Start a New Blog to Promote Your Business

These days, it seems like everybody has a blog where they write about something. Whatever your hobby, interest or favourite sports team, you can find countless people investing time in writing about it to share with the world. Of course, writing a blog isn’t just about having a forum to discuss things you like, it is also a powerful medium for getting people’s attention. If you run a business and would like to harness the power of blogging to get more traffic, publicise what you are doing, engage with potential new customers and create shareable content that can be used in your social media marketing, it is probably easier than you think. Here, we take a look at the basics of how to start a new blog for your business.

The Technical Stuff

While what makes a blog a success or a failure mostly comes down to the content it has on it, you do need a good basic website to put that content on. One of the first things to do is choose a web host. This will be the company you use to host the site and deal with all the server side management. You can get free hosting from sites like WordPress, but this is not really a good choice for business or commercial sites. Instead, choose a reputable host that gives you good options for managing your site, such as Umbeehosting.net or an equivalent – this will give you a professional look and take all of the hassle out of keeping your site up and running.

Content

Planning your blog makes coming up with good content much easier. If you keep a rolling list of ideas for posts, some of which should be easy things like lists you could write that would be relevant to your field, then you won’t feel as much under pressure when the time comes to write something. There are lots of apps and services to help making your blogging easier, and to help you share your content when it is live. It is a good idea to have a business Twitter account and Facebook page too, to help you do this. Other social networks like LinkedIn can also be an asset.

Your content needs to be of a very high standard, because it helps reinforce your brand. You need very good written English (or the language you are working in), and you need to have well thought out topics, and accurate facts. If you don’t have the time to do this or don’t have the writing skills, it is usually better to hire a freelance writer to create content for you. This is not that expensive, and can make all the difference because it takes the stress out of creating content and ensures everything you post is of a high enough standard to properly represent your brand.

Starting a blog can take very little time, and can have great rewards in terms of the visibility of your company. It is fast becoming something that no small business should do without!