7 Steps To Help You Start Your Own Small Business Blog
If you’re feeling little stuck getting your small business blog started, follow these helpful steps.
In the previous post, we talked about the essential planning you want to do before you launch your new small business blog. Now let’s talk about some helpful initial steps to get your new blog started off on the right track. It will make your life easier.
- Essential questions: Be sure to answer the three essential questions covered in the previous post. Keep these fundamentals in clear focus at every step and turn.
- Purpose of your blog
- What is your blog about
- Who is your target audience
- Research 5 blogs in your industry, niche or business. Chances are, you’re not the first business to establish a blog in your market segment. Discover and leverage what is already working, and learn from others that are already publishing a blog. Imitate what works well and what appeals to you. And improve on the weak aspects where you know you could do better.
- How to locate relevant blogs. Follow this simple technique to easily identify successful and interesting blogs in your market segment. Here are 4 directories and sites you can use to locate blogs of interest:
- Alltop.com – this is a comprehensive directory of hand picked blogs on thousands of subjects, markets and industries. Simply key in a search term that targets your business, market, or subject area and visit the blogs. Check out the Alltop video tutorial to familiarize yourself with the site. (We’ll cover what to look for in the blogs that you find in the next step).
- Technorati.com – considered the master blog index of over 100 million blogs, with advanced search functions. You can easily identify the busiest and most popular blogs that have established authority in their subject areas.
- Google Blog Search – Google has a useful blog index and search function. Key in a subject as a search term and Google will return thousands of blogs that match your area of interest.
- Blogs.com – hand reviewed blogs, the best of the best on a many subjects.
- Alltop.com – this is a comprehensive directory of hand picked blogs on thousands of subjects, markets and industries. Simply key in a search term that targets your business, market, or subject area and visit the blogs. Check out the Alltop video tutorial to familiarize yourself with the site. (We’ll cover what to look for in the blogs that you find in the next step).
- Look for the most active blogs. Unfortunately, many businesses start blogs and then don’t attend to these blogs. Effectively, nothing is going on at these blogs, and they sit idle month after month. Obviously, you don’t want to emulate these unsuccessful blogs. Look for busy, active blogs and see what they are doing. These are the blogs you want to learn from and imitate. Look for the following characteristics to help you identify the best blogs to learn from.
- Frequent posts – at least 2 to 3 per week. This indicates the blog owner is actively engaged in the blog. This is the same type of activity you want to accomplish.
- Decent archive – a new blog won’t have an established archive of posts from prior months. You don’t have to rule out new blogs if they are on track, but older, more well established blogs will have a nice history of consistent posts month after month that you can review.
- On topic – look for blogs that stick to the topic and theme. More general blogs can be all over the map. These less focused blogs make it much more difficult to establish authority and community. Look for tightly focused blogs that stick to the subject and them. This is the approach you want to imitate.
- Active community – look for engagement and activity from the readership and community. Active engagement takes the form of many and frequent comments on most of the posts. This is a strong indication of a thriving blog. Definitely the model you want to imitate. It means the blog publisher understands their audience, knows how to reach their audience and is successful in engaging their audience.
- Participate on the 5 blogs. In the previous step, you’ve identified 5 blogs in your market segment. Don’t just passively read these blogs. You want to actively participate on these blogs. Find relevant posts and subjects that interest you. Leave comments on these posts. Jump in and become part of the conversation. This accomplishes several important things.
- You begin to establish an identity in the community within your market
- You can practice your writing on other business blogs and begin to get the feel. The comments that you contribute on these other blogs can be very similar in format, content and feel to the blog posts that you will write on your own business blog. Keep the comments relevant, to the point, informal and interesting. This is the perfect opportunity to get your feet wet practicing on a blog other than your own. By the way, go ahead and leave a comment on this post (scroll down below to the end of the post). See, you can start practicing right now!
- You help create relevant activity on these other blogs. These blog owners will appreciate your participation and may actually return the favor in your direction further down the road as you get your own blog up and running.
- Incidentally, later on, as you establish your own blog, you can continue to leverage this community presence that you have already created and actually create backlinks to your own business blog in the comments that you continue to post on other blogs in your market segment. This becomes essential off-page SEO that we’ll discuss further in upcoming posts. Start paving the way now.
- Five problems that your customers need to solve. As you participate in the conversation on other business blogs in your industry, business, or market segment, listen for the pain points and problems that your target customers are trying to solve. Make a list of these five problems or pain points. This will become the subject matter for your first series of posts on your new business blog. Start thinking about this now. You can gather the research and feedback ahead of actually launching your own blog. What better approach than to listen directly to your market.
- Get started now. There’s nothing gained until you take some action. Don’t wait, get started now. Remember, a “less than perfect small business blog” is far better than “no blog at all”. And your blog will need some critical mass to gain momentum. You need to start building up the posts and content, and start drawing the readership and get some community interaction going. Every business has to start in the same place with their blog … “not enough content”, “not enough readers”, and “not enough comments and interaction”. There’s nothing unique or special about these first steps, and thousands of successful blogs solve these early startup challenges without difficulty. Don’t let this hold you up. The longer you wait to get started, the longer you delay in moving your blog through the startup and launch phase, and on to successful daily results that drive more customers, sales and profits to your business.
What Are You Waiting For?
I promise you, your new blog won’t be perfect. You will make plenty of mistakes. And practice will make your blog better and more successful. So start practicing today. I’ve given you the perfect approach to start practicing on other business blogs in your market segment as you get your own blog started up. How simple is that?
Next step, create your own small business blog. Stay tuned, we’ll give you plenty of tips, techniques and strategies to help you get up and running quickly and easily!
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Comments
Just discovered Alltop and I have to say it’s a rich source of info. Nice article.
If you don’t have a blog or some regularly updated news feed nowadays, you’re not even in business. A blog lets you control your brand, makes it easy for new customers to find you, and makes it easy for existing customers to interact with you.
Not having a blog is like giving money away.
@Rich,
Yes, Alltop is a great resource. Glad you found the information here helpful!
@CharlieHipHop
Agree, the “interaction” that a blog encourages and building up a community for your business through your online presence is key.
Thanks for the comments …
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