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Want to learn more about blogging for businesses? Register for our upcoming 15 minute Coffee Break webinar on Thursday, December, 17th at 11am, PST.

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Starting and maintaining an informative blog for your business can be one of the most rewarding, challenging, and productive marketing tools you can develop as a business owner. A blog is a great way to bring fresh, new content to your website, driving higher SEO for your online properties, as well as branding you and your business as an expert in your industry. If you want to drive clients to your business and build trust, start blogging.

Running a blog means keeping up with your industry and consistently delivering new content—a lot to ask if you’ve never posted content online. If you’re a beginning blogger, here are a few tips to help you get going.

Develop a blogging schedule

When it comes to creating new content, it’s imperative that you set up some sort of regular publishing calendar as well as set aside specific time to write. Make sure you are real with yourself about what you can and can’t do. If you know you’ll only have time for one post per week, set aside that time, and don’t skip.

To keep yourself on track, create a weekly content calendar. A simple spreadsheet is a great way to lay out your publishing schedule and makes it easy to collaborate if you have multiple blog writers in your company. Download our free blog schedule template or build your own—whatever you use, have a plan and stick to it!

Come up with blog topics

Beyond creating the content itself, one of the next most challenging parts of keeping a business blog is coming up with relevant, interesting subject matter to write about week after week. For me, ideas for blogs often come to mind randomly—never during any scheduled “blog writing” time.

Make sure you record these random inspirations! The beauty of our mobile devices is you have a great place to take notes at any time, wherever you are. Whether it’s a spreadsheet or a simple note file, I recommend keeping all of your blog ideas in one place. Download our free blog schedule template and check out the Topics sheet for an example of how to record and track your blog ideas.

Be enthused and interesting

Staying engaged as a writer can be difficult at times, as not all business topics are all that interesting. But, if you can press your enthusiasm into your writing, it will come through to your reader. Whether you’re writing a targeted how-to guide or a fun weekend read, make your content easy to consume, keep things interesting, and get your point across with as little fluff as possible.

Make sure to distribute

If you are going to take the time and effort to write a blog, make sure you do a good job at distributing the content. Here are a few things to keep in mind to maximize your reach:

• Make sure your content includes keywords and #hashtags aligned with your SEO strategy
  
• Don’t forget other SEO-related components, such as page meta titles and descriptions
  
• Share on social media
  
• Distribute through email marketing
  

Distributing your content across the web, and giving others the ability to like, comment, and share your information, goes a long way in developing a brand of industry expertise and a following of potential clients for your business.

Blogging is a great way to really humanize your business. It gives your target audience something to connect you and your industry with, and it allows you to communicate with your peers. It can be a challenge to get started and maintain a quality content marketing schedule, but you’ll quickly find that content creation gets easier the more you do it. Keep at it, and you’ll start to see the fruits of your labor: more business, industry respect, and a fantastic sense of accomplishment.

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Register for our upcoming 15 minute Coffee Break webinar on Thursday, December, 17th at 11am, PST where we’ll dive into more tips and technologies to help you build your blogging strategy!

Want to learn more about how Qebot can help you grow you business? Check us out at qebot.com.