What is a blog and blogging?

A web log, often shortened to “blog,” is a web page that contains dated posts, by one or multiple authors/bloggers, often pertaining to a particular topic. “Blogging” is the act of writing in a blog.

What is Business Blogging?

Business blogging is a marketing method that uses blogging to get your business more online visibility and to get your targeted prospects engaged using your great content and social media.

To understand it better, you are reading my blog post now, that has been posted on our official blog.

If you’re blogging for personal use, just to share your thoughts / ideas / the things you enjoy with your friends / family then you may start a personal blog using www.blogger.com and here’s a guide about using Blogger https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/1623800?hl=en.

However, if you’re creating content for your business, I strongly recommend to start with a self-hosted blog to host your content. You need to be technical-enough to setup a self-hosted blog; alternatively, ask your design to set it up for you.

Hubspot has published many posts related to business blogging.

The following two are really useful to help you get started with business blogging:

1. What is Business Blogging?
2. Why Blog? The benefits of Blogging

Here are 7 essentials steps published by Kristi Hines @ Social Media Examiner:

1. Select the best blog layout
2. Make it responsive (mobile-friendly)
3. Add multiple opt-in forms to convert your blog readers into leads
4. Optimize it for SEO – to improve its visibility in Google search results
5. Use social sharing buttons – to make sharing easy using AddThis.com
6. Enable Google Analytics – to track the performance of your blog
7. Create authors’ bios

Here’s another old-but-evergreen article by Denise Wakeman containing easy steps to start a business blog: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/top-10-easy-steps-to-starting-a-business-blog/

Hubspot has published this ebook as “Introduction to Business Blogging“:

I also find a good infographic about “How to start a blog for small business?“:

Here are some more tips that I must share with you:

1. Create great content that is fresh, unique, useful and shareable!
2. It’s not enough to just produce content. Your content must educate, inspire, or entertain your audience. In this way, people will talk about you and you will get loads of traffic using mentions and by the word-of-mouth.
3. Embed videos, PDFs and Slideshare presentations into your content to make it more engaging.
4. Rely on self-hosted blog (that is hosted and connected with your own website) such as our blogs like https://www.seointl.net/blog/ and http://www.digitalmarketinggulf.com that are using WordPress CMS.
5. Do backup your blog content (posts, images, videos etc.) on a regular basis. Ask your web hosting company for the same.
6. Think about your prospects’ concerns, questions, and problems. Develop content to help your prospects / potential clients, to answer their questions, and to solve problems!
7. Share industry-related tips, FAQs, How-to guides, etc. Here are 238 more ideas to create great content for your business blog.
8. Create eye-catching and optimized titles for your blog posts.
9. Links within paragraphs to relevant articles / landing pages – do credit the source, if sharing someone else’s content.
10. Categorize your articles with proper niches.
11. Encourage comments – and do respond to comments.
12. Share your blog posts on your social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+
13. Blog at least 4 – 12 times or more in a month
14. Be a problem-solver using your blog; earn people trust – don’t just write to sell. When your earned people’s trust, they will buy from you.
15. Convert the visitors into leads with relevant, attractive offers – Add relevant offers with attractive Call to Actions at the end of blog posts / social updates.

At some later stage, once everything is set up; you can start promoting your blog.

Kim Garst has written a great post containing easy ways to promote your blog:

1. Promote it to your email list
2. Share it on social media
3. Guest blogging
4. Optimize it for Search – Blogging SEO
5. Write articles in local magazine and newspapers
6. Promote it offline!

You can read all 25 tips in details here: http://kimgarst.com/25-easy-ways-promote-blog

Author Bio:

Najam Ahmed | Digital & Inbound Marketing Consultant
Google Partner | Hubspot Inbound Certified
SEO International – a divisional of Al Wafaa Group