With such an active blogosphere, it’s crucial to know the basics of starting a blog for your business. While blogs have become an important part of business, especially for online businesses, a poorly executed blog is actually worse than no blog at all.

With this in mind, I thought it would be good to go over the A, B, and C basics of starting a blog for your business.

A. Choose a Blogging Platform

The first step of creating a blog for your business is probably the most important you’ll make. The blogging platform will act as your repository for articles, your community for consumers and followers, and central access point for people discovering your business for the first time … so it better be good! First impressions are everything in the business world, so the last thing you want from your blog is to give your visitor a bad impression – for more on this, read How to Lose a Customer in 4 Seconds.

There are two things to keep in mind when first starting a blog for your business:

1. Free Hosting vs. Self-Hosting – Because every website and blog needs a domain name – also known as a web address – you’ll need to decide whether to buy your own for an annual fee or shack up with one of the major blogging systems and create a free sub-domain. This might all sound pretty demanding, but what it comes to is this: one is free, the other is not. If you’re unsure, maybe seeing the domains below will help clarify the difference.

Self-hosted: www.yourblog.com
Hosted for free: www.yourblog.wordpress.com

As you can see, the self-hosted blog will bear your blog name along with the classic www and .com, .org, .net, etc, whereas the hosted blog will borrow the blogging system’s domain so to speak. If you’re after professionalism, consider the self-hosted. It’s clean, clear, and less distracting.

However, this brings us to the next point – if you plan on choosing to host your blog yourself, you’ll need to purchase hosting if you haven’t already. Hosting is the behind the scenes service that allows you to publish a website. If you’re adding a blog to your existing website, then you’re choice of blogging system should provide you with instruction to include the blog on the domain you already own.

2. Template – Again, the blogosphere is hopping these days, so you’ll want to evaluate the importance of a one-of-a-kind blog template. While Blogging systems such as Blogger and TypePad offer a few free templates for the use of their bloggers, it’s easy to be lost in the static when you share the template with thousands of fellow bloggers. You can do two things to overcome this challenge: Hire a professional graphic designer to design a template for your blogging system or use one of the thousands of free and premium WordPress templates made available through open source community contribution.

Again, it’s all about first impressions. Once you know how system you want to use, how you want to host your blog, and how you want it to look, you can move on to the next step.

B. What Type of Content to Write

There are two types of blogs you should consider when starting a blog for your business.

1. Personal – Write whatever interests you at the moment. This is the original and most popular type of blog, partly because it allows people to reflect on life on a personal level, express themselves, and communicate.

2. Professional – Write about a specific topic or theme. This type has grown in popularity exponentially due to the ability to publish and find content from authoritative sources – being experts, professionals, consultants, and more. The types of blogs will focus on any given topic, including everything from the future of business to the art of the ant farm.

I think the best business blogs sit somewhere in between the Journal and Professional types. It’s important to have a focus of some sort but it’s also good to create a voice that visitors can identify with as a person. It’s good to create a place where visitors can depend on you for valuable, authoritative information, but it’s also good to be sporadic and allow the world to affect you and your blog.

So while it’s tempting to simply go for the latter, I urge you to mix it up a bit once you get your blog off to a strong start by allowing your blog to reflect your personal thoughts or feelings regarding your trade, relevant news, or anything that might interest your readers. If you’re still not sure about the whole thing, consider posting one “CEO” article per week, two weeks, or whatever. Articles from CEOs tend to attract interest from readers and add a personal flavor to the image of the company.

Overall, aim for somewhere in between the personal and professional blog and you’ll have an attractive place for consumers to visit again and again. Speaking of which, this brings us to our next point …

C. Know Your Goal

Starting a blog for your business with no goal in mind is simply setting out to blog for no reason. As a business owner, you know that you need to use your time efficiently in order to work toward your ultimate goal – profit in most cases.

So let us assume your business goal is to make money.

Before you can really increase your profits through the use of a blog, you need to build traffic to your blog. So the first thing you should focus on is creating a lot of original content – articles, interviews, case studies, lists, and anything else that might be interesting to your readers / consumers. This content will attract people from the vast reaches of the web. Think of this step as the belief that “if you build it, they will come.”

Consider using Google Analytics to gauge your sites stats, including visitors per day, page views, and other important factors. Once you’ve reached a fair amount of regular visitors, consider showcasing a product or service somewhere on the sidebar of your blog. Another place to draw business might be at the foot of each post – like an email signature. Be careful when promoting your business products and services on your blog though, blog readers are very wary of advertising on blogs.

Once you’ve created a nice flow of content, attracted a nice readership, and let that readership know about your products or services, you’ll be well on your way to gaining business you wouldn’t have had without the blog.

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