Blogging for Startups
Business has come a long way in expressing themselves on the internet, from static information content to flash creative to dynamic blogging, and finally to micro-blogging and location tagging. For all these times, the goal has never changed – to spread the word out about your products or services.
Beside the use of Facebook and Twitter, which allows business to engage and update to people, blogging is still at the core of spreading detailed information. Blogs are like product, and facebook and twitter are like a distribution channel which will help you reach out to your audience. You need to create enough interest in each of your post, to make sure that they create enough interest among your readers.
Why Startups?
It’s because blogging is the best platform out there to communicate your brand/business. In addition to it, it’s free and easy to set up. That makes it the best option for start-ups to start blogging on their product/company website and start generating visitors and interested clients.
Getting started
First of all, blogging is all about sharing relevant information with your prospective customers or clients. For that purpose, you need to understand your business and show your eagerness to address different issues of your business. This genuine concern will create a better image for your business, as it shows that you are deeply interested in solving the problem through your business.
Start by collecting different topics and content related to your business and see what most people are looking for and what kind of content is in demand. This will help you compose the list of topics and form an idea on what you blog will be communicating to your audience.
Choosing the right platform
There are hundreds of different platforms to choose from and each of them has their own value proposition. But there is no harm in going with the most popular ones like WordPress. There are other interesting platforms such as tumblr and posterous, but they are on their own a mini social network, which can be used to explore other opportunities to share your content.
Once you have decided on the platform and installed it to your website, make sure to go with decent theme which goes with your company’s website. Theme matters a lot because it communicates your standards.
Keep turning the wheels
The art of blogging is to be consistent with your blog post irrespective of how many people are reading them. At the initial stage the readers will be low, but with your consistent effort you will be able to create better credibility. Furthermore, you need to understand that you blog post should be targeting to the right audience required for your business. Hence, do not falter away from your goal for the sake of more visits.
Make a daily routine of posting relevant post (generally 500/600 words with images) and visiting other similar profile blogs and engage in the conversation. Comments are the real measure of the success of your blog. The more the conversation, the more meaning you will be creating through your blog and better chances for other visitors to view the conversation.
Make it sharable and readable
Each of your post acts as a driving factor for your website and creates more visibility. Hence it is always best to make each of your post sharable. How you do it? By adding, ‘sharing action buttons’ which are freely available on the internet. The interesting fact about share buttons is that they can be made very intelligent by connecting them to link tracking analytics. This means that the entire link shared through your blog can be measured in terms of how many people shared and how many clicks were received by the post. This will give good insights into the likability of your post and help you compose better ones in the future.
Create a Delivery Man
Most people on the internet have a habit of subscribing blogs through feedburner, twitter or facebook page. Hence make sure that all your post is timely sent to these networks. Feedburner is the most important tool as it directly connects your blog post to reader’s inbox.
Feed burner is the best platform to harness you community. Through this process, you can create a good database of your members and send them timely updates, and weekly or biweekly newsletters. On the whole, email campaigns are still the most effective form of communication which can be leveraged by your company.
Future
The idea behind blogging is to reach out to people who are interested in your kind of business. Therefore there is no end to it, till the time your business is running. Though once your blog has received enough traction, you can lessen the number of post and engage with your audience through twitter, facebook or biweekly newsletters. But the flow needs to continue to gain more audience and responses on your website.
Note : We are organizing an online webinar for Social Media for Startups. You can join our LinkedIn Community to know more about the event.
