{"id":17751,"date":"2017-11-27T12:05:23","date_gmt":"2017-11-27T17:05:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hostgator.com\/blog\/?p=17751"},"modified":"2017-11-27T12:37:39","modified_gmt":"2017-11-27T17:37:39","slug":"blogging-business-strategy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hostgator.com\/blog\/blogging-business-strategy\/","title":{"rendered":"What Kind of Blogging Makes Sense for Your Business?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"what<\/p>\n

How to Create a Blogging Strategy for Your Business<\/h2>\n

You\u2019ve decided it\u2019s time for your business to start blogging (good call!), but now you have to figure out exactly what that will look like. You need a strategy.<\/p>\n

The first thing you have to acknowledge is that blogging is hard<\/a>. It requires a lot of time, energy, and skill. If you go into it expecting it to be easy and think you can just figure out what you\u2019re doing as you go, you probably won\u2019t get much out of your blog and may well give up a few months in (you wouldn\u2019t be the first business to do so).<\/p>\n

To actually do this right, you need to start by thinking through the kind of blogging that makes sense for your business.\"Create<\/a><\/p>\n

Answer These 4 Questions Before You Start Blogging<\/h2>\n

First, sit down with your team and ask yourself some questions:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. What\u2019s the goal of your blog? <\/b>You shouldn\u2019t start a blog just because you read somewhere that businesses should have a blog. You need to figure out what you actually want to accomplish with your blog. Is your main priority improving your website\u2019s SEO? Building relationships with your customers? Growing an email list? You\u2019ll probably want to accomplish some combination of all those things, but figure out where your priorities are. That will help guide your blog efforts.<\/li>\n
  2. Who\u2019s your audience? <\/b>Who are the people it\u2019s most important to reach with your blog posts? A blog that gets tons of traffic from the wrong audience won\u2019t serve your business well, you have to make sure you design your blog strategy around reaching the people most likely to become your customers.<\/li>\n
  3. What\u2019s your bandwidth? <\/b>Be realistic. How much time does your current team really have to work on this? If you\u2019re trying to fit all the work of creating and running a blog into already full work schedules, something else will have to give.<\/li>\n
  4. What\u2019s your budget? <\/b>A blog itself doesn\u2019t cost that much money to set up and run (especially since you already have your domain and hosting), but you\u2019ll likely find you want to consider hiring professionals to help you with the writing, image design, SEO, and promotion. You may also need to spend money on things like images and plug-ins to get the blog looking just right.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Knowing the answer to these questions going in can help you craft a realistic strategy for your blog. Here are a few of the other considerations you\u2019ll need to make.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    Blog Frequency<\/h2>\n

    One of the most important parts of your blogging strategy will be determining how often you\u2019ll be updating your blog. Research on this subject has come to a very clear conclusion: the more you publish, the better the results<\/a> you\u2019ll get in traffic and blog leads.<\/p>\n

    \"blog\"how<\/center>But there\u2019s a good reason most businesses don\u2019t publish several blog posts a day in spite of this data. For most of people reading this, it just isn\u2019t possible to produce that much blog content and have it all be of a high quality.<\/p>\n

    What you have to figure out here is what you can realistically manage based on the bandwidth and budget you just figured out. You have to account for the time it takes to plan out your blog each month (e.g. doing research, coming up with topic ideas, setting up a calendar), write the blog posts (this will vary, but think somewhere in the range of 1-3 hours per post<\/a>), edit the blog posts, and load them to the blog and schedule them. That\u2019s gonna add up, and it\u2019s very likely you\u2019ll need to hire people beyond your current team to be able to fit it all in.<\/p>\n

    Pick a realistic goal for blog frequency to start, and be prepared to scale back if you realize it\u2019s too much to keep up with long term. It\u2019s more important that you maintain a high quality in your blog posts and keep up with a consistent publishing schedule than that you publish multiple posts a day.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    Blog Post Length<\/h2>\n

    You have two issues to figure out here:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. How long should your blog content generally be?<\/li>\n
    2. Do you want some general consistency in content length, or some blog posts that are longer and some that are shorter?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      There\u2019s not a clear right answer to either of those questions, but this is an area that marketers have done a lot of research into. The results aren\u2019t quite as clear-cut as they are with blog frequency, but generally speaking, long-form blog posts perform better in terms of SEO results, shares, and traffic. There is some variety in just how long posts can be to get those results though.<\/p>\n

      SerpIQ<\/a> found that the top 10 results in Google tend to fall somewhere in the 2,000-3,000 word count range.<\/p>\n

      \"how<\/p>\n

      But an analysis of how blog content gets shared<\/a> found that blog posts over 3,000 words fare best in that regard.<\/p>\n

      \"longer<\/p>\n

      Basically, making sure a good portion of your posts are comprehensive and provide detailed information on the topic in question is probably a good strategy. There may occasionally be topics you write about that don\u2019t require that kind of in-depth coverage, in which case don\u2019t try to stretch it. But do try to make your sure your posts pack a lot of good information.<\/p>\n

      Do keep in mind here that longform posts take longer to write than shorter ones. If you decide to aim consistently for 2,000 word posts, you should anticipate that they\u2019ll take you approximately four times as long to write as 500 word posts. Figuring out what you want in this step may mean revisiting your goals in blog frequency.<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n

      Write Yourself or Hire Someone?<\/h2>\n

      If you want to keep the writing in-house to start, then you\u2019ll need to make plenty of room in the calendar to ensure your team can take on the additional duties. \u00a0That may mean lengthening deadlines on other projects or figuring out other responsibilities that can be dropped. Asking employees that already have full schedules to somehow fit blog writing in as well won\u2019t turn out well not for them and not for the quality of the blog posts you\u2019re likely to end up with.<\/p>\n

      \"CostIt\u2019s more likely that you\u2019ll need to hire someone new, whether by creating a new employee position (or a few) at your company, or by hiring freelancers to fill in the gaps in what you need. \u00a0This comes with a number of benefits:<\/p>\n