Business blogging can bring your company leads and more money.
I’ve been setting up websites for myself and friends since 1997. I’ve been creating business blogs specifically for businesses and individuals since 2006. Much has changed since I started blogging for profit but at the same time … a lot has remained the same. Whether a blog can be set up in 3 steps or 30, good content is always king. You need something people will “click toward” and then you need the technical know-how to lead your readers to advertising (or your product). Recently I went into partnership with my father to create a real estate blog for him that was strictly blogging for business. I learned that even though this is one of the most saturated web-market, one can still get relevant traffic that makes one money in this niche. Here are three main steps you need to take when starting a blog for your online business, there are quite a few other steps to follow these which I will include in a subsequent post. I’ll be using my dad’s blog as a primary example to illustrate:
- Get a Hosting/Publishing Platform: There are many affordable hosting plans out there. The median price looks to be about $10/month. The amount you pay will depend on the amount of space and bandwidth you require. In other words, if you aren’t making much from your blog, you won’t need to pay much. On the other hand, if you have a lot of visitors, that will take up a lot of bandwidth. Also, if you require a lot of physical hard drive space (ie; for hosting videos or a lot of podcast audio), you’ll need to buy a larger package. Wordpress lists some excellent hosts at their dedicated page for Wordpress hosting. There are a few options within your webhost to use as your publishing platform. I personally recommend Wordpress. It is a system of ingenious, yet simple, templates that can be made to look any way you imagine and it is very reliable. You can see what we have started to do on my Dad’s real estate blog through Wordpress at Riley State. Since he started posting to this blog not even 6 months ago, he has received over $300k in home value leads. (his pay from these has been about 10k and the blog hosting costs have been $5.95/month. If you want to promote your business, a blog can help you do that.
- Learn and practice SEO. Another term you must get familiar with is SEO. This stands for “Search Engine Optimization.” This is the interaction between your blog and the search engines. One amazing mentor of SEO out there is Michelle MacPhearson but there are many available, including myself. If you simply post blog posts or web pages to your server, they may never leave the gate. On the other hand, crafting links, tags, and keywords can bring you unexpected traffic from across the globe. For example, someone may type in a city they want to move to like “Menifee.” They will also include “Real estate” in the search. In that search, the search engine will search the sites they have crawled and return the most relevant results. One of my dad’s leads came in as a result of those search terms which we had embedded in a few posts as well as in the index page meta tags. SEO is a science that is changing so you need to stay on top of the trends and/or hire someone who knows it well. This is just as good as any advertosong you can purchse. In conjunction with that, SEO may get your business the publicity it needs. There is a plethora of public info available on SEO on the web. Beware of companies that charge you to give out these secrets, they are all over the place for free. You can feel the rush of business that comes through doing this yourself.
- Stay Faithful at Posting. This third one is a tough chore at times. It helps if you love writing but we all get burned out when we try to be regular at blogging for profit. This can get even harder when we limit our topics to one business or niche. It is worth it though because many times when we discipline ourselves to do so, our body of posts become the only stuff available in a given area. Niche blogging is something I highly recommend. If you have a business and you make that region your niche, you are going down a good path for SEO and your financial success. Search engines take a long time to crawl and analyze your site. That’s why it’s important to be dedicated to blogging. A strong niche and faithfulness to post will eventually make your blog an “authority.” Just like “the wheels of justice,” the wheels of search engines grind slow and exceedingly fine. If you believe in your company, business blogs can help get your cause out to the people.
I hope starting an online business blog is an exciting concept to you now. It is something you can do for your website or company and something you should consider doing soon.
What are your questions about online business blogs? Please feel free to ask in the comments or contact me.
