In this fifth posting in a series on building community using social media, we are going to talk about blogging. Sure this may not be the sexiest topic, since businesses have been using blogs for many years now, however, a blog is a necessary tool for driving traffic to your site, as well as building your online reputation and expertise in a particular topic or area of expertise. Of course, if you haven't incorporated a blog into your marketing mix, this should be a least third on your list (after getting yourself on Twitter and a creating your Facebook Fan Page). Blogging not only supports developing your company’s brand, but also helps increase your site traffic and rank in Google, which hopefully converts to qualified leads and actual customers!
So where do you start? First decide who you are writing for (i.e. your customers), and position yourself in a manner that shows how your expertise can help them achieve their goals and improve their business. Once you define who your target is, and how you will position yourself, you can then define the kind of content you will write about. For example, this blog focuses mainly on social media, and how to use digital marketing to promote your company or organization. Ideally, assuming your blog is for your business (not personal) you will have someone working on content to share with your customers and potential customers, in your particular industry.
Now that you have your audience defined, and know generally the theme of your blog, you will need to start drafting your blog posts. I would suggest you generate between 5 and 10 posts ahead of your official blog launch. This will give you a buffer of content to post, since you never know what can come up during your busy work week! Ideally, you will be able to publish at least one blog post a week, so you can keep customers coming back to you r site, and can encourage viral sharing of your content. Of course you are probably thinking, “How am I going to write all of these posts, when I don't even know what to write about for my first post?". Well I am sure there are many subjects you can choose from, but here are 7 ideas to get you started on your first 7 blog posts:
- Introductory/Press Release blog post (See "How to Create a Compelling Social Media Press Release")
- Explain your service methodology, philosophy on customer service and what separates you from competitors
- Highlight a recent client case (with clients permission) and describe how you solved their business problems
- Create a tutorial post that that could help a reader perform a common but useful task
- Interview a customer (via e-mail) and publish on the blog with link back to customers website (if applicable)
- Write a wrap up of your industry's news and current events
- Create a post asking for feedback on your blog content, and crowd-source new topics
Now that you have that entire back log of content ready to go, you need your blogging platform to publish it to the world. Luckily there are many options for creating a blog. This particular blog was created using WordPress, which is the most popular blogging engine around today. You can set up a free account on WordPress.com, and join their blogger community. To help you get started, you can check other blogs, or you can buy a books on blogging, such as Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business or The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Social Media, Blogs, News Releases, Online Video, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly. Of course, if you want to have a custom built WordPress site built, you can contact Aday Interactive for a free consultation!
So by this point, you should have created your content, you are building a following on your social media channels and have started to engage with key influencers in your community or business space. You can take the first blog post, which is in a Press Release style, and submit it to a service such as Pitch Engine, which helps you to easily share your "Pitch"/Press Release post with your friends and followers through your social networks, email and other methods. The service also shares your post with all of the major search engines, in order to maximize publicity, while helping your blog get indexed by search engines. It is also recommended you use a tool like Feedburner, so that you can track subscribers and other statistics, to compliment your web analytics. From this point, it is just a matter of continuing to create and publish engaging content that your target audience wants to read! See it is that simple 
