For those who consider themselves technologically challenged, the idea of trying to start a blog can be intimidating. The misconception is that you practically need to be a programmer in order to effectively build and operate a blog. Modern software and hosting platforms, however, take a lot of the technical work out of blogging. As such, even small businesses can utilize blog marketing. Here is our checklist of things you need to do in order to start a blog.
- Pick your blogging platform. Now if you have an existing website you may not have much of a choice depending on how it is hosted, unless you are willing to migrate your site to another platform. If you are starting from scratch, we recommend WordPress as it is relatively easy to use set up and use, plus offers a lot in the way of flexibility.
- Research keywords and competition. SEO is all about appearing as close to the top of search results as possible. In order to do this, you need to target specific keywords that will bring you the most traffic then use those keywords in your content. Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool is a great way to get this information. Once you know what keyword you plan to use, check to see what the competition is like for those keywords, and eliminate the ones with a very high competition rate.
- Develop a plan for creating content. There is no point in starting a blog and only posting once every few months. Determine how much content you want to post per week and find a way to set aside the time to write this content. In order to make the process easier, you can write a weeks’ worth of posts in advance and then schedule them to come out for certain days.
If you need more advice on how to start a blog or if you are interested in having SevenAtoms get you started, then please give us a call at (925) 566-6969 or just stop by our contact page.
