Your blog should inspire people to sign up for your email newsletter list, which, in turn, feeds traffic to your blog.
Generate publicity
As previously mentioned, business bloggers establish authority. When you demonstrate you know your niche, you’ll get asked for interviews frequently.
Give your brand a voice
A blog is your pulpit, your publication, your journal—the place where you talk about whatever you choose, however you choose.
Exchange ideas
Blogs obliterate the wall that once stood between a brand and its customers. Encourage interaction, comments, and feedback.
Get (and stay) customer focused
By blogging, you’ll learn how to speak in your customers’ terms and grow more in touch with your audience’s wants and needs.
Increase focus
A subtle addendum to the point above: blogging consistently forces you to define who you are trying to reach and why.
Discover
You are going to learn a lot about yourself and the world around you. It comes with being a writer.
Start with a basic publishing plan
As a business blogger, you become an online publisher. Your starting point is to document a concise plan to address the fundamental why, who, what, and where questions.
Why will you have a business blog?
Establish your goals by considering the ideas above and create a short list that addresses your specific objectives.
Who’s the blog for?
Create a persona (or multiple personas) to describe a prototype reader. Include both demographic and psychographic details. The goal is to develop a clear understanding of what pushes the reader’s buttons, intellectually and emotionally.
What will the blog offer?
How will your content satisfy the needs of its readers?
Where will it be published?
Your personal brand blog should not be published only offsite, that is, on platforms such as Blogger.com, WordPress.com, Tumblr, Medium, LinkedIn, etc. You may want to take advantage of these channels; however, your interests are best served by hosting a blog on your own domain.
After considering each issue above, document a brief mission statement to define what you will publish, for whom, and the specific value of the content.
Develop a strategic editorial plan
Your business blog needs to focus on specific topics but be broad enough to allow you to perpetually create new and useful content. Let’s get into some practical approaches for identifying topics and extracting ways to use them to publish relevant content regularly.
ID the questions prospects ask
You need to discover your prospects’ interests, concerns, and challenges and interpret them as questions. What would they type in a search query?
Your prospect’s questions might be uncovered in chat, email, phone calls, blog commentary, etc. Tune in closely to these channels and document the questions you’re able to gather.
Also, spend time on the social media channels your prospects use. Look for questions and conversations about business challenges. Make and maintain a list of them. You’re going to answer them on your blog.
Swipe ideas
Get in the habit of reading the content published in your niche: in blogs, social media, and books. When you discover something promising, document it. Of course, you don’t want to plagiarize headlines or copy, but you want great ideas to inspire yours. Create a “swipe file” of inspiring ideas.
Monitor your market
Stay plugged into what’s going on in your field. You can keep tabs on industry news with alerts, feeds, and media monitoring tools.
Extend ideas
Don’t let a big idea be a singular idea. Use mind mapping apps, a whiteboard, flip chart, sticky notes, or whatever you prefer to brainstorm subtopics and ideas that relate to the core idea and build a bigger story.
Ask your readers
Ask your readers how you can publish content that will help them succeed. You can do this via email invitations to surveys, with on-site survey tools, through groups and forums, and, yes, in conversation.
Log your ideas
When you start blogging regularly, creative ideas will come at you constantly. You can’t get to them all immediately. Archive them. Whether it’s with a notepad, computer, cloud-based app, or recorder, summarize the idea to the point where it will make good sense when you return to it.
Publish an interesting mix
I believe a great blog delivers variety. This section offers ideas to vary the content of your blog to make it interesting to more people.
How to posts—The “how to” post is the most common style because it’s so well received. Deliver valuable insights on how to accomplish something more effectively, and you’re bound to produce magnetic posts.
List posts—List posts work. Create them often.
Resources posts—Resources posts aim to enlighten readers by listing helpful books, blogs, shows, products, services, apps, or any type of resource.
Roundups—A roundup is a resource post, but instead of pointing readers to resources, you pull the resources into your story. A popular example is a post where an expert panel is asked
