If you are looking to make money online, you could start a blog for yourself or for your company. What do you need to create a blog? In this mega-guide to content marketing, I will explain the essential points you must consider when creating a blog for your business or brand to achieve maximum success.
Tips Before Creating a Professional Blog
Before writing articles, hiring a hosting service, designing a template, etc., you must consider the following points:
1. Objective of the Blog
It is crucial to know the purpose of creating a blog. Any action you take for your business must have a purpose since your company exists to generate revenue. Whether you want to establish brand authority, create a community, increase website traffic, or get leads, your goal must be SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. Setting unrealistic goals will only lead to frustration, causing you to abandon your blog and give an unprofessional image.
2. Know Your Target Audience
Once you have a clear objective, it's time to analyze and understand the ideal audience or customer you want to reach. If you think your customer is everyone, you are wrong. Creating articles for everyone will prevent you from focusing on content that genuinely interests your audience, and valuable content on your blog will be scarce. Therefore, before writing, it's essential to analyze your audience, generate one or more buyer personas, and determine who to target and the kind of questions, concerns, or curiosities they want to explore. This information is invaluable when creating content for your blog.
3. Choose the Blog's Theme
The topics you discuss on your blog must be linked to your objective, information collected from your target audience, and the specialty of your business. It's crucial to differentiate between topics you want to write about and topics that interest your target audience. Discussing your favorite movies or explaining the recipes for the dishes you make on weekends on a professional blog will not be useful. It's crucial to learn how to say no to ideas that are far from your goal when creating a blog for your company.
4. Analyze Your Competitors' Content
The wheel has already been invented, so it's a good idea to identify your competitors who use a blog as a digital marketing strategy and use free or paid tools to analyze the following points:
- How they position themselves on Google
- What type of articles bring more traffic to their website
- What are their most shared articles on social networks
By learning the content that works for them and aligns with your strategy, you can adapt it to your blog and create complete, differential posts that help your audience.
5. Create an Editorial Calendar
One of the significant issues blogs face is the "blank page" crisis. Spending every week thinking about what to write is exhausting and time-consuming. Therefore, before starting a blog, you must create a calendar that clarifies:
- The topic to be discussed in the article
- The purpose of the article
- The publication date
- Main keywords
Selected dates of the year, such as Black Friday, to publish content appropriate to the date
Tips During the Creation of the Professional Blog
All the tips for creating a professional blog that I have given you so far are guidelines to follow before starting to create a blog. Now, I want to provide you with a series of ideas to create a blog while working on it.
1. Register a Domain
If you're starting from scratch, think about the name your website will have so that people can access it when entering the URL in the search engine. I recommend that the domain have the following features:
- Easy to remember
- Use a keyword related to your theme
- Do not include symbols, numbers, or hyphens
- Make it as short as possible
- Where to create a professional website
Once you have the domain name, select a reputable web hosting provider that suits your needs to ensure that your website runs smoothly and efficiently.
2. Selecting a template for your blog
Creating a website with online platforms like WordPress is easy today, as they are intuitive, visual, and have a strong online community that helps you solve any problems that may arise. One of the benefits they offer is that most of them provide you with a set of pre-designed templates that make it easier for you to create a blog for your company.
You have both free and paid options; see which one best fits the structure you want to give your website, and then modify the content to your liking.
Tips after creating a professional blog
In the following lines, I will explain in more detail the points named in the list.
1. Valuable content
You will hear this word a lot on the internet, but they don't always make it clear what it means. The best article for your blog that you can create while being of value is the one that helps the reader to solve a doubt or satisfy a need after reading your content. To comply with this section, it is essential that you have previously carried out the previous steps and further investigate the search intentions that the user has regarding a topic.
2. SEO optimization
Your content should always be written with the user in mind, but you do not have to abandon the SEO of your blog articles. The points that you should take into account when optimizing a blog article are:
- A short URL with the main keyword.
- A title that describes the topic to be dealt with without exaggeration.
- A title with the keyword as far to the left as possible and then explaining the issues to be resolved without going over characters.
- Creating a meta description.
- Taking care of the structure with H2, H3, H4…
- Using images or videos that help strengthen the text.
- Reducing the weight of images and covering the metadata.
However, SEO does not end here; Google also takes into account other aspects such as loading time and user experience on the website, so hiring a good SEO specialist can be a good option. You can also turn to a good SEO tool for help.
3. Social sharing buttons
Make your content go beyond your blog and allow readers the ease of sharing it on their social media. In this way, you will reach a larger audience that did not know you existed, so putting buttons to share the content on the reader's social profiles is a great idea.
4. Calls to action
Throughout the text or at the end, invite the reader to take action on what you want to propose. It may be that they access a newsletter or go to a landing page. In this way, you are making a proposal according to the topic to be discussed in the article.
5. Relevant videos or images
Whenever you introduce an image in an article on your blog, I advise you to ensure it has the purpose of helping to further strengthen the information you are presenting with the text. While some bloggers use images to "breathe the text," I don't see it as necessary if you have a good paragraph structure. However, adding a tutorial video will be great if you are writing a guide or course.
6. Author Pages
Whether you are the sole writer on your blog or have a team behind it, I recommend creating a dedicated space where readers can learn about the author(s) of the article and their expertise. This way, you can verify that the article is written by a specialist in the field and communicate transparency and security to the reader. Additionally, this is an excellent way to strengthen and work on your personal brand.
7. Categories
To improve and structure the content of your blog, I recommend that you separate it into categories so that users can access the information in a more organized manner. This will also help to optimize the SEO of your website.
8. Contact Acquisition
It is beneficial to provide a box where readers can leave their contact information, which you can then use in your digital marketing strategy. This is a great way to impact a qualified audience who has an interest in your brand, products, services, or your sector. To encourage readers to provide their information, consider offering a free or downloadable resource that is of interest to them.
9. Comment Box
Providing the community with the opportunity to leave their impressions on what they have just read is a great way to get to know your ideal client better, understand their doubts or concerns, and learn their opinions on the topic. By doing this, you can also increase engagement and develop a sense of community among your readers.
Conclusion
In summary, creating a professional blog for your company requires time and dedication, and its results are long-term. However, with a good strategy, the benefits achieved are worth the effort. Key tips include optimizing your blog for search engines, interacting with your readers, making it easier for them to promote your articles, and providing a dedicated space for your authors.
