How to Start a Blog for Content Marketing Purposes

Thinking about starting a blog to help drive traffic to your business using content marketing? Blogging is an ideal method of content marketing for both small and large online businesses as it is a highly scalable source of traffic. It also allows you to demonstrate your business’ personality and forge deep and lasting connections with your customers that promote return visits.

This is because it uses a relaxed and conversational tone and creates the perception of added value. The content of your business blog is something that adds to your customer’s experience of your site and transforms your business into a living, breathing entity that they can relate to.

Understanding Your Niche

So how do you actually start a blog though? The first step is to know and understand your niche very well. What are the most common problems that people face in your niche? Can you offer them helpful solutions that link back to your business? Blogging is all about creating a dialogue between your business and a potential customer, answering their question or providing them with some helpful information, and encouraging them to make a purchase from you or keep your products in mind in the future.

It’s also intended to bring in lots of new visitors from search engines though, and this is where a blog really shines. Search traffic is the holy grail for a lot of businesses as it’s a near-limitless pool of potential new sales and can help to dramatically grow your existing business as well as shore up your performance for the future.

If you want to catch this search traffic, you need to be able to frame your information in a way that search engines can understand its context and link it to search terms. This is where search engine optimization (SEO) becomes important.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO is crucial to content marketing. Without it, no one will likely ever see your content because search engines won’t rank it highly. If you want to start a blog for your business, you need to study SEO practices too. This will give you the foundation you need to write content that appeals to search engines and your visitors.

There are a lot of factors that go into a successful SEO approach, but the most relevant to begin with is to understand how to perform keyword and competition analysis. There are many tools to do this, such as Google’s own AdWords Keyword Planner. This research is very important because it tells you first and foremost whether the content you want to write has an audience, but also how you can best approach that audience.

Context is everything and you need to understand your search traffic to write a blog that appeals to your intended audience based on what they are actually searching for.

“You may check out this recent post to learn more about keyword research.”

Blog Platforms and Hosting

If you already have an online business, you likely also have a web developer and hosting for your website. The hosting of your blog may be as simple as expanding the service you already have or adding the blog to your existing service if it can handle the load. If this isn’t possible, you need to look into changing the way you host your website to allow for this expansion and future growth potential.

The platform you choose to use can also be of great importance. While you can definitely create a blog from scratch and attach it to your website, using a dedicated blogging platform like WordPress.org is usually a better option because it is quicker and easier to set up while still being free to use. Templates and plugins that are included with platforms like this make it easy to implement a blog with minimal coding experience as much of the web architecture side of things is automated for you.

Many paid blogging platforms exist and are designed to be very simple for novices with no web design or development experience to be able to set up an attractive and functional blog. If you don’t have web development skills or a team to perform this task, you may find it easier to use one of these services but keep in mind that they do charge a monthly fee to use the service.

Maintaining a Blog

The last step to starting a blog is to have a plan in place for how you want to operate the blog and help it to grow over time. A blog is only a viable content marketing strategy if you maintain it and invest in it. If you start a blog and find yourself stuck with no ideas about how to proceed well into the future, your blog will fail.

The best way to handle this is to ask yourself these questions before you start the blog in the first place. How do you want to see your blog grow? Write a content plan for several months of content and then stick to it because it will guide you and provide you with all the blog post outlines that you need to grow your audience over time. You should never start a blog until you have this plan in place and your plan should always stay many steps ahead of the actual implementation.

The benefits of blogging for your business are numerous but nothing is ever achieved if you don’t put in the time and effort. Investing in your blog and seeing it grow will help to bring in large amounts of search traffic to your online business. This leads to increased profits and also benefits your customers too by providing a lot of added value. That’s why blogging is one of the best options for your content marketing strategy.

To your success

Kirk