Starting a blog from scratch can be as exciting as it is daunting. You don’t have an audience yet, and you’re not quite sure of your plan, but the potential is there. Luckily, with a bit of forward thinking, you’ll find that creating an engaging blog is within reach.
Know what you’re going to blog about
First things first: you need to know what your blog is about. Posting about random and unrelated things might be interesting to you, but it’s unlikely to draw in an audience.
Thinking about the purpose behind your blog will show you what your theme is. If you’re creating a new blog for your business, setting up a content strategy will help you create content in line with your core objectives.
Begin with the basics
Diving into specific details is a great way of informing your audience, however it’s good to establish a base-line of knowledge first. While it can feel mundane writing about things that seem simple to you, they may still be new to your audience. And even experts need to be reminded of the basics at times. For example, business blogs can cover in-depth topics, however their most popular posts may be about setting up a sustainable savings budget.
If you struggle to come up with content idea, starting simple can be a great way to gain momentum. Once you’ve started exploring simpler concepts, you can grow from there to get ever more specific.
Understand your target audience
When coming up with blog ideas, it’s more important to think about the topics your audience wants to read than the topics you want to post about. Gaining a strong understanding of your target audience can help you better target your content to your readers.
You can sometimes find this information through Google Analytics, or by interviewing people you think may be interested in your service. You can even try mocking up fake customer profiles to help build a picture of what your target audience looks like. Then you can use the profiles to figure out what content that person would be interested in.
Stick to your schedule
Once you know what content you’ll be posting, you need to post regularly. One way of doing this is to set up a content calendar, and map out when you’re going to post what. By sticking to a schedule, you’re more likely to build an audience and keep your website looking fresh. Big gaps between posts doesn’t look great, so plan to post regularly and consistently.
Whether you post once a day or every second Friday, try to stick to a predictable pattern. If you have a stockpile of pre-written posts, you can even schedule them to post automatically, so you can just sit back and let your CMS do the work for you.
Still not sure where to begin? Get your new blog off to the right start with our blog writing package. We’ll write five completely original blog posts with your core business objectives in mind.