Blogging for a small business isn’t easy. Luckily, you came here and found me, and I love giving info away for free. So, if you’re trying to learn how to start a blog for your business successfully, you’ll need four key ingredients.

It’ll only take three minutes, so get out your notebook, and let’s get it done!

1) Get your branding on lock first

I know you're keen to dive in and start churning out content, but your blog will never do anything for you if you don't have your brand fundamentals on lock. It's just random content for content's sake when it could be the top of your sales funnel or a powerful inbound marketing tool.

Fundamentals like mission, values, and tone of voice, guide how you talk to your readers and the topics you write about. It's worth working on this because everything you do and say as your business comes right back to it.

So, if you're starting or don't quite have the fundamentals locked in yet, get on it! You can’t blog without it.

2) Content plan

Next up, we need a content plan. This could range from something as simple as a list of topics with deadlines or as thorough as a colour-coded Excel spreadsheet. Choose a method that suits your business and your planning style but — by god — make a damn plan.

The most common way I plan client content is quarterly, with at least one blog post a week covering the gamut of brand-relevant topics over that month. You should factor in the following…

Seasonality
Upcoming campaigns and promotions
Your keyword strategy
Topics around your values and mission
Content that excites, helps, and engages

By sitting down to plan properly, you can make sure your blog is working as hard as poss!

3) Post length and optimisation

I make my client blog posts anything between 500 to 1,000 words. General consensus seems to be that there is no ideal length where search is concerned, so I suggest starting with 500 words and then starting to experiment, always keeping an eye on your analytics to see which length your customers read most (pay particular attention to page dwell time!).

Stick a primary keyword in the meta title, meta description, image name, H1, and body copy. It's also good to include a mix of relevant internal links to products or blog posts and external links to verify statistics or additional information or resources 😎

4) Build a pipeline so you're never caught off guard

This tip is super helpful for people who struggle to build blogging time into their work schedule or don’t always remember to post. Your best bet is to get a month’s worth of blog posts under your belt before you start pushing them live, so you’re always working a month ahead of yourself.

Use scheduling tools in your CMS to automatically push posts live and don't forget to schedule promotional social media posts, too. You can also promote your newest posts in email newsletters, just to make sure no one misses ‘em!

Still overwhelmed? Hire me to take care of it for you — I can create content plans based on your branding and then write and schedule it all for you. No problem!

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