Blogging for Dummies: How to Build an Awesome Blog with No Experience

So you want to start a blog for your business? That’s great! A blog is an excellent way to promote your brand and increase revenue. But don’t worry, it doesn’t have to be hard.

Building a blog from scratch can seem overwhelming at first, but this article will show you how simple it really is.

In just five steps, we’ll walk through the process of building an awesome blog that will have your readers and customers coming back for more.

Step 1: Set Your Goals and Target

The first thing you should do is to identify your goals when it comes to your blog. There are many good reasons to blog, but why do you want to do it for your business?

Do you want to drive more traffic to your website? Do you want to increase the amount of email subscribers that are signing up every day? How about sales conversions, or maybe even boosting revenue for certain products?

You should also revisit your target audience for the blog. While usually, it will be the target market for your business, should you narrow or expand your blog audience? Expanding it can be good if you’d like to build a community around your brand.

Take some time and really think through what you would like to accomplish with this blog before moving forward. Write it all down so you have something to come back to later.

Step 2: Set Up Your Blog

Setting up your blog doesn’t have to be rocket science, thanks to a lot of helpful tools available now. It just takes a little research!

If you don’t have a website for your business yet, you can start from scratch with many full blogging platforms which gives you a lot of functionality right out of the box.

But if you already have a business website or online shop, don’t worry. You don’t need to rebuild anything. Check if your website has blogging functionalities. If not, there are also great tools to embed full-featured blogs right into an existing website.

So you’ve set up a great website for your blog — what’s next?

Step 3: Write Consistently

Well, you need to start writing. But what do you write about?

Revisit your goals and target audience: what would these people want to read? While it’s good to write about your products and services, the bulk of your blog’s content should be useful, engaging content that your target audience will love. That’s not necessarily sale or promotion posts!

You can start by developing a content calendar to help you plan out your posts and topics in advance. This can include everything from holiday-themed blog posts to weekly product announcements or even just monthly highlights of what’s new on your website.

Having a content calendar in place will make it easier for you to stay on track. You can pick topics ahead of time so you’re not scrambling at the last minute for ideas.

Once you’ve got a post or three under your belt, it’s time to think about getting the word out.

Step 4: Promote Your Blog

While search engines will eventually find your blog and start showing it in searches, you need to jump start this process by promoting your blog yourself.

Here are a few ways for you to get the word out about your new blog:

• Share it on social media. Make sure you’ve got a great highlighted image on your blog posts so that it’s even more attractive to people who scroll by. Creating useful infographics can be very effective!
• Network and build links. One of the best ways to get people to your blog is from getting featured or linked from other websites. Connect with your peers, do some guest posts, and exchange some links to get more people linking to your blog.
• Post in online communities. If you’re active in online communities in your industry, see if you can share some helpful posts from your blog organically. Places like Quora and Reddit can help!

Step 5: Track and Improve

Of course, once you’ve launched your blog, you need to make sure you know how you’re doing. You should make sure you’ve installed a website tracker such as Google Analytics to help you track some important metrics.

Analytics can be overwhelming, but at first, focus on the basic metrics so you take things at a manageable pace. Look into visitor counts, engagement, traffic sources, and the like.

Move on to building UTM links and tracking visitor flows once you start promoting your blog more extensively. This will help you determine which marketing sources are really working for you.

Revisit your metrics regularly and make sure to adapt your strategy when you need to.

Build Your Awesome Blog

Building an effective, engaging blog is not as difficult as you might think. If you take things one step at a time and follow the following five steps, you’ll have an awesome blog in no time:

1. Set your goals and target audience so you can focus better.
2. Set up your blog using any of the wide range of tools available to you.
3. Write consistently with topics that will attract and engage your target audience.
4. Promote your blog on various networks and get the word out.
5. Track your blog’s metrics and make sure to adapt accordingly.

It’s never too late to start a blog for your business. Strengthen your brand and build your community with a blog that will keep giving back to you.