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Business Blog Step 4 - Pre-Posting Decisions

Guest post by: Gary Baker

Article Overview: As you start to plan your business blog and decide how you wish to set it up, there are a number of areas that you need to evaluate to ensure that it delivers the best results for you and your business. The answers will help you to focus your efforts in the right areas, to lay out a plan forward and ensure that the blog has the strongest possible impact in your target area.

Business Blog Step 4 - Pre-Posting Decisions

As you start to plan your business blog and decide how you wish to set it up, there are a number of areas that you need to evaluate to ensure that it delivers the best results for you and your business.

The answers will help you to focus your efforts in the right areas, to lay out a plan forward and ensure that the blog has the strongest possible impact in your target area.

1. Who is your target audience for your Blog?

You need to decide who your target audience is for your blog, and consequently who you are writing for. This is likely to influence not only the content of your postings but also their tone according to how you wish to be perceived.

2. What results are you looking for?

You should also have an idea of want you wish to achieve with the blog in terms of results. There are no hard and fast rules for what criteria you should use but could include ones such as number of visitors, sign ups, contacts or opt-ins.

3. Which blogging software is best for you?

While there are many different blogging "platforms" available, the most popular are WordPress and Blogger. Both are easy to set up while you are learning the ropes and provide flexibility, tutorials and support.

Be aware that WordPress dot com will place its own ads on your blog while Blogger dot com will allow you to place your own advertising. For total control I recommend WordPress dot org. You will have to pay for the hosting and I highly recommend using HostGator. See my article titled "Internet Marketing Tools - Review of Web Host Provider HostGator" for further details.

4. Where to display your Business Blog?

With either of the methods,you will still have the option of it appearing as a separate domain. The standard for a hosted solution would be a domain name where the host's name (eg "blogspot" from Blogger) is part of your domain.

This is fine for personal blogs but not so appropriate for Business Blogs. Much better is to show it as a separate domain or as a subdomain or your current website.

5. How much time do you want to spend on your blog?

Whether you compare them to websites or other marketing techniques, blogs are exceptionally cost effective in pure monetary terms. The real cost comes in the time that you are willing to put into the blog to get the results that you want to achieve.

6. How will you promote your blog?

It is a good idea to have an idea of how you wish to get the message out to your target market that you are providing a service which should be of interest and of use to them. You are spending a lot of time and effort on providing this so make sure they know about it.

7. How will you measure how successful it is?

What criteria would you like to use to see how successful it is? Ideally they will be in line with the main objective that you set out for your blog but it's necessary to have some way of measuring this.

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Article Tags: blog, blog lesson, blogging, business blog lesson, business blogging, how to blog, internet marketing, internet marketing tools, what is a blog



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