Here are a few questions you should ask yourself before you get started:
– What is the aim of the blog?
– What will be the theme of your blog ?
– What search keywords will you target?
– What types of media will you create?
You should be aiming to provide valuable information, build your authority in the industry or niche, get people returning to you for more information, and build an e-mail list of subscribers.
Next write down a list of things you could write about in your blog. Get ideas by looking at other blogs in your industry. Will you be publishing the latest news, entertaining stories, educational how-to guides or curating information from other sources and adding your opinion?
WordPress SEO blogs
A WordPress blog is the best and most popular blogging platform available today. Here are the steps you need to take to optimise your new post for the search engines.
– Target Keyword (you should decide this at the start)
– Page Title / Main Heading – should include keyword
– Changing Permalinks
– Adding Headings
– Categories and Tags
– Yoast SEO plugin
– Adding links (external and internal)
– Add media button
– Filename, Title, Alt Tag, Description
Adding Youtube Videos
– Click Share, then embed. Copy the code.
– Special code
You Tube Videos
Once you are logged into your youtube account (this can be linked to your gmail account), click on my channel to add your channel. Then create a unique channel URL, description and tags. Click upload to add a video from your computer. As it uploads you can set the Title, description and tags as well as the category.
Facebook Fan Pages
Automation should only be used if Facebook is not going to be a major source of traffic for your business. If this is the case, you can use the networked blogs app to automatically feed your blog posts into your facebook page. You can also make it easy by simply using the facebook like and share buttons after each post is created.
Manually posting to Facebook is far more effective, you will reach much more people and people engage better with manual posts. This is by far the best option if you plan on getting traffic from Facebook. For the best effect, try to posting around midday and early afternoon.
Firstly copy the URL of the post you wish to promote, go over to your facebook fanpage and paste the URL as a status update. Once it has loaded, remove the URL and type in a message about the post.
Then change back to your personal profile, like the pages status update and share it on your own wall (If you want your friends to see it – don’t over-do this step)
Twitter may not be where your customers are likely to find you, not all businesses connect with customers on twitter, but it is worth putting your info out there for people to find if they want. You can automate this with networked blogs or by hitting the tweet button after posting.
If you are planning on getting maximum exposure from twitter or connecting with customers there, do a manual post, it only takes a few seconds. For maximum exposure, use a hashtag # or an @ reply-tag to include more people in the conversation. @ reply-tags are for tagging people in the post or conversation and # hashtags are for tagging a topic in the conversation.
Google Plus Pages
People ask why use Google Plus, or what is this Google Plus you speak of, it is Googles answer to Facebook and while it is taking a while to get off the ground it is very useful if you want Google to notice you.
You can have a fan page much like in Facebook and you post in much the same way. However Google are currently integrating Google Local Places (from Google Maps) into Google Plus so look out for more functionality to share content there.
Linked In Page
Again Linkedin is a social media site worth setting up for all businesses, but it may not be worth spending too much time on depending on your business and your customers. After setting up, you may want to just auto-feed you blog using the Blog-link app inside Linkedin and check it every now and then.