Why Blogging Matters for Your Small Business and How to Get Started

This post is the fourth of a five-part series on Inbound Marketing campaigns and the different pieces that go into them.

Deciding to start a blog may seem overwhelming, but once you get organized, it is simply a checklist of tasks that result in an online space full of information for your customers to visit again and again. Planning, producing, and promoting a blog is more approachable than you think. If you are feeling lost, here is a rundown of how to start a successful blog.

Benefits of Blogging

Simply put, blogging makes you visible. Blogging regularly allows your website to be found and trusted. The more people that visit your website to read your blog, the more likely it is to be found again in the future and the more credibility you’ll build over time. Each time you create relevant, informative, quality content you are boosting your authority on a particular subject matter. Your readers will come to appreciate your expertise and continue to visit your website and better yet, search engines will recognize this and continue to boost your website in relevant search results. The more you blog, the more you attract readers and the more traffic is driven to your site.

A Moment of Pedantry

You’ll hear a lot of people say they are writing “a blog.” However, it’s good to know that your blog is the collection of articles on your website, the entire thing, like a newspaper. When you sit down to write, you’re writing a blog post or a blog entry, the single article on your blog.

Planning a Blog Schedule

Planning your blog schedule is the first step in blogging. Having a schedule and list of relevant ideas will keep you accountable and will inspire you to keep writing. Start by thinking about your buyer personas. Coming from your buyer personas’ frame of reference, think about why they would visit your blog, what information they want and need, and what search terms they would use to find it.

Jot down a list of relevant topics or angles for new blogs and begin filling in your schedule. Plan to write at least one blog post per week if you can. To stay organized, think of a few broad topics or areas of interests that your customers would benefit from. For example, if you’re a digital marketing expert, maybe your topics include Blogging, SEO, Lead generation, and Branding. Under each topic, come up with several ideas for individual blog posts. You might also take a list of FAQs from customers and turn each one into a blog post. Now arrange these blog post ideas on your calendar.

When Planning, Ensure Your Post Ideas Are:

• Keyword focused
• Helpful and relevant
• Offering a solution
• Refined vs. broad

 Producing

Producing content is certainly the most time-consuming step in the process, but this is where your voice and writing style shines. Write a clear outline of how your post will progress. Include a clear question or problem, credible information about the problem, and steps to resolve it. Offer your readers solutions to confirm why they visited your website in the first place.

You also want to make sure you format your post in a way that makes it easy to read. If no one is reading your posts, what is the point? Always be sure to break up the body of your post with headings, subheadings, bullet points and always include images and multimedia elements where possible.

You must add a call to action at the end of your post. A call to action directs readers to their next move. Maybe it’s a link to other relevant posts or premium content, a link to your contact page, or a sign-up form for your email list, whatever you’d like your reader to do.

Finally, there are a few steps that ensure your post will be more easily seen in search results:

• Fill out backend search engine optimization elements (there are plugins and extensions for this with your website).
• Rename images.
• Define keywords. 

Before you begin writing a years’ worth of content, it is helpful to create a separate document that details step-by-step what should be included in each blog post. This document acts as a quality control checklist to make sure you don’t miss any important steps. Here is an example.

Blog Post Quality Control Checklist

• Include your keyword in the title of the blog post
• Organically mention the keyword and long-tail keywords throughout the content.
• Include the keyword in the image name and caption on your post.
• Format the post to be visually appealing and easy to digest.
• Include images and multimedia. 
• Add outbound and inbound links. 
• End with a call to action. 

Promoting

Once your blog entry is written, edited, and published, it’s time to promote it. Promoting your post does not mean linking to it on various social platforms and calling it a day. Blog post promotion works best if you diversify your approach. LinkedIn users are in a different mindset than those on Instagram, even when it’s the same individual. Think about which customers use each networking platform and how to best speak to them on said platforms. Present your blog posts as helpful solutions to each community. Specifically, craft your updates to speak to each community individually to ensure increased engagement.

Promote Your Posts Via:

• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Instagram
• Pinterest
• MeetUp
• Cross promotion on other blogs
• Author bio links on other websites
• In person
• Email signature

Once you have a pile of content written, browse the Joomlashack and explore which extensions and plugins can optimize your quality material and streamline your blog process even more. Joomla plugins can improve your search engine optimization, help you organize all your content into a single calendar, ensure your websites’ forms are easy to fill out, integrate all your multimedia elements seamlessly, and so much more.

No matter how your approach to blogging differs from the techniques presented here, always aim for quality over quantity. Gear your efforts toward offering solutions for your customers and use your buyer personas to get into that mindset. If you consistently offer relevant information and helpful solutions for your audience, you will retain readers and begin to see more website traffic.

For more tips on inbound marketing, explore our entire series.