A blog is a marketing tool that can help you grow your target audience and your business. One of the greatest benefits of launching a blog is that you can start and maintain one for free. If you're willing to put in the time, you don't have to spend anything on your blog, unless you choose to. Here's how to start your own blog for free:
Step 1: Determine Your Subject Matter
Generalized blogs don't tend to do as well as niche blogs. You have to determine what you want to focus on. For example, if the blog is for your business, then you may want to provide tips, news and information as it relates to the products or services that you offer. Another approach is to blog about your life, if it fits your brand identity. For example, if you sell household products, then you might want to blog about your household and showcase how you use the products you sell in your home.
Step 2: Select Your Keywords
Your blog will be more successful if you learn SEO article writing. It's important to research the keywords that will most likely lead people to your blog, and incorporate them throughout your blog posts. Search engines will take note of those keywords and show your blog in search results. It's an effective search engine optimization strategy for blogging that will lead to more traffic.
Step 3: Choose a Free Blog Publishing Tool
Blogs are prolific on the Internet because of the free blog publishing tools available. You don't have to be tech savvy to use them. Just choose a design that you like, follow the instructions, and you can set up your own blog in a matter of hours. No knowledge of HTML is required.
The top two blog publishing tools available are WordPress and Blogger. More bloggers are drawn to WordPress than to Blogger, because it's more user-friendly. You don't want WordPress to host your blog though, because they can delete your blog if they choose.
Step 4: Add the Blog to Your Website
Once you've created your blog, add it your business website. Your hosting package will dictate how to do this for free. Some packages allow you to have multiple websites for the same monthly fee. If that's the case, then you can set up the blog on its own domain and link it from your website, and vice versa. The problem with that approach is that you would have to pay for a separate domain name for your blog. If you don't want to pay for a domain name, then set your blog up as a sub-domain on your website, such as "blog.mybusiness.com."
Step 5: Write Two or More Posts per Day
Your blog has to be content driven if you want people to find it and remain interested. It doesn't have to be all written content. Video clips and audio are very helpful for blog promotion and search engine optimization. Whatever forms you choose, you should schedule at least two or more posts a day. You can do them all for the week in one sitting and pre-schedule when to publish the posts, or do them daily.
Don't expect readers to flock to your blog when you start one. There are free ways to market and promote your blog, and you'll have to do them to get noticed.
__________________________
Daphne Mallory, Esq. is the co-owner of Mallory Writing Services and has written more than 100 articles helping home based business owners and entrepreneurs start and market their business. You can learn more about her here.
