You have read, heard, and witnessed plenty of businesses taking advantage of blogging for their businesses. You know it’s something beneficial to your small business, but you are wondering where to start.
If this is you, don’t worry; we will share a step-by-step guide to help you create a blog for your small business.
Just keep reading.
According to HubSpot, 53 percent of online marketers put blogging as their top content marketing strategy. Besides, businesses that are blogging are said to have 434% more indexed pages. Other studies suggest that B2B marketers that blog attain 67% more leads and 55% more traffic than their counterparts. Most writer services use blogging to drive traffic to their websites.
So you can see how beneficial blogging is for your small business. But then, where do you start, especially if you are new to these things.
Worry not because it’s not as hard as you may think to get started.
Blogging can make your small business found by people worldwide, bring traffic to your website, make you become an authority in your niche, and increase sales.
Given that more than 409 million people read blog posts every month, you are not doing any favor to your business if you are not blogging.
But since you have seen how influential blogging is to your small business, the next part is to know how to create the blog and ultimately start blogging.
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The first step that you don’t want to get it wrong is the selection of your blogging platform. You must be cautious not to make the wrong choice here because you might end up finding the whole blogging process complicated and monotonous.
A blogging platform is where your blog is housed. Where you will be writing, editing and publishing posts from.
These days there are many different blogging platforms to choose from including Wix, WordPress Blogger, Joomla, Weebly, Drupal, etc. However, WordPress is a flexible and easy-to-use platform.
WordPress is free but you will have to pay for hosting and domain registration, although there are registrars that offer free domain registration such as Bluehost.
The reason why most people use WordPress and we are recommending it is that it does not have restrictions like the other platforms.
Not all themes available on WordPress are good for your small business. Choose a good theme so that you can adjust the look and feel of your blog easily. Check from their Theme Directory and choose a premium theme.
A good theme is one that is:
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After choosing a blogging platform and picking a good theme for your small business blog, the third thing is to choose a good domain name and register it.
A domain name is a URL that people enter into the address bar of their browsers when searching for information on the internet. It looks like relevance.com.
It is also important to make sure your domain name is memorable, not too long, and can relate to your business.
Bluehost, Namecheap, GoDaddy are some of the popular domain registrars out there. Some will allow you to register your domain free and some registrars will require you to pay. The cost of registering a domain name isn’t costly. Around $15 per year and the price can get lower if you are paying for more than one year up-front.
It’s better to choose a .com domain instead of .biz, .net, and others. Just make sure it’s easy to remember and unique.
The WordPress platform is free, but you will need to pay for your blog hosting. A host is where your important information (articles, videos, images, infographics, etc.) are housed. Its cost is a bit higher than that of domain registration.
There are also plenty of web hosting companies out there. You need to be careful not to pick a web host that will give you headaches in the future.
There are plenty of factors to consider when choosing a web host such as customer support, uptime, etc.
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Creating a content strategy is perhaps the main reason you decided to create a business blog: To educate your readers, interact with them, engage them, establish authority in your niche by sharing content that helps that achieve something that’s giving them sleepless nights.
Once your blog is up and running and you have implemented an effective content strategy, it’s time to get into the writing phase.
But wait. Do you just get started writing everything that comes to your mind?
This is where keyword research comes in.
Well, keyword research is a long topic to talk about. However, at this stage, you need to search for phrases that people are using to search for information on the internet.
For instance, some people were searching how to make money on Instagram and entered “how to earn money on Instagram” or another example, people like you who were searching for a step-by-step guide to creating a small business blog, probably you entered “how to create a small business blog”.
The idea is to target those phrase people are using to search for information on the internet
Happy Blogging!!!
