How To Get Started With Blogging For Your Business [Contributed Blog]

June 21, 2019 - 8 minutes read - Blogging, Contributed Posts

Blogging is something that can be incredibly powerful for your business when done right. But the problem with it is that it’s often seen as something quite overwhelming by business owners because they don’t really know where to start and they feel like having to constantly post is going to take so much time.

First of all, the great thing about blogging is that you can do it in a way that entirely fits your business and you don’t have to be posting all the time. Quality and consistency are far more important than volume, so don’t worry about that.

The next thing is, getting the blog set up and working for you. It may take a little bit of effort but there’s plenty of help out there and it’s really not as crazy as it seems. So, once you do that, then it’s just about having a plan in place to keep the blog flowing, and that’s what we’re going to share with you below.

Know your audience:

Hopefully, by this stage in your business, you already know who your audience is and what kinds of things they’re looking for in order to help them. But if you don’t, before you even get started with any kind of blogging or content creation, it’s really important that you start this right away.

The reason this is so important is that if you’re going to spend your time creating content, it has to be content that is useful to those reading it. And if you’re not sure who exactly your audience is and what kind of content they’re going to find useful, it’s really not going to pay off. And you’re basically, creating content for nothing.

Identify your topics:

Once you have a better understanding of who your audience is and the kind of content they want to see, it’s a good idea to really take some time and map out some content topics. The best way to do this is to use a planner tool such as a spreadsheet, something like Trello, or even just a piece of paper and then start writing down which categories you cover for your audience.

For example, maybe you’re a business coach, so your categories could be marketing and mindset.

Or you could be the owner of a career blog and could write about topics such as putting together a CV or the benefits of getting a Christian MBA degree.

When you have your categories listed, you need to populate those categories with topics, and you could base this on 1 post per week over a month, so you would be looking at 2 posts for each category for the month covering different topics related to these categories.

Make a plan:

When you have your content ideas written down, you’ll want to start making a more solid plan for how this content is going to be published and when. For example, open up Google Calendar, and start adding in dates on the calendar for when each post should go live.

Now, you have a clear overview of what your month will look like in terms of your content creation. When you see it mapped out like this, it really doesn’t seem as overwhelming anymore.

Create a schedule:

The next step is actually scheduling out your content by putting it into a scheduling tool where the content will be posted automatically according to the dates you choose.

There are many tools out there you can use for this, such as CoSchedule, Buffer, PostPlanner, and lots of others, so although they’re all pretty similar, you should test a few of them to find one that works for you.

When it comes to scheduling your content, it keeps you more organized. This means that you’ll be consistent and know exactly when each piece is supposed to go out.

You can also decide in advance if you’re going to write some or all of your content ahead of time by using a method called content batching, or if you prefer just to get a reminder a few days before that it’s time to create a blog post to go out by a certain date.

There’s no right or wrong way to do this. So, it’s just a case of finding the solution that works best for you.

Automate:

If you’ve decided to go for the batching option, one of the main benefits of this is that you’ll be able to automate the publishing of your content. So, for example, if you’ve created all your blog posts ahead of time for the month, all you have to do is upload that content into your chosen scheduler and then choose the dates and time to publish it and the rest will be taken care of.

This saves you a lot of time in your business and means that you have content going out consistently that’s marketing your business for you so that you can be focused on other things.

Repurpose:

One of the biggest benefits of creating blog posts for your business is that you can use these blogs for other types of content by repurposing them.

For example, you can use them as emails, turn them into videos and podcasts, or even take small snippets of them that you’ll turn into social media posts for platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

You can also create other digital products like ebooks and courses, or you can create graphics such as image quotes so that your content is being seen by as many people as possible without you having to constantly create lots of new stuff all the time.

As you can see, setting up a blog will require a little work. But once it’s done, it’s more about the management of it, which is actually easy. And if you want to be marketing your business in a way that brings results, then blogging is definitely something you should be considering anyway.

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Tags: Blog, Blogging, content marketing strategy, scheduling content, social media marketing