For many people, the first step they take is to research and find the correct blog software and then jump in and start creating their blog (or get someone else to do it).
But I believe this isn't the right place to start with your blog.
First you need to decide what kind of content you're going to provide via your fabulous new business blog.
There are 3 things you need to do in order to figure out what kinds of valuable information you want to write your blog posts on.
The first thing is to be clear on the following questions:
o your target group: what do they need and what kind of information do they like?
o your objective: what are you trying to achieve with your blog?
o your level of involvement: are you going to be the only one making posts or will you have guest bloggers?
o your money and time resources: how much time and money do you have to spend on it?
o your level of interactivity: how interactive are you going to be - run contests, have comments, show videos and post audio clips?
The second things you need to do is make sure that the content on your blog is important to your target group or niche.
Like a website or any other marketing communications you do, your blog needs to be something that your target group finds valuable and has need of. So you need to choose content that you know your prospects and clients want.
There are several ways to find this out:
- research the needs of your target market
- do a survey
- get feedback from your current clients and customers
- get clear on what problem your target audience wants solved and the benefits you offer
The third thing is to decide which of these two categories you fall into:
a) those that provide information by writing about it
b) those that provide information by linking to it - other blogs, news sources, other media, YouTube, etc.
Many blogs and bloggers combine a mixture of the two - it all depends on how you want to structure your blog content. As well, do you want to be known as the expert on a subject or the person who is an expert on where to find the experts?
So before you even start looking at blog software and figuring out how your blog is going to look, spend time figuring out what kind of content your blog is going to provide on an ongoing basis.
Then hav'at'er picking those colours and templates!
