How to Start a Successful Blog

So you don’t have any idea where to start, right? Guess what—neither did we. We were clueless. Literally. Few years ago, we had no idea how to start a blog. We could hardly spell HTML, let alone build a beautiful website.
 And now you can learn from our pain and suffering to circumvent much of the tedium involved in creating a successful blog. Here’s how we started our blog, step by step, followed by additional rationale and insights below:

1. Domain and Hosting. The first thing we did was go to inmotion and register our domain. We didn’t even need to set up a WordPress page first, since Bluehost does all that for you.. Then, we did a simple install of WordPress through inmotion. Otherwise we can get free domain such as blogger. Com etc.
2. Theme. A good theme gives you the look and feel you want for your blog, allowing you to design your blog exactly how you want it to look. If you’re not a coder, then a theme makes the design work a million times easier. Plus, once you purchase a theme, which are inexpensive for the time they save you, you own it for life. A theme has two halves: the framework (the bones) and the Child Theme (the beauty):

There are several Word Press theme frameworks on the market, but Genesis is without a doubt the best and most flexible choice. Genesis is the first half of your theme. Many themes simply handle the aesthetics of your new blog, but Genesis provides a necessary foundation for your Child Theme. Simply go to Studio Press. After you get your Genesis Framework, you’ll want to find that right Child Theme (which is just a silly way to say “blog design”).Which is available at BYLT, the Genesis Community Marketplace. Head on over to BYLT, browse their carefully curated collection of themes, and find the design that’s right for you.

3. Tinkering. Once you had our domain, hosting, WordPress, and theme, we spent a lot of time tweaking the theme to get the look and feel we wanted (i.e., making our vision a reality). Then you spent even more time tweaking the theme and arguing about it and tweaking it some more. We also set up a free account so people could subscribe to our site via email and RSS subscriptions. And then we established a free account to track our stats. Feed burner and Google Analytics were both easy to sign up for, and you still use both today.
4. Plugins. You can use only a few plugins on our site: “Google Analytics for WordPress” and really simple Facebook and Twitter share-button plugins (since human beings are intrinsically wired to share value, it’s important to make your posts easy to share with others). They take just a few seconds (literally a few seconds, it’s just a click of a button) to install once your site is all set up. And if you really want to play around with some cool plugins, check out Eight Deuce Media’s.
5. Content. Last, via WordPress we started writing and uploading the content for your pages: About Page, Contact Page, Start Here Page, Books Page, Events Page, Archives Page, etc. Next, we designed our logo using free images we found online and text from a regular word-processing program. Then we put a picture of ourselves in the header (this is important because people identify with people, not logos). Finally we started writing new blog posts and posting them regularly (at least once a week)  http://ow.ly/wryFE

What Is Business Blogging?

 

Business bogging is a marketing tool that uses bogging to get your business more online visibility. That definition raises two questions:

1. What is blogging?

2. What is online visibility?

Question 1- Blogging is short-form content. A blog post is posted to your website's "blog" a part of your website where you house all of those posts. Example- you're presently reading a blog post- a piece of short-form content that has been posted on a blog.

It's also vital to note that once you are doing business blogging, your blog posts important a couple of particular subject matter associated with your business. For instance, HubSpot is an incoming marketing platform, thus our blog talks concerning incoming marketing topics - using Facebook and Twitter for business, email marketing, business blogging, etc. Your business blog can talk about issues that are associated with your business.

Question number 2 - defining "online visibility." online visibility is exactly what it sounds like - being able to be found and seen on the internet. this might mean your business pops up a lot in search engines, on social media, on other people's blogs as a guest author, etc. Business blogging is one way to assist get your business enter front of individuals yearning for your product or services on the net

 

How Is Business Blogging Different From Regular Blogging?

Many people have personal blogs, or even blogs that bring in money through selling ad space. But business blogging is different than all of that, because your blog is neither  a hobby, like many people's personal blogs, nor  the primary way your business makes money - because heck, at that point your blog is just your entire business!
Instead, a business blog is a marketing channel (just like social media, direct mail, email marketing, etc.) that helps support business growth. It does that by driving traffic to your website and providing opportunities for that . Traffic for various businesses might convert differently - some aim to turn traffic into leads to hand over to a sales team, others may aim to convert traffic into customers via an online transaction - but ultimately, business blogging will initiate conversions that drive more business’s.

 

Why Should Businesses Blog?

This could be an entire blog post of its own, but it will try to keep this brief, if only for the purpose of helping better define what business blogging is.
To make your website a valuable marketing asset, you need people to actually see it. Other than people just typing in your website's URL (which is pretty unlikely to happen for most businesses), there are a lot of ways people can see your website and one big way your website can be found is through search engines.
The more pages your website has, the more chances you have to rank in search engines. The problem is, you don't just want to throw up random web pages all over your site. That would be a terrible user experience, and your site would quickly become a total mess. Business blogging is a solution to that problem. Every time you post a new blog post on your website, you have a new web page on your website, and it's all housed under your blog so your website doesn't get cluttered with pages here, there, and everywhere.
So, every time you publish a blog post and create a new web page, you create one more opportunity for your site to rank in search and appear for the queries people are entering into search engines.
You can apply this logic to other digital channels, too. For instance, every time you publish a new blog post, it's one more opportunity for someone to share that post on social media, getting it out in front of a new audience. It's also one more opportunity for another site to link to your post, giving you some great SEO juice.
In short, business blogging is a low-cost way to create opportunities to get your website found by the people that you want to find it, so you can generate new leads and customers for your business.



http://ow.ly/wryFE