How Do I Get My Blog Started?

The use of blogs has changed the way we approach Marketing on the Internet, they are an excellent way to get your message on the Internet, but it is also true that many blogs fail. In this section we look at how to get started with your blog, keep your blog organised and some tips and advice on how to keep it interesting and how to attract visitors.  If you are unsure what a blog actually is follow this link What is a blog, it will make reading this section much clearer.

Blogging the Advantages

• Low-cost method of boosting your profile with potential customers.
• Improving your websites ranking in organic search results.
• Acts as a hub to merge tools from many different types of Social Media e.g. Podcasting, Bookmarking, Video, etc.

Blogging the Disadvantages

• Time-consuming.
• Difficult to measure Return On Investment.
• Not a direct sales method.

How to set up a Blog – Organised Blogging

A blog is an excellent way to create awareness and promote your ideas or products, it can also be the centre of all your social media campaign. It does help to be organised when creating your blog and this will help for the long-term and ensure success.

Plan your Content

When you first begin your blog, unless you already have a popular online presence and are known in your subject area, no-one will know who you are, what you are qualified in or what you do. By creating a post talking about the blog and about yourself this will help new visitors.

Create and Make the Blog Interesting

Know your Audience

It is essential that you know your audience, you need to be aware of what the people you are writing for want and what will keep them interested.

Research:

• The competition.
• Industry news.
• The comments on competitors blogs and your own if you already have a blog.
• The searches visitors have conducted on your site.
• Check trends Yahoo/Google, can you relate latest news to one of your posts.
• If you have a blog ask about the content of a post.

The blog cannot be directly about you or your business, people will get bored, visitors want to gain something by visiting your site. An example could be a vodka retailer that produces recipes for cocktails (including their vodka) is much more likely to gain interest than a retailer who talks solely about their vodka and staff parties. In 5 years time that Vodka recipe could still be of use and gain organic search traffic.

Set Publishing Goals

It’s no secret many blogs fail, one major reason for this is lack of content. Create a schedule for when you will create and upload a post and use a calendar or a simple spreadsheet to stay organised. Try and make the posts relevant around a topic and try to stagger publishing posts, don’t publish them all at the same time (aim for around 3-5 posts a week). Keep a notebook handy to jot down ideas for posts, and/or create a folder on your computer with the same category structure as your blog and store ideas and or potential posts in this folder.

How do I start my own Blog? – Blog technology

Once you have your content you need somewhere to post your articles. For people with limited technical skills and if you would like to begin straight away Blogger.com and WordPress.com are two services which offer free blogging which is very straight forward. It is possible to sign up straight away. Be aware there are lots of blogging services available if you don’t like these.

Content Management Systems

If you have the ability to use a Content Management System, WordPress and Drupal are free and very powerful systems. Both have communities of developers that create new software and programs regularly which allow website owners to create a custom blog using various technologies for free. WordPress is more suited for blogging and has an amazing array of online support. For more on WordPress.org. Drupal can be used for blogging but is more suited for website creation and it helps to know a little coding to get the best from Drupal. For more on Drupal.

How to increase traffic to a blog – Reusing Previous Posts

If you begin by writing 3-5  posts each week, within a relatively short space of time you will have a healthy amount of posts which may get archived and have nowhere for visitors to access (apart from the search engines).  To get round this problem and make sure your content is accessible there are a number of methods you can use.

• Related Posts, this can be a set of links at the end of an article which links to older and current articles.
• Recommended Posts, this can be a set of links from the editor in the navigation bar.
• Popular posts, this can be a set of links in the navigation bar and controlled by the editor or automatically depending on number of views or votes.
• Other groups of older links could include Best of the week, month, year, or even a retro column e.g. best of 2007.
• A link in a new article can bring back to life the older article and help it’s visibility in the Search Engines.
• My favourite – update the old article add some new additions and repost, this will bring more links to the older article building on the ones it already has and it may still be highly relevant.