Beginning Your Business Blogging - The First Step

The best way for small business owners to get started blogging is to do some research. Start looking at other blogs and start, getting to know what blogging is.  If this is a new thing for you, find some other blogs and bookmark them and subscribe to them. And then what I suggest is to start commenting on those blogs, because not only what you can do when you comment on those blogs, is you can have, when you leave your comment you will have a link back to your Web site or a blog.  So it’s a great way to get some links back to your site. Search engines love links, so that’s just a free link for you to get by commenting on another person’s blog.

And then you’re getting experience as you find out what are they writing about?  So look at your competitors.  What do their blogs look like, do they write long posts, how often do they post? It’s really  study this information to get started. I have found some resources where you can go to find these other blogs to be a part of.

First you can go to a Web site called www.Technorati.com and what you can do is you can search for your expertise or your niche on there. This is a great blog search engine and you can then find the blogs that relate to it. 

Another good website that I just found out about recently is called www.blogcatalogue.com. And this is sort of like a search engine like Technorati for blogs but it’s also a catalog so you just type in the search field what you are looking for. Just for example with marketing, so you just search "marketing blog" and then it just pulls up all the different marketing blogs.

So then you can go and find those and just look at what they’re doing and you know, how they’re getting Web site traffic and how they’re setting up their blog. And just see what you want to copy and what you don’t want to copy and then just really get out there and start commenting on other blogs and  get familiar with the blogging community.

Comments

[Dianne]

Thanks Jennifer, good information. I have a business blog that I would like your advise on. Please visit and tell me how to make it more interesting. www.mom-stuffcommunity.com
Dianne

[Jennifer Haubein]

I would recommend having a custom banner or logo created to represent your business brand. This would really help jazz it up.

Also, I would suggest going with a different template other than the default.

There are a lot of mom blogs out there so you can always take a look and see what they are doing.

Here is a website that lists the top mom blogs: http://moms.alltop.com/

I hope these tips helped and let me know if I can help with anything else. Thanks.