Step 1: Set Up Your Blog
When you’re starting a business blog, the most important thing to do is to set up a blog.
Blogs are an easy and cost-effective way to get your content out there and into the hands of potential customers.
But to reap the full benefits of a business blog, you need to take the time to plan out how you’re going to use it.
This will help you to ensure that you make the most of the platform and engage with your audience – both now and in the future.
When you’ve finished planning out your blog, take some time to look at other blogs in your industry to see how they’re using the platform.
This will help you plan out how you want to use yours – whether you want to keep it simple or you want to add a bit more flair.
Step 2: Find Your Niche
When you’ve got a few months of blogging under your belt, it’s time to take a step back and evaluate what you’ve accomplished.
This is a great time to look at all the content you’ve published and see how it measures up against what you originally set out to do.
If your main purpose for creating the blog was to get lots of traffic and make money, then you need to take some time to evaluate whether or not this has been successful.
In some cases, a business blog can be a money pit.
You’ll expend lots of time and effort to get the content out there, and although you might see some initial results, it’s not necessarily money well-spent.
However, if your main purpose was to establish yourself as an expert in your industry, then taking the time to find your niche and establish yourself as an expert in this area will hopefully pay off in the long run.
Step 3: Create content consistently
Once you’ve found your niche, you’ll want to stick with it and create content on a regular basis.
The key to establishing yourself as an expert in your industry is to put out quality content regularly – at least once or twice a week.
If you want to make money from a blog, you’ll want to develop a business that can scale and allow you to eventually earn a full-time living off of it.
To do this, you’ll want to create content that is valuable and of good quality.
You can then use this content to attract and engage with potential customers.
The more you put out there, the more you’ll be rewarded.
Step 4: Generate Long-Tail Keywords
With all the focus on social media and the proliferation of platforms like Twitter, people are forgetting about the traditional SEO techniques that got them to the top of Google searches in the first place.
Back in the day, people used to use keywords in the content of their website and related blog posts to “trigger” the engine to find these posts when a potential customer used a search engine to find the website or blog.
These days, content marketers spend a lot of time developing long-tail keywords and searching for these terms when they’re writing blog posts or executing SEO campaigns.
So, if you want your blog to be found when a potential customer enters a search term into the engine, you’ll want to make sure that you develop content around these keywords and tie these terms into the content as often as possible.
Step 5: Measure The Results Of Your Efforts
The only way to truly know if what you’re doing is paying off is by measuring the results of your efforts.
To do this, you’ll want to use a tool like Google Analytics to track the number of people arriving at your site from different internet sources – like social media, a blog post, or a website.
With this data, you can then track the effect that different marketing tactics have on your site traffic – like a paid ad on social media or a blog post compared to a tweet with a link to your site.
By keeping track of these results, you’ll be able to measure the effectiveness of your efforts and determine whether or not what you’re doing is paying off.
Just remember: this doesn’t mean that what you’re doing today will produce the results you’re looking for tomorrow. This is a long-term strategic effort that will take months and sometimes even years to fully measure.
Step 6: Expand Your Reach
When you’ve found a way to generate consistent and profitable traffic from different platforms, it’s time to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.
This is when you’ll want to expand your reach and start attracting potential customers that would’ve never given you a thought.
The easiest and most effective way to do this is to create content for other platforms that are similar to yours.
If you’ve got a blog about fashion, for example, you might want to create a page on your website about style and fashion, and then use platforms like Google Docs, SlideShare, or Pinterest to pull together digital presentations about style and fashion.
These are just a few of the tactics content marketers use to bring in more traffic and make more money, but the important takeaway is to make the most of what you’ve got.
It might not be easy, but as long as you keep the above steps in mind, you’ll be able to make the most of your online marketing efforts – and eventually, you’ll wonder why you didn’t start a blog earlier!