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How to create a business blog plan

Sep 19, 2008 4 Comments »

Blogging is serious business if you take it seriously. There are many individuals who are running complete businesses merely out of their blogs without ever having a business website.  But then this differs from business to business; sometimes a website is at essential to communicate some points.

Once you start publishing your business blog on a regular basis it will become an integral part of your online marketing strategy.  This means that sooner or later it will have a deep impact on your business and this further means you need a business blog plan before starting to publish a blog.  Why do you need a plan? A plan helps you set directions and allocate resources for your blogging effort. Planning your business blog is crucial for its success whether you are a corporate organization, independent business owner/consultant, or a small startup company. Though the objectives and outcomes will be different for different requirements, you should aim to have answers to the following before you start your business blog:

What is the purpose of your business blog?

The purpose of your blog should be very clear in terms of what is it you want to achieve through the blog. The more focused and specific you are, the greater is the chance of success of your blog.

Knowing your target audience

This is another important aspect to consider. Do not make the mistake of addressing the masses all at one go – it simply is not possible. Choose your audience and provide them the information that they will warm up to. If you are keen on having a lot of things conveyed on different subjects, to lots of people, then create separate blogs specific to each subject. It is preferable that you stick to a highly targeted niche audience.

Measure your objective with the outcome

When you set out to create a blog, you would have certain objectives in mind. Evaluate if those will be adequately achieved and how should you measure your goals. You would need to put in effort, time, and investment, if any – thus you need to be doubly sure from the beginning how you will take the worth of all this from your business blog.

Blog integration with other marketing activities

Blogging is indeed a great way to market your business, besides being useful in lot many other ways. But using it intelligently with your other marketing activities, business development, and customer service activities will be the real challenge. your blog may turn out to be the greatest communication asset your business has.  Use it to its utmost capacity without unnecessarily bothering your visitors.  Communicate through your blog as much as possible.  Are you planning to launch a new campaign or a product and you need to disseminate this information as quickly as possible?  Your blog is the best mode of doing it.

Choosing the appropriate blogging software

There are various blogging software available offering different benefits for different requirements, for instance WordPress, MovableType and expression engine. WordPress is free source, that is you can use it and develop new content management applications using the source code.  MovableType too has turned free source to an extent but it is quite difficult to customize it.  Interestingly many business blogs use movable type rather than WordPress.  This is just because of a mental block against free software, otherwise, to be frank, WordPress is a lot better than MovableType. Acquiring knowledge on the kind of blogging software you require for your business will be paramount for its success. whatever software you use to publish your business blog just make sure you don’t use one of the free blog hosting services.

Naming your blog

Choose an appropriate name for your blog – either with keywords that immediately convey the purpose of your blog or the brand that you want it to reflect. The is very crucial because once your blog picks up the momentum it will be very difficult to change the name. The name becomes an inseparable part of its identity and whenever people mention your blog they will be using that name.  So if you change the name later on it will pose lots of difficulty for your blog.

Hosting considerations

As a rule of thumb, if your blog complements your website in terms of content, then it is good to integrate it with your website. in fact many businesses prefer to publish their blogs as a sub domain on an add-on domain. If your objectives are different, then choose different domain names to have your purpose served better.

Carefully choosing your domain name

Your domain name may affect your search engine rankings. Be descriptive in your domain name choice. even if you choose to host your business blog under the sub domain of your website name it in a manner that your keywords appear in it.

Deciding on the interface of your blog

If your blog is going to be a part of your website then integrate it with the website. If the blog is on a different domain, then design your business blog that will sufficiently depict the image you want to portray. Remember! Do not use the default template, hundreds of people already use it and it will make your blog look unprofessional and common.

With this groundwork done, you can start your business blog on the right track and achieve the desired result!

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