A Business Blog – Where Do I Start?

The new hot commodity is a blog for your small business so you’ve decided you must have one.

Before you begin think about it long term.

• Where do you think the blog is headed?
• What is the objective? Do you want it to be found by the search engines for specific terms?
• How often will you post?
• Who will the audience be?
• What will it look like a year from now?
• Five years from now?

If you think you may have this blog for a long time, consider hosting it with your own domain name. Blogger provides you with a free domain name (name.blogspot.com), or the option of ftp to your own domain. If, at some point in time in the future you want to move the blog and you’ve been using the blogspot name, you won’t be able to take it with you. This means that all of the people who have your blog in their reader will “lose” you. It also means that you’ll have to start from ground zero with the search engines. That’s not a good thing. You can get hosting starting at $5 a month — not a huge expense. And well worth it to save you headaches down the road.

You’ll also want to make sure you build a community with your blog. To do that, you’ll want to have a mailing list service so you can capture emails of visitors who are interested in your content. I use Aweber and absolutely love it. Also, a real handy tool to ensure you make the most of your email list is the List Building for Bloggers book. I love this book. It can help you grow your list quickly and keep your community engaged.

Do some digging before you jump.

Take a look at the small business blog directory for some great examples of small business blogs. It’s full of great ideas and topics to get you started.

Once you’re ready to go, what are you going to write about? Make sure you’ve brainstormed blog topic ideas so you don’t run into the inevitable writer’s block. You can always start with what you’ve written before.

• Do you have a newsletter? Look through your archive and “refresh” some of those old topics as a blog posting.
• How about your website? Do you have content you can turn into a blog topic?
• Do you participate in online forums or discussion lists? Find some advice you gave to someone there and turn it into a blog post.
• Get ideas from others. You can always use private label rights (PLR) content. This is content your purchase (inexpensively) that you can use as is or rewrite and call it your own.

This should get you started. Remember that small business blogging is a long term activity. Be ready.

Got additional suggestions? Leave me a comment and we’ll talk about them.