Blogging - Why Blog Anyway?

Our first step in our chronicled journey is setting up a blog.

If you’ve been around internet marketing long, you know what the most important piece of the puzzle is. Content. And not just a little either. Blogging will help you help the search engines by offering a ton of valuable content.

Hopefully if you are working in your passion you are an expert in your field or at least headed that way. If that’s the case you are full of beneficial content. Sometimes you need some inspiration to drum up ideas, but it is there. In business our goal is to get our message in front of our target audience. Blogging is one of the easiest, best ways to do that.

So where do you come up with ideas to write about?

One of the first places I direct people if they’ve been in the business long is in their email archives. Hopefully you have many opportunities every day to answer questions from prospects and clients.  This is fertile ground for developing rich content. Use your replies, removing any comments directed at the individual, and develop a helpful article/blog post.

Another place to find ideas is message forums. You do participate in online communites related to your product or service don’t you? Find out what the hot topic of the day/week is and post your opinion in your blog.

Finding out what information your target audience is looking for is another great way to come up with content. You can do that by visiting www.adwords.com and clicking on the link in the middle of the page that says “Get keyword ideas”. This is a look into the queries that people do in their searches, specifically Google in this case. Enter a few broad words (e.g. office supplies, auto repair etc.) and get an awesome view into what people are actually looking for. Now take their searches…turn them into the form of questions and answer them in your blog.

Where do you set up your blog?

There are a few, but the most common right now are WordPress.com and Blogger.com. Both of them are free and very easy to get started. Just sign up for your account, browse around some of the tools, pick a template and you’re off to the races.

In fact, if you haven’t already done that, why not head on over there right now while you’re thinking about it.

Have fun!