Thinking about starting a blog for your business?  Good. Blogs are increasingly becoming an interesting and effective way to directly engage with your customers, provide education and expertise to your audience, and highlight and market your products or services.

Not sure where to start? Check out the tips below and you’ll have a blog up and running in no time.

Choose a Blog Platform

As a general rule, the blogging platform you employ should directly correlate to the time you want to spend learning publishing tools and producing blog content. To make it easy on you, we’ve highlighted some of the more popular blog platforms and what you can expect if you use them.

WordPress

• A  great platform for anyone who wants to make a move towards website management, as WordPress is inching closer and close to being a genuine Content Management System.

• Versatile-  you can post from your computer, email, or your mobile device.

• Could be time consuming to learn the platform and create the content if you lack experience in the blogging space or have a general phobia of internet tools.

Posterous + Tumblr

• Both these blogging programs allow you to post content incredibly quickly.

• Option to  post remotely using mobile apps or email, which is useful if you are snapping and uploading photos on the go.

• Syncs seamlessly with social networks, so everything you produce can be auto-fed into your networks in real-time.

Micro-Blogging

• Great for bloggers who are extremely pressed for time.

• Ability to elaborate on particular ideas is limited to 140 characters.

• LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook etc all have a Micro-Blogging component.

Make the choice: business, personal, or both?

Should you be focusing on your personal blog, your business blog, or devote time to both?  This, of course,  really is a question of what you’re trying to promote. If your business runs on your personal profile, your personal contacts, and your dynamic personality – it might not even be worth your time having a business blog.  By developing your personal blog and your own social networks, you’ll subsequently be growing your business and solidifying YOU as your brand.

Business blogs tend to be best for businesses that are experiencing growth and have realized the importance of having a social profile and web presence.  Recently opened a new location or hired several employees? Business owners in this developmental stage are well served by starting a blog in order to capitalize on recent momentum and reach a wider audience with their good news.

What to post

There is incredible flexibility in blog publishing – you can post about almost anything you like. But is this a good thing?

The Internet has provided an exceptional opportunity in that virtually anyone can publish material and no cost. This, of course, has given birth to a trend that shows the quality of content deeply eroding. For this reason, if  you want to create a blog with content that is actually read and shared, it’s a good idea to institute your own style guide and set of publishing restrictions.  That means:

• Correct punctuation,  grammar and spelling
• Content that is providing value to your audience
• Links that point where they’re supposed to
• Font size and style uniformity for aesthetic purposes (and please…no Comic Sans)
• Breaking up sections with sub-headings
• Posting at the same time each day

While the above might seem  like simple suggestions, you’d be amazed at how much they can contribute to the overall professionalism of your blog.

Blogging for SEO and Internal Links

Finally, something that is often overlooked but extremely important is the power of internal linking programs as a great feature of SEO. Current content linked to old content validates the old material on your site and gives Google confidence in what you’ve produced . It also notes that your site is staying in the same genre of content production. Internal linking programs are ideal for giving smaller pages within your site, or the pages on which you display services, the link juice from a newly published article.