From driving more visitors to your website to improving customer loyalty, you’ve probably heard all about the benefits of blogging. But getting started can feel daunting. Where do you begin?
Here are five steps to help you get started blogging.
1. Identify your audience
If you try to appeal to everyone, you’ll excite no one. Think carefully about who the audience for your blog will be. You may find that it’s a subset of your target market or, if your customers are other businesses, people with a specific job title.
2. Choose a topic area
Just as you cannot speak to everyone, you cannot be all things to all people.
At Jottful, for example, we make websites for small businesses and self-employed business owners. We could have limited our blog to providing information about websites. Or we could have expanded it to address all kinds of challenges small businesses face. We chose to focus on how to market a small business — and to do so by providing practical ideas, education, and inspiration.
💡 WEBSITE INSIGHT: Sticking to a topic area will help your website visitors understand who you are and what your product or service is all about. This will help you attract the right target audience.
3. Create a calendar
Committing yourself to a publishing schedule does two things:
- Teaches your audience when to expect content from you (and consistency is important in marketing)
- Gets you into a writing rhythm, so you’re more likely to keep it going
4. Find an editor
Few of us can author interesting, succinct, and grammatically-correct prose without an editor. Whether it’s a colleague, a friend, or an editor you hire through Jottful Community, get a second set of eyes on your content before you publish it.
5. Source great images
Decide upfront what kind of images you’ll use to entice readers to click through to your content and to illustrate your points. Find an image style that both appeals to your audience and reinforces your brand.
Will you use photos? Hand-drawn graphics? Animated gifs?
