or many, blogging conjures up fears of being chained to one's computer spending countless hours on content that no one will read. But it doesn't have to be that way. From an online journal at 1,000 words per post to a simple 140-character Twitter feed, blogging has taken center stage largely because of how useful it has proven itself to be in almost all areas of business. Blogging can also be profitable according to research by Technorati, an Internet search engine for searching blogs, which reports that for blogs with 100,000 or more unique monthly visitors revenue averages about $75,000 annually. As a companion to my popular series on Blogging, here is a step-by-step guide to getting your blog from zero to thousands of readers.
Note: This guide doesn't touch on micro-blogging, the type of short blog posts that can be found on Twitter or on other social networking status updates. For more information on how these blogs can be helpful, read 5 Ways to Actually Make Money on Twitter.
Step 1: Determine why you are blogging.
In my post "To Blog or Not to Blog", I outlined the four reasons why a website exists to aid a business: 1) to build a brand, 2) generate leads, 3) generate direct sales, or 4) generate advertising revenue. A blog can also support any one of these goals. Which goals are you trying to accomplish with your company website and which are you trying to accomplish with your blog?
Define what success looks like? If your goal is branding, what awareness studies will you do? If your goal is advertising revenue, how much do you hope to make? How many readers and page views do you need? For lead generation, how many phone calls or e-mails do you want to get from your blog? These goals can change, but it is important to put a stake in the ground and then measure against it. Also, take a look at How Twitter Helps a CEO Run His Company for a peek at how micro-blogging (Twitter) helped this CEO gain feedback about his company.
Step 2: Determine the "concept" of your blog.
What is the niche you will write about? Who will care? Once you know WHY you are blogging, you can think about WHAT to blog about. You may go back and forth between Step 1 and Step 2 for a few rounds before making your final decision. Some people start with an idea for a blog but when they put it to the test of actually generating revenue the idea changes. Step 1 and Step 2 must work in tandem and you have to know that there is an audience for what you have to say.
Your blog concept can be very narrow, attracting a small but passionate niche of readers and few, if any, competitors, or it can focus broadly on a topic that is widely popular but has a lot of competition. Much of your decision may rely on the resources available to you and ultimately your goals. Do you have a large marketing budget, staff and resources for your blog? Do you already have access to a large audience of readers (thousands to tens of thousands of readers)? Do you have a long period of time (2-3 years) over which you can consistently devote 5-10 hours per week of writing and marketing efforts to slowly build your blog audience and subscriber base? If you answered no to all of these questions you may want to consider focusing narrowly since creating a very unique voice or speaking on a unique topic is a much easier and faster way to break through the noise than writing about the same thing that everyone else writes about.
Step 3: Will your blog be separate or integrated into your site?
This is actually two questions:
1. Will your blog be under the same domain name as your site? The benefit of this is that you will get more (search engine optimization) SEO value out of the content of your blog. Some advise putting your blog under a different domain and linking generously between the two sites in order to gain "link popularity." But link popularity is not necessarily the most important element of SEO (nor will it help you much to have many links between two sites neither of which is itself highly ranked). Having a larger amount of keyword-rich content on your site is usually far more important. Having your blog hosted under the same domain name as your site will add all of your blog content to your site content when search engines determine where to place your site in the rankings. For more about Search Engine Optimization read this detailed guide or my blog post on the topic.
2. Will your blog exist within the same software as your site? If your website is built within a Content Management System (which is usually a very good idea because updating is made easier) it is typically most useful to have your blog constructed within that same CMS. These programs, including Drupal, Joomla and WordPress, will typically allow users to build both a website and a blog. The benefit here is that you only have ONE login to access and update all of the content of your site. Plus, there's only ONE system to learn. See my post titled "Build Your Blog" for a lot more detail on different options for building your blog, including free vs. paid, self-hosted vs. blogging-company hosted, WordPress.org vs. WordPress.com,
