Blogging can be intimidating for someone who hasn’t done it in the past or grown up in the age where everyone has a personal blog. It is, however, critical that business owners and marketers ‘ blog for business .’ Putting pen to paper or more appropriately, putting fingers to your keyboard is the biggest challenge for most people. So let’s talk about how to get started.
1. If you’re hesitant to put your voice out there for fear of being critiqued, start small. Go to blogs in your industry and start reading. Reading is the easiest way to get started. See what others are talking about, review the comments. Place a few relevant comments on other blogs to get a feel for what it’s like to be out in the blogosphere.
2. Blogging doesn’t have to be technical. Setting up a blog for your business is as easy as setting up a sub-domain or a sub-directory of your main website. If you have an IT team, this will take them a matter of minutes. If not, it’s still a relatively easy exercise. Depending upon where you host the site (i.e. Network Solutions, GoDaddy), their support department should have detailed instructions on how to set-up a sub-domain . There are also inbound marketing software packages that have blog software included.
3. Determine who your audience is going to be and why you are blogging. Think about what you are trying to accomplish with a blog. Is your objective to entertain, educate or just drive visibility to your company/industry? Write these personas down. You may think you’ve thought of everything, but you haven’t. If you had to give a 30 second pitch on all of the people you were writing for, could you? Craft your articles based on the personas you have outlined. This will help you target your audience and solid blog content.
4. Figuring out what to write about when getting started is a snap. Review old email to find common questions that leads or customers have asked about. Chances are you already have quite a bit of content in your email. Drop it into your blog and do a little editing based on how you’ve defined your audience and BOOM… you have your first article. Do this until you feel comfortable drafting new content. If you don’t have information like this available, go to other blogs and take your own spin on controversial or interesting posts.
5. Post! Seth Godin is one of those rare big thinkers and he has produced several best selling books . One of the most interesting points he makes is that you cannot wait for every piece of something to be perfect. You must produce work. Produce it. Get feedback. Tinker with it and then produce more work. If you wait for the perfect topic, the perfect title, the perfect content, you will never get anything out the door. If you never get anything out the door, you’ll never get any better at blogging. Don’t put something on your blog with spelling and grammar mistakes, but just start writing and posting. It’s the fastest way to get better, become a thought-leader in your space, drive traffic and ultimately inbound links.
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