HowTority.com

It is now common knowledge that one of the most profitable way to recruit new customers and ultimately to increase revenue, is through content marketing. The tool to deliver such content is the BLOG. Today I will give you some tips on how to start a new blog and why you should do it.

Let’s start with the question “why should I start a blog?”:

• To communicate effectively with your customers if you already run a business, or to build a customer base if you are starting your business or you are planning to.
• To generate some revenue selling advertisement space.
• To share your ideas and influence public (although that is mostly dependent on the volume of your traffic)
• To fulfil your dream to write articles (after all the investment is moderate and you can keep this activity as hobby)

This is clearly not an exhaustive list of reasons why you should do it, but at least it will give you few thought points for inspiration.

Something that I also would like to highlight is that starting and maintaining a blog is a commitment which could be a great pleasure if you actually enjoy researching knowledge and always improve your skill in sharing it otherwise it could become hassle and boring. This is important also in view of the fact that earnings (if those are your only motivation to start it) are possible but are slow to come and they do require lot of resilience and dedication.

Let’s now move on to how start your blog: brainstorm and preparation.

1)      Think of an argument you would like to discuss (in case of a business this step is easier to complete as you most probably would want to discuss about your products and services or anything that closely relates to your target market). Once you have created a short list with few options and test the keywords on a couple of search engines to see what is already on the net. Most probably  you will find that there already are lots of websites and blogs about it, don’t get disheartened but try to understand if you can find a different view point form the one tackled from the main stream websites.

2)      Think of the name that you would like to give to your blog, when doing that keep in mind that search engines do like names which are clearly saying what the website do. When trying to fulfil that rule you can unleash your fantasy or get kick-started by using Wordoid which is a really nice web tool to help you with names; it also will give you the availability of the name for registering your domain…but I will get onto that topic in more details later.

3)      Test your chosen name/s against a keyword search tool by Google which basically will tell you how many searches have been entered in the search engines in a given period of time. If you discover that name A contains a keyword that has been hit 1 million times in a week while name B has a keyword that has been hit 2 thousand times in the same period of time, draw your conclusion keeping in mind that be found of the search engines is paramount. The goal is to find the name that you like which tells clearly what you do and that has high search numbers (closer or in excess to a million) and has low competition…I know, is not easy but it is essential to get it right! Advice: don’t settle for the second best, probably investing time at this stage will be the most valuable effort to make in order to have success later with your blog.

For now that’s it! In the next part (part 2) I will give some tips on how to register your domain and proceed to the web design challenge.