How to Start Blogging for Your Small Business

Small-business blogs are the foundation of any successful content strategy. Blogging benefits businesses in almost any industry and vertical. A high-quality, useful blog helps build awareness of a business’ brand and product offerings. It also helps build authority around a particular subject matter.

With the right plan and some strategic work, your blog can lead to more organic search traffic and social media engagement. Here are eight steps to take to launch your small-business blog.

1. Identify Your Blogging Goals

Don’t start blogging just to blog. Have a specific goal in mind, and make sure it relates to the business’ overall goals. Some of your goals can include:

• Being more discoverable on search engine platforms
• Increasing users’ time on your page and reducing your website’s bounce rate
• Building authority and credibility for your business

Once you’ve set a goal, assign relevant key performance indicators to work toward as you launch your blog.

2. Create Editorial Guidelines

Editorial guidelines help your writing team and your audience understand your brand. If this is your first time creating editorial guidelines for your business, don’t worry. Your first set of guidelines doesn’t have to be set in stone. Think of them as guardrails to keep your early blog posts consistent.

You can bundle your editorial guidelines with your overall brand book, but don't be afraid to take your blog in a different direction with new color palettes, fonts, and shapes. Many business blogs follow a version of the AP style, which is a good place to start for your new blog.

3. Choose a Blogging Platform

Choosing the right home for your blog impacts its visibility and success. Your blogging platform should reflect the goal you set at the beginning of the process. Your goal will determine whether you use your website’s current content management system or establish your business blog on a separate platform, such as Medium. 

Investing in a new CMS is a huge undertaking, but it's often a necessary business expense. Small-business loans can help you access cash you need to migrate your blog or website onto a platform that better suits your needs. 

4. Brainstorm Content Ideas

Once you have the key pieces of your blog's infrastructure in place, it’s time to create. Business blogs mix timely posts and announcements with educational, evergreen content. Brainstorming content ideas ahead of time ensures you won’t run out of blog topics when there aren't many announcements or newsworthy information to report. 

Start your brainstorming by casting a wide net. Don’t leave any ideas off the table. Note any themes that emerge or topics that correspond to upcoming business initiatives. As you brainstorm content topics, remember your target audience and the goal of each piece.

5. Set Your Publishing Cadence

When you have a list of so many good ideas, you might want to write and publish them all as soon as possible. It’s important to start small and ramp up content production slowly on your new blog.

Good blogging takes time. High-quality and authoritative content will help your business meet its goals, but it also requires time, labor, and expertise to produce. The last thing you want is an overburdened team that's exerting the minimum amount of effort and churning out sub-par blog posts.

6. Build Your Writing Team

The skills of your writing team will determine your publishing cadence and blog performance. Your blog writers can be in-house employees, freelance writers, or a combination of both. 

If you want to build an in-house team, you can hire dedicated, full-time writers or ask current team members for blog posts.

Flexible work schedules and economic uncertainty have drawn many professional writers into the freelance market. Working with freelance writers is less expensive than hiring someone full-time, so you can hire more contract writers to create more content.

Many freelance writers prefer to work remotely so they can travel or move states more easily. Keep time zones and asynchronous work schedules in mind as you build your blogging team.

7. Start Writing and Publishing

When you have your topics and writing team in place, it’s time to assign articles and start publishing. 

Launching your blog can be stressful, and you don’t want to risk burning out your creators before the blog is even live. Consider creating a bank of articles before your blog’s official launch instead of publishing posts one by one as they’re ready.  

If your publishing platform has a scheduling feature, use it to schedule a handful of posts over a few weeks to alleviate stress for you and your writing team. Make sure you have a few posts scheduled in advance so your writers aren’t constantly working against deadlines. 

To ensure articles meet your editorial guidelines and are free of errors, establish a peer editing and quality assurance process before each post goes live.

8. Make a Plan to Measure Success

Launching a blog for the first time is a huge accomplishment, but most blogs won’t go viral overnight. Choose how you want to measure your blog’s success based on short- and long-term milestones. Use a combination of delivery-based goals and key performance indicators to keep the momentum going. 

It’ll take time for your blog to build readership and traffic. For the first few months, consider setting goals for how many blog posts you want to publish each week. You can also research common benchmarks for blogs in your industry to see where your blog should be in six to nine months.

For more immediate feedback on your blog’s success, use an online quiz or form that enables readers to submit comments about your content.