Beginners Only: How To Start Your Small Business Blog Today?

Beginners Only: How To Start Your Small Business Blog Today?

If you’re starting a company blog from scratch, here are a few pointers you need to keep in mind.

Decide on a Blogging Platform

There are many different blogging sites available and you need to make sure you use the right one as per your specific needs. Do proper research on various platforms like restrictions in terms of design, functionality and SEO before zeroing in on one.

Register a Domain Name

Once you’ve decided on a blogging platform, the next step is to choose a domain name. This will be the URL used to access your website. It is better to choose a domain name that ends with ‘.com’. Also, make sure it’s easy to remember and spell.

Purchase Web Hosting

Web hosting is a service that allows you to post a website or web page onto the internet. There are many companies that provide this service; some of the more popular ones are InMotion, DreamHost, 1&1, and HostGator.

Customize the Blog

When you first start out, a number of customization tasks have to be performed. The first thing to do is to modify your blog design to match your company website and branding.

Customization involves modifying the CSS, JavaScript, graphics and a few database elements.

Create a Content Plan

You will need a detailed plan about how you want to go about this blogging business to keep it from falling apart within a few weeks. First off, you need to establish what is it that you want to accomplish with this blog.

You will also need to figure out the voice of your blog, whether it will be casual or authoritative. Plan out how many hours you will invest into blogging each day and how often you will publish new posts. This is also the time to figure out what your call to action is going to be.

Make It Useful

Though your company blog is supposed to promote your business, do not make it obvious to your readers.

Do NOT be sale-sy.

Being genuinely helpful to your readers through useful tips and links to other resources on the internet will be more beneficial to you than constantly selling yourself. If your blog is a good source of information for your industry, other bloggers and website owners will want to link to it, making both your blog and business more popular.

Use Relevant Keywords

You must have heard your web design company mention SEO many times. SEO, or search engine optimization is all about trying to rank higher in search engines. Using relevant keyword is a big part of it.

Make sure to strategically place keywords related to your content, brand and company in the title, headings, tags and throughout the post.

Update Often

When you start getting visitors on your blog, they will expect it to be updated regularly to provide new, useful content. Long gaps between blog posts will fail to get you a devoted readership. Shorter, more frequent updates will prove a lot more beneficial to you than longer, less frequent ones.

Stick to It

Even though you will start with no audience, no network and no experience, you will get better and more effective with time and effort.

You will need to spend hours on your blog every day for months before it gets anywhere but it is important to keep at it. An abandoned blog will give an unfavorable impression to readers about your company.

Blogging is fairly simple and easy to start, but to reap rewards out of it you will have to put in consistent efforts and time.