreadsheet

Download the above templates by clicking here: Blog Editorial Templates

Types Of Content To Publish

Once you have set up a schedule for creating content for your blog, the next step is to define what types of content you will actually create for your blog.

Do you plan to publish articles, videos, audios, interviews, slideshows, case studies, product reviews and comparisons, multimedia presentations, etc….?

Knowing what types of content you intend to create for your blog is useful, because this helps you understand what other tools and technologies you may need to purchase to create the content (e.g. Video screen capture software for videos and multimedia presentations, software for creating slide shows, etc….), as well as plan for other resources, such as the one discussed in the next step.

Blogging Responsibilities

The final step in our blog planning process is deciding who will be responsible for managing the various areas of your business blog.

For example, here are just some of the roles and responsibilities associated with running a successful blog:

• Deciding what content to publish
• Creating content (researching, writing, sourcing, outsourcing or creating graphic images, videos, audios, etc.)
• Editing content
• Publishing posts and pages
• Promoting the blog (search engine optimization, online advertising, social media, video marketing, etc….)

Who will handle all of the above areas of your blog? Depending on your business set up, it may be just one person doing it all, or a few people and perhaps some outsourced help.

Once you have assigned the responsibilities for creating and managing content on your blog and completed the planning process, you should have a very clear plan worked out for starting your business blog.

WordPress is huge and can sometimes be overwhelming about where to start. As you move on to the next Page, you will have a clearer picture of where to start and progress to building a professional WordPress Site