How to Set Up a Business Blog

Although the word “blogging” is associated with personal websites in the digital world, building a business blog actually has a number of different advantages.  Not only can business blogs be an incredibly useful tool in branding your business as an authority within your industry, they can also help you to engage visitors and turn them into repeat customers.

Today, we’ll look at how business blogs work in more depth, as well as cover the steps you need to take to add one to your own website.  Let’s get started!

The first step in launching a business blog is installing blog platform software on your website.  Although you could simply designate a static HTML page as your business blog and update it regularly with new content, this isn’t a recommended solution.  Blog platform software is uniquely coded to manage frequent updates and provides a number of search engine optimization benefits that occur apart from standard HTML pages.

But knowing to use blogging-specific software is only half the battle – the next step is to choose the one that’s right for your website.  By far, the most popular blogging platform is WordPress, which can be easily installed and customized to match the look and feel of your website.  As an added bonus, uploading content and managing posts through the WordPress dashboard is easy enough for even beginning webmasters to handle.

However, WordPress isn’t the only blogging software out there that can be used to create a business blog on your website.  Movable Type, Joomla, Drupal, Expression Engine and BlogEngine.net are all viable alternatives, so you’ll want to do some research into each of these platforms before deciding which blogging software is right for your business.

Once you have a blogging platform picked out, the next step is to install it on your website in order to start building your business blog.  Depending on the way your hosting is set up, this could be as simple as running a script and designating the specific directory on which you’d like your site to be built (for example, http://www.yoursite.com/blog/, with “blog” as your chosen directory).  If you aren’t technologically savvy – or if the process is more complicated based on the type of hosting your site runs on – you can always outsource this process to a qualified web developer.

Congratulations – at this point in the process, you should have your very own business blog up and running!  Now it’s time to design your blog and update it with fun and informative content…

After your blogging software is installed, you’ll want to customize the look and feel of your business blog.  If you’ve chosen to go with the WordPress platform, this is done through the use of “themes” – aka, template files that can be added to quickly and easily change the look of the default installation.  The WordPress directory offers tons of free themes to choose from, although you can also create your own custom theme using tools like Artisteer or hire a graphic designer to create a theme if you have something unique in mind.

As far as choosing a theme direction goes, most website strategy experts recommend coming up with a blogging design that mimics elements of your homepage, whether through the use of similar colors, fonts or graphics.  This will help to ensure a cohesive theme to your site and will eliminate the cognitive dissonance that can disrupt readers’ attention when they land on a blog that looks significantly different from its home page.

Keep in mind that one of the major advantages to installing a blogging platform on your site to run your business blog is that you can change its entire look and feel by simply uploading a new theme.  Don’t get too hung up on making sure that everything is perfect from the get go – remember that you can always make changes and improvements as you go along.

Now that you’ve chosen a design theme to move forward with, it’s time to start adding content.  There are a few different types of blog posts that you’ll want to consider adding to your publishing schedule:

Newsworthy Content – In late 2011, Google released a major “Freshness” update with the goal of providing up-to-date results for specific topics.  Basically, for certain search queries – like those related to conferences, major events or other time-sensitive occurrences – the search results follow a new algorithm which prioritizes timely content over articles that would otherwise rank well according to traditional SEO.

Because of this – and because of the potential for your business blog to brand you as an authority in your industry – it’s a good idea to feature many articles on your blog that are related to high priority industry news.  For example, if a new product or service is released in your niche, weighing in on it could help your site to get noticed in the Google SERPs faster than it would through traditional SEO.

Evergreen Content – “Evergreen” content is referred to this way because it contains information that will always be useful to your website visitors.  For example, if you run a website in the fashion industry, certain trends will come and go, but articles on topics like “dressing your figure” or “budget shopping techniques” will always appeal to your readers.

For best results, try to structure evergreen content around good long tail keywords in your niche – that is, keywords that have consistent search volume and a low number of competing pages.  As your evergreen articles get shared around the web, these back links will help your articles to maintain high positions in the search results pages, ensuring that even more traffic finds its way back to your site.

Personal Content – One of the other advantages of running a business blog is that it lets your readers see “the man (or woman) behind the mask.”  When you run an internet business, you aren’t able to connect with customers the way you can in a traditional offline store.  This often prevents the loyalty and associations that people have with their favorite offline retailers from developing with online merchants.

A business blog lets you remedy this situation by sharing elements of your personal life or personal opinions with your readers.  Obviously, your business blog isn’t the best place to post on the great meal you had for dinner, but by carefully referencing pieces of your family life or personal philosophy can help readers form a more personal connection with you and your business.

When it comes to balancing these types of blog posts, there’s no exact formula to follow to determine what percentage of different types of posts will be appropriate.  If you work in a fast-paced industry where things change quickly, you may want to dedicate more of your posts to newsworthy content.  On the other hand, if you work in personal development or personal finance, sharing more information about your life through personal content could be valuable.

To identify the ratio that’s right for you, track how visitors respond to specific posts on your site.  If you get more comments or social shares on one type of post over another, that could be an indication that your audience prefers this type of content.  By paying attention to the reaction each post gets, you’ll be able to better tailor the content on your business blog to meet the unique needs of your audience.

Image: mugfaker