Starting a Business Blog? Step Two: Launching a Business Blog
In my blog post on developing a blog (step one), I covered tips and issues you should address while developing your company’s blog. This post will cover some basic tips for launching your blog, including insights from our experience promoting the Priority Integrated Marketing blog.
Step Two: Launching Your Blog
If you’ve done research on participating in social media, then you’ve probably heard the good advice to “listen first.” Running to your audiences when your blog has two posts and proclaiming that your blog is the ultimate authority is probably not going to create an engaging experience for your audience (meaning you might lose the chance to get them back in the future).
We actually started writing posts on our blog a few months before we launched it based on topics that our audiences were already searching for (this is where keyword research becomes mission critical). When we finally drove our audience to the blog, it was already a reliable source of information, written from our own expertise. There was a little bit of something on a variety of topics.
When you developed your blog, you may or may not have set up categories and/or tags. I think these are a crucial piece of launching your blog because it helps to illustrate the depth of your blog. If you don’t have them yet, don’t fret, start adding them as you’re working through the launch process. We ultimately expanded our categories and tags during the launch process to help highlight keywords that we identified. You’ll want to do the same.
We used a promotion to launch our newly redesigned website and blog. It was effective, but I’m sure there are other great ways to promote a blog (please feel free to share other ideas below!). You’ll also want to start considering your backlinking strategy during the launch process if you didn’t do that as part of step one. I’ll talk more about blog backlinking in my next post, but for now, you can check out a great post we already have about backlinking.
Once you reach step three, you should be prepared to love your blog. This is where being a champion or having a champion of the blog becomes really important. The post on managing a business blog is coming soon.
