A Simple Guide to Launching Your First Business Blog

By Devesh Sharma

Right now is a great time to launch a business blog or website. With the latest algorithm updates, Google has made it much easier for bloggers with genuinely good content to get high organic rankings. If you have a niche, quality content, and a solid marketing plan, you can drive thousands of visitors to your site in your first month. Here are steps to getting started.

Establish Goals

The first and foremost important thing is to have goals. You need to know what you want to get out of your blog and what you want your visitors to do when they get to your blog. For me, the goal of my blog is to grow an email list. I have a big popup box for list building and selling products through affiliate links.  Your goal might be for people to purchase your product and sign up to your mailing list, or to generate more affiliate sales, and so on. It can be anything from driving more sales to getting more social signals.

The key is don’t overdo it -- just focus on a few things. Write down your goals on paper and list them in order of importance. From this you will get a clear picture of what you want to focus on.

Content Plan

Content is the base of your site. Without it, you won’t be able to convert a single visitor.

Start by building a list of popular blogs, and then break it down even further into a list of the most popular blog posts to see what type of content gets the most traffic and social shares in your niche. You can use sites like Topsy to figure out the most heavily shared content in your industry.

Once you have a list of blog post ideas, put those ideas into an editorial calendar. Start out by creating simple guides, and move on to different types of content such as tutorials, interviews, inforgaphics, podcasts, slideshares, etc.

Putting Everything Together

Once you have established your goals and content plan for your soon to be launched site, it's time to create the blog. You will need to:

Choose a domain name. It’s important that you choose the right domain the first time. Here are few tips to consider when choosing a domain name:

• Don’t use hyphens in the domain.
• It should be easy to spell and write.
• Purchase domain and hosting separately.

Choose a web hosting company. The next step is to choose a reliable hosting company for your site. Everyone has a different opinion about web hosting, so you'll need to make your own best decision on this one, instead of blindly trusting hosting review websites. Personally, I like SiteGround, BlueHost, or HostGator because they are cheap and good for beginner bloggers. For medium-sized or larger sites, I would say go with WPEngine, which is what I use.

Choose a blogging platform. There are number of great blogging options available such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and most recently Ghost. But the most popular platform by far is WordPress. Today more than 20 percent of the total websites on the Internet are powered by WordPress.

Choose a theme for your blog. Design plays a great role and it is important to choose a well coded WordPress theme. If you don’t have a nice design, then you won’t be able to convert visitors to readers or subscribers. To find a good-looking premium theme, go with companies like StudioPress or OrganicThemes. Or if you don’t want to spend the money on a premium theme, then choose a theme from a trusted source such as WordPress.org.

Install the essential plugins. This is your last step. Here’s a list of essential plugins:

• WordPress SEO: Most complete SEO plugin for WordPress
• Akismet or GASP: Anti-spam plugins
• Digg Digg: Adds floating social media buttons
• W3 Total Cache:  Increases the speed of your site
• Backup Buddy: Makes a complete backup of your site.
• Optin Monster: Use this for list building. The new-ish list building plugin is by Syed Balkhi.

Adding a Launch Page

Although having a launch page is not as important as some of the steps listed above, having one does help to build initial buzz, as well as a small mailing list. Blogger Jon Morrow was able to build a list of 13,000 subscribers before launching his site. You can create a launch or "coming soon" page with SeedProd or Launcheffect.

Promoting Your Blog

There are two strategies to promoting content:

1. Keep publishing quality content and hope someone will link/share.
2. Publish high quality in-depth content and reach out to the right people.

A lot of people follow the first approach, and while nothing is wrong with that, it takes time to get results. I have recently started focusing on the latter, and already have had some great results.

Finally, here’s a list of some fantastic resources for driving traffic to your blog:

• How I Increased My Search Traffic by 110% in 14 Days by Brian Dean
• Why Google Plus is a Great Traffic Generation Source by Matthew Barby
• 20 Content Marketing Tips to Boost Traffic, Engagement and Sales by Steven Macdonald

There are obviously a lot of things to consider when launching a blog, and I've provided the basic process you will go through before launching a new site. Is there anything you would like to add?