Blogging is a great way to generate revenue for yourself or your business. You know you need to start a blog, but how exactly do you go about doing it?
Starting a blog can be daunting. You have to figure out what it is you will write, your blogging strategy, the blog posting frequency, and other important items like search engine optimization (SEO), media types, and calls to action (CTA).
Depending on how you approach this, starting a blog can be simple or it can be complex. You can start the blog just to get started, or do a lot of prep work to make sure it’s right. No matter your approach, we’re here to help.
Here are 8 tips for starting a blog:
1. Set Aside Enough Time For Content Planning
Content planning is by far the most important aspect of starting a successful blog. When planning, you are allotting time to sit and think about what your blog should be about, your target audience, the goals of the content, and potential topic ideas.
At a minimum, content planning or your content marketing strategy should include:
- Goal setting
- Keyword research
- Competitor research
- Topic brainstorming
To start, be sure you have a goal in mind that makes sense for your business goals. Do you want to start a blog just because you should? What is the ultimate goal for your blog? Do you want to generate more traffic? Do you need to focus on brand awareness first before trying to target competitive keywords? Remember that simply starting a blog is better than not having one at all. Eventually, you’ll want to write down goals for the blog.
Keywords and competitor research will help you position your content strategy. This is wholeheartedly based on your goal. If you are looking for brand awareness, you shouldn’t target a really competitive keyword. Instead, hit low-hanging fruit. And by low-hanging fruit, we mean keywords with a decent monthly search volume but a low competition score.
And finally, do a little topic brainstorming. This is where you are coming up with topics that you or your content marketing team are going to write. Remember that you can outsource most of this work too to a content marketing team like okwrite.
2. Create A Checklist For Posting
One of the best things you can do for starting your blog is to create a checklist.
A checklist for posting (and writing and strategy) can keep you motivated and on track for completing all of the goals that you had in mind for your business blog.
Before you publish a blog post, create checklists for:
- Content research and planning sessions
- Setting aside time to write
- Your posting and distribution calendar
Common things on your content writing checklist should include:
- Coming up with an SEO Title
- Creating your meta description
- Coming up with tags and alt descriptions that are SEO friendly
- Featured image and images in text
- Finalizing your preferred blog template
- Infographics or visuals for your blog
- Distribution processes to social media channels
3. Hire A Content Writing Team To Help You Start
Chances are you’ve tried to start a blog multiple times and, for one reason or another, the blog has failed.
Maybe you got too busy or perhaps you didn’t even know where to start. If this is you (or you anticipate it will be), then the smartest thing to do is to hire a content writing team.
A professional content writing team can:
- Dedicate writers to your project to maintain consistent tone and voice within your blogs
- Dedicate a content marketing team to keyword planning and topic suggestion
- Post your blog content, even on a schedule that you determine
- Post other types of content too, like images and infographics on your blog
- Recommend SEO and user experience (UX) changes to improve your blog page
- Automate other parts of your content marketing strategy, like newsletters and web copy
Content marketing teams can be very powerful allies. Not only do they make starting a blog far easier, but they also keep you accountable to the blog and your content marketing goals.
4. Stay Consistent
No matter how you approach it, whether you are hiring a content team or writing it yourself, stay consistent with your approach.
If you know that you need to post 2 times a week for organic traffic, do that. If you can’t do it yourself, be smart about the process and hire out.
5. Assess Your Blog Analytics
Every so often, be sure to check in with your blog analytics.
You want to make sure that you’re hitting the right goals, and checking on analytics can help you see where your traffic is coming from, keywords that are hitting the mark, keywords that aren’t, and potential keyword opportunities that you should target.
Your content marketing team can also help with making sense of the analytics.
6. Don’t Overwhelm Yourself When Just Starting
As you probably know, it can be overwhelming when you are just starting something. Keep the expectations and workload lower so that you don’t overwhelm yourself.
If you are finding that even content planning is difficult, then remember that you can seek help, like a content marketing managed service.
Hire support or lower your workload so that you keep the blog going and don’t give up before it gets off the ground.
7. Start With The Bare Minimum That You Can Do
This may sound like the opposite of what most marketing gurus are telling you these days, but it’s true. You can only do what you can do, nothing more.
If you have a workload that requires more time than is available in your schedule, then it’ll fail. Don’t set yourself up for failure.
Instead, start with the bare minimum that you know you can do. Maybe this is goal setting and outsourcing a team for support.
Or perhaps its topic planning and then visiting an SEO team for keyword research. Be smart about your time management.
8. But Don’t Beat Yourself Up
Blogging, like many things, can be difficult even in the best of times.
Online web hosting is finicky, your words don’t always come out the way they should, and your blog won’t always generate the ideal amount of traffic.
But this is okay!
Starting a blog is also a learning process, so you want to give yourself time to learn this process and fail every so often.
Don’t beat yourself up during this process, especially on things you can’t control. Learn from them and keep trucking!
If you’re ready to start a blog, congratulations! Reach out to okwrite if you need any help!
