For a businnes, a blog helps maintain its notoriety in its field. It therefore allows your business to create a more familiar bond with your audience. More specifically, the blog allows the company to:
- improve its image and to set it apart from the competition;
- promote its products / services;
- bring its website to life;
- manage the customer relationship, to gain their trust by communicating with them;
- retain customers;
- improve your community management strategy;
- improve the ranking of your site on search engines;
- drive traffic to your site.
Nonetheless, it's important that you prepare yourself when you think about embarking on this adventure. Here's some steps that can help you better prepare before you get started.
1. Determine your needs
The first step in creating a blog is to assess your needs. To get there, you need to ask yourself some questions. In particular, the purpose of your blog, the internal and external resources required. Also, what skills you need and what skills you have.
You also need to decide on your blogging platform. The most popular and easy to use are WordPress and Drupal.
With WordPress, remember that there are two variants: wordpress.com and wordpress.org. The most suitable for the needs of a professional blog is of course the second.
If you find yourself in trouble, hiring a web developer will be of great help and will save you time. After that, you will need to establish a plan for writing, publishing and promoting articles on your blog. In case you have the time and the skills, you can take care of it or delegate this task.
2. Determine your niche
In order to make sure that your blog is right for your audience, you need to choose what you will talk. For that, you need to choose your niche. Indeed, a niche brings together a set of people with common interests.
The advantage you have here is that you already know your customers, so identifying the target of your blog should be easier.
Also, the choice of your niche will allow you to know what type of content is suitable for your customers. Adopt the same tone of communication as with your clients, while maintaining your professionalism.
Quick tip for your blog:
The determination of your subjects should not be a repetition of your services since you already have pages that describe them. But that doesn't mean you should refrain from posting content about your business or other topics. The bottom line is that most of your posts meet the needs of your readers.
Therefore, your blog should provide value to your readers so that they always come back to your site.
3. Find the right collaborator
A collaborator will be of great help for you with your blog. An external person with a self-employed profile who will be responsible for writing articles or promoting them. For example, at 8P Design, we write different types of content for our clients according to their needs.
If you need one-off or long-term writers, freelance work platforms are also at your disposal. In our article entitled “Guide to integrating freelance in a business”, we provide you with some useful tips.
Finally, below are a few sites to find freelance web writers:
Freelancer.net
Editor.com
Upwork.com
And more ...
4. Create your editorial planning
The editorial planning or editorial calendar will simply structure your content ideas and avoid last minute publications.
Many entrepreneurs and online sites don't always think about it, but when you commit to producing content for an audience, it requires planning content well in advance.
This process will help you organize yourself and plan your communication strategy. The schedule can be monthly or quarterly. Ideally, plan at least 1 to 3 months in advance, it will always be a few weeks gained in advance so as not to be out of content.
In this 8P Design article, you can learn more about how to create such a calendar and a header template. This will let you know how many times you are going to post in a month.
5. Do a keyword research
Another very relevant step!
The success of your blog depends in part on the keywords you choose. Indeed, good SEO guarantees you more traffic and therefore more authority in your field. The research in this case is to find relevant keywords that will facilitate your positioning.
What is a relevant keyword?
Your keywords are relevant if they are the same as your readers' search engines or if they come close to their search intentions. There are several free and paid tips and tools online for finding leveraged keywords for your content.
Yoast estimates that a keyword research job, including your topic delineation and your writing plan, can take up to 40% of the time to write highly optimized content.
In addition, to perform this analysis, you can see what is doing well with your competition and build on the needs of your customers. To help you, you can call on an agency specializing in the matter such as 8P Design.
To conclude,
In short, the best time to create a business blog that meets your professionalism and the information needs of your targets is now!
First, identify your needs, whether with your teams or your external talents. Next, determine your niche for communicating with the right target. If the editorial planning that follows this step is heavy for you, delegate or outsource!
Finally, you have the keyword research for SEO strategy. You are free to start there as well. Just remember that creating your blog is the best way to communicate about your products and services while creating a link with your customers. Yep, the blog is not dead! And he won't die anytime soon.
For all your professional blog creation needs, call our agency, we take care of everything.