If You’re Not Blogging for Business, You’re Losing Business 

Before getting into the ways to easily get a blog up and running, get blog post ideas, and get business from it, you need to know where you’ll be blogging. If your website has a blogging feature, then you’re all set. If you’re using WordPress for your website, you’re in great shape, as it’s an awesome blogging platform that’s free.

If neither of those options is available, you can start a free blog at a number of free blogging sites. A basic blog is easy to set up on these platforms, as that’s what they’re designed to do. The benefits of having a blog as a part of your business website include SEO, Search Engine Optimization. Instead of having to link your remote blog back to your website on every post, you just have to write and publish.

What to Post & How Often 

One of the biggest excuses you hear for not starting a blog or letting one stay idle is that it’s too difficult to try to figure out new post ideas. The solution is just a matter of getting organized and using these ideas to generate your post ideas:

Basic Business Info – Of course, you’ll want to do a post on every aspect of your business, products, or services. They’ll be informational, and they’ll be instructional as well. These provide the basic business descriptions that potential customers need to make a decision.

Answer Questions – Even if you overlap with the basic business info, one of the most effective things you can do to generate post ideas and valuable content is to make the posts answers to questions you get in the course of business. Begin to make a note of every question you’re asked in person, via email, or through forms on your website. Then take each question and develop a detailed answer and make it an individual post with content text that takes advantage of one or more appropriate keyword phrases.

Local and Current Content – Keep your feelers out for local articles, website and blog articles, and other information that isn’t a competitor, but is relevant to your business. Write about it and link to Unlike a static site that wants a lot of “evergreen” content, content that’s going to be good and relevant indefinitely, your blog can have current events and information, as that’s the reason for blogging.

Curate Content – Somewhat like the previous item, but more regional to global, you can use Google Alerts with key phrases relevant to your business to alert you to content that you find of interest. If you see a post or article in a national publication or on their website, you can do limited quoting from the article as “fair use” and then comment and expand on it. If you’re not sure about fair use, do a search, and you can get the basic rules, and they’re not hard to follow.

Now that you know what to do to get ideas, you’ll probably find that you’re overflowing with posts. Use a calendar app to schedule regular posts with suggested titles based on the content tips above. How often should you post? There isn’t a rule. Once or more each week is a good starting point, as that’s only four or more posts/month. Using the idea tips, you should have months to a year or more of posts ready for scheduling.

Use the tips in this article, get your post ideas together, and set up your posting calendar. Once you get into a routine, it will not be hard to do, and your business will benefit from the effort.