Now you have your blog up and running and you are excited to start blogging. So go ahead and write your first post announcing your blog to the world. I like to keep this very first post short so you can just get something out there as an introduction. Publish it and you now officially have a blog.
Create a Blogging Ideas List
This is something that is good to do before you even start your blog. But once you have launched it becomes essential. Create a document and enter in every idea you have that you might want to publish on your blog. Make this a living document so that you are constantly adding to it and checking items off as you go. I always try and make sure I have at least five ideas here that I have yet to publish so I am never struggling for ideas.
Read Related Blogs
Every blogger should be be spending some time reading other blogs. I gave you some recommendations in an earlier post of blogs that every small business owner should read, but you should also develop your own reading list. You obviously need to read what your direct competitors are writing about if any of them have a blog, but I like to find blogs that are in a related industry that you can really use for ideas. Then, of course, you should see if any of your customers have blogs. It is always useful to know what issues are most important to your customers, and you can always feature your customers on your blog in mini “case studies.”
Use Online Bookmarking
When you are reading blogs you will come across interesting articles that you want to save. The easiest way to save these articles is with an online bookmarking service. I use Delicious, but you could also use StumbleUpon, Reddit or Evernote. What I do is use a tag “blogidea” when saving a page that I think would be good for the blog. Then when I am ready to write my next post I can check my ideas list as well as the pages I have tagged in Delicious and quickly decide what I want to write about. Once you get in the habit of doing this you will always have a steady flow of blog ideas.
Establish a Blogging Rhythm
If you are running a small business, you no doubt wear a number of hats and are extremely busy. If you can do the three steps described above you can easily have a successful blog spending just one hour a week writing your blog. This should be enough time for two blog posts a week, which is a good amount for a small business blogger. I recommend setting aside half an hour twice a week to write. Your blog posts don’t have to be long or perfectly written, just get some useful thoughts down and publish them.
Promote Your Blog
This is a major topic in itself that I will devote a future blog post to, but there a couple of points that need to be made now about blog promotion. First, don’t start promoting your blog right after you have done your first post. I recommend waiting until you have written at least 10 posts before promoting your blog. This way, you will have a variety of content and people can see that you are serious about your blog. Second, make sure it is easy for readers to subscribe to your blog. Have a big subscribe button and sign up with a feed service such as Feedburner. More on that in our next post.
Photo courtesy of joiseyshowaa
