Keeping a journal — with paper or online — is a new habit people often take up on the first of the year. For your business, blogging is an excellent new habit. A good blog will drive traffic, increase rankings, and give you control over keywords your website couldn’t get without a blog.
For most businesses, hiring professionals like Haden Interactive to write your blog is the best plan. DIY corporate blogs often don’t meet your goals, cost more than hiring a pro (your on-site people are almost certainly going to be slower, and they’ll still expect to be paid for their time), and divert staff from mission-critical work.
What’s more, they usually don’t get posted regularly, so you not only lose the benefits of regular blog posting, but look like you’re not keeping up.
If you’re determined to write your own blog, resolve not only to post regularly, but to set it up to maximize your chances of success.
- Choose your blog’s home wisely. You can set up a free blog someplace, or you can have your IT guy set it up at your website using blogengine.net or a similar solution. I’ve written before about the various free blogging platforms , but there are some strong reasons for having your blog live at your website, both for SEO and for your company’s image. I have gotten excellent results for clients from free blogs, and can get top rankings and good traffic from them, but even in those cases I always think how much better it would be for those clients if they had the blogs inside their websites.
- Choose a content management system you can grow to love. I work with a lot of different systems, and I don’t mind using whatever the client prefers. Still, there are some that require you to fool around with the html in order to get the results you want. There are some that won’t let you get the results you want even if you can fool around with html confidently. Right now I’m working with one that requires me to scroll from side to side — I can’t see an entire sentence at one time. I’m paid by the hour, so the way that slows me down is the client’s problem, but the frequent need to breathe deeply and get over the frustration of it is my problem. So try out a few before committing yourself, or discuss your options fully with your developer if you’re having a custom arrangement done.
- Make a schedule. If you blog when you feel like it, you may end up going weeks between posts, and your blog won’t deliver the way you want it to. I recently made a schedule for a client showing the dates, titles, and summaries of posts for the next month. You can do that for yourself. You can also commit to daily blogging, or three days a week — but be sure to choose three particular days of the week, or it’ll always be “tomorrow.”
Good luck!
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