Amy Olivieri, Constant Contact
Regional Development Director
Blogs are an increasingly valuable resource for small businesses. They play an important role in improving your website SEO, generating better results from your email marketing, and boosting engagement on your social networks. For businesses that are serious about creating great content, having a blog is more important today than ever before.
However, the reality is that starting (or restarting) a blog isn’t always as simple as just wanting to do it. For many people, overcoming the anxiety of getting started is the hardest part of the entire process. If you’re serious about getting started, here are some things to consider:
What is your goal?
Before you start writing, have a good idea of what you want this blog to do for your business. Even more importantly, consider what benefits your blog will bring to the people who are reading it. Identify your goals from the start and let that guide the rest of your decisions.
Who is your audience?
What you decide to talk about on your blog will depend entirely on who you’re writing it for. Who are the people who will be reading your blog? What type of knowledge can you share with them? What are the questions they need answered? Identify your target audience before coming up with topic ideas.
What topics will your blog focus on?
Every blog is built on certain “cornerstone” topics that spring from a number of key elements — your audience, your industry, and the community in which you work. By establishing the topics to focus on, you’ll make better decisions about what ends up on your blog. You’ll be able to build a community around your blog and increase the chances of having readers referring other people to it. Putting your content in front of a wider audience will also boost your presence on search engines like Google.
How often will you post?
As with everything you’re already doing to market your business online, frequency needs to be an important consideration when starting your blog. Try to do too much, too early, and you risk getting overwhelmed or burnt out by the blogging experience. However, post too infrequently and it could be difficult to build a meaningful audience.
Here’s a good rule of thumb: Commit to doing at least one post a week for your first few months of blogging. Look at your calendar and set hard deadlines for when you want your posts to go up. These don’t all have to be groundbreaking pieces of online literature. Something as simple as a photo and a few words can go a long way towards letting your audiences know you’re serious about staying active. From there, you can make more decisions down the road about whether or not you should be posting more frequently.
What type of content do you want to create?
One of the biggest misconceptions people have about blogs is that a certain level of writing expertise is required to create one; but the fact is, for a lot of people, writing isn’t something that comes easily nor is it something they particularly enjoy doing. For those people, incorporating other types of content, like photos and videos, may be a good alternative.
You don’t have to be a talented writer to create great content. In reality, great content is all about answering the questions your audience has. So think about these questions and write out the answers or simply record yourself answering the questions. Then transcribe it or use a dictation tool to turn your voice into text.
How will your blog fit into your other marketing efforts?
Chances are, you’ve already been creating content for quite some time, whether it’s coming up with information for your latest email or figuring out what to post on Facebook or Twitter. Having a blog should make those efforts easier not more difficult. If you commit to writing one blog post a week for an entire month, you’ll have four valuable pieces of content to fuel your online marketing.
Start now! Overcome the anxiety of getting going.
Okay, so you know what you need to do. Now it’s time to do it! Don’t be afraid to start small. For a lot of people, using that first post to introduce your blog takes a lot of stress out of getting started.
Amy E. Olivieri is the Regional Development Director at Constant Contact. You can reach her by phone at (713) 401-2841, by email at aolivieri@constantcontact.com , or visit her on the Web at http://www.constantcontact.com/amy-olivieriwww.constantcontact.com/amy-olivieri .
