Utilizing Your Blog

Blogging is quickly becoming a great way to grow your business and also to start making money.  There are many different sites that allow you to create a FREE blog - Blogger, WordPress or LiveJournal.  These free blogging sites have templates that you can customize to fit your business or topic.   

Step 1: Choose a Topic

The first choice you need to make when starting a blog is a topic.  You can blog about anything - from nutrition to running a Fortune 500 business.  When you are considering your topic it may help you to create a numerical list of subjects that you could write about.  If you don't have at least 20-30 subjects as a jumping off point, you may need to consider another topic.  Blogging should be FUN!  You don't want to look at you to-do list everyday, see "Write a Blog Post", and have a feeling of complete despair. 

Step 2:  Design Your Blog
The next step is to start designing your blog.  There are many choices to make your blog the "perfect" blog.  You need to choose the layout, color scheme, and template for your blog.  You also have the opportunity to include stand-alone pages on your blog.  These are some important choices - what do you want your page to always say about you based on the tabs that always appear?  Also when designing your blog, you want to prepare your first blog post so that it is ready when you launch your blog.

Step 3:  Marketing Plan
Before you launch your blog, you need to have a plan for marketing your blog.  How are you going to drive readers to your blog and develop a following?  Just a couple of my favorite strategies: creating a Fan Page on Facebook, using Twitter, and/or becoming a member of blog networks. 

Step 4:  Launch

This step includes publishing your blog.  At this point you need to be implementing your marketing plan to get your blog in the public eye.

Now that you have launched your blog, you must start blogging on a regular basis.  You want your blog to contain valuable information for your audience.  If your blog reads as a daily advertisement for a product or service, you are not going to establish a regular following.  Think about your blog like a T.V. show - do you watch an hour long T.V. show to see the commercials?  So, to get people to come to your blog, you have to provide information that they are looking for.  It is perfectly okay to ask for people to look at your business, product or service once in awhile.

I hope that this helps you get out there and start blogging to build a brand for yourself and/or your business.  Remember the most important thing about blogging is to have fun and provide information for your followers. 

A Great Video About Blogging