5 Easy Steps to Build a Blog for Your Business

By now you have probably heard about blogs and somewhat of what they entail. What you may not know is how it can help your business. Many businesses have found that blogs are a great way to express your company's opinions, keep your company in your customers' minds, and create discussion among your readers. Blogs are a social media that can enhance your company's marketing capabilities.

Blogs can attract a larger audience to your business. When used in combination with other social media strategies, like Twitter and LinkedIn, visitors who are attracted to your products or services may be able to find your website more easily. Most blogs are constructed to offer a high degree of search engine access, creating even more chances for consumers to come across your business.

We have compiled five easy steps to start building your own blog. Read them below and start writing!


1. Set Goals for your Blog
First, you need to pick out what you are blogging about. If you do not determine what you are blogging about, your blog will soon die. Find your blog's niche and then go from there. Choose a topic you have a lot to talk about, pick something that interests you, and pick something that will further your career.

Then, you need to set goals for yourself and determine what you are trying to accomplish with your blog. Ask yourself questions like: Do I want to start a blog to complement my business, products, and services? For notoriety? To open doors to other opportunities? To help others? After you have answered these questions, develop a mission statement outlining what the blog is meant to achieve and how it will benefit your company as well as your readers.

Next, you need to create an interesting title, one that will spark curiosity in its viewers and intrigue them to click the link and read on. Humor is always the best way to catch a viewer's eye, but your title does not have to be funny as long as it remains alluring to readers. Consider the title an extension of your company's branding.

2. Decide on the Platform You Will Host Your Blog on
You will have to choose if you want your blog to be on a hosted or non-hosted platform. There are pros and cons to each. More serious bloggers use non-hosted blogs, while some less experienced bloggers use hosted blogs. With a hosted platform like Blogger or Type Pad, your blog will be housed on the platform’s server. Choose this option if you do not have a website, or if you are unsure of how to host the blog on your own website. Also, if you are a beginner, hosted blogs are definitely easier to use. On the other hand, these types of blogs usually look less professional.

A non-hosted blog, like Wordpress, is housed on your server. Use this option if you or someone in your company can easily determine how to host a blog on your website. Non-hosted blogs do give you more control over the way your blog works, but you should be comfortable with HTML, CSS, and PHP.

3. Customize Your Blog
Once you have your blog set up, you will want to begin customizing it. You definitely want your blog to be unique and stand out from other blogs in both voice and style. If you are experienced with HTML and CSS, you can probably build your own template, or build off other available templates. However, if you are a beginner, you will want to first start with a template that appeals to you.

Once you have a template, start changing it to your own specifications. You can add a new banner at the top of the page. This could be your company's logo. Change the color scheme if you would like to. And add some widgets, but not too many because you don't want to drag a reader's attention away from your content. Add your company's Twitter feed or a custom RSS newsfeed to a sidebar. And definitely add photos. Whether the pictures are of you, your business, or pictures that pertain to the content of your blog, they will catch a reader's eye and draw them in. If you are using Wordpress, install some plugins for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), social networking, and plugins that enhance the performance of the blog.

4. Add Web Analytics to Your Blog
Who is reading your blog? What are the most popular posts? How are visitors finding your blog? Web analytics can show you this. When web analytics are installed on your blog, you can see which posts are your most popular, and then write more like them to keep people coming back to your website.

You can also analyze referring links - the links on other websites that people click on to get to yours. Figure out which sites are linking to yours, and then build a relationship with those sites so they will continue to link to your site. You can also see what visitors are typing into search engines to get to your site. If there are some keyword searches that show up many times, focus on those. If there are some keywords that don't see in the results, focus on them and write more posts about them.

5. Start Writing
To start off, make an interesting first post about you and your blog. You want to catch the reader's attention, so tell a little bit about what makes your company and your blog unique and why this blog will interest them.

Once you have the first post done, start to focus on writing actual content for your blog. This may be the biggest challenge. Make sure you are writing about something that intrigues you, that way you will have more to say and will avoid the common blogger dread of getting "burned out." In order to stay true to your audience, research and be sure about your facts to maintain your blog's credibility. However, your content does not have to remain heavy and packed with pure information. Write in your own voice and provide interesting thoughts and opinions. Your readers should enjoy reading your blog, find value in it, and want to stay tuned to see what is to come.

Finally, socialize with other bloggers. Begin by fraternizing with bloggers like you. Be yourself but be warned not to give out any personal data, passwords, or even your analytics report.