You know why blogs are important for your business, how they help in reaching wider audience, and bringing leads to your website. You’re now ready to start blogging but are not sure about how. Don’t worry! By the time you finish this blog, you’ll be ready to get started on your first blog post!

One of the first lessons to know about blogging is that writing is the last thing in blogging

Here are the 8 steps to follow to get your first blog put live on your website.

Step 1: Understand your audience

Step 2: Create a blog domain and choose a theme

Step 3: Find your topic

Step 4: Create a blog outline

Step 5: Write your blog

Step 6: Edit and finalize the title

Step 7: Add images and links

Step 8: Publish

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1. Understand your Audience

You've already started on the first step by doing your market research! You can refer to its data before starting your blog. Of course, audience behaviors are plenty and vary from product to product or requirement to requirement. For every blog you want to write, ask yourself these basic questions.

• What does the audience want to learn?
• What will the audience relate to the most?
• Will this be a new piece of information for them?
• What level of knowledge do they already have about the industry?
  

These questions will help you decide what type of blog you should write and what information you could add to it. Further, it’ll help you set the tone of the blog.

2. Create a blog domain and choose a theme

You already have a website for your company. If not, you should create one RIGHT NOW! Check out our website development services or schedule a call with us for a FREE consultation to get started.

The days of hard coding a website from scratch are long behind us. Most websites these days are built using readily available tools such as Webflow, WordPress, and so on, based on business requirements. We personally love Webflow and use/recommend it to all our clients as it’s easy to use, has plenty of options and is highly customizable.

Almost all the tools available come with themes you could choose from. The same goes for your blog! Select a theme with the layout you think would be a good fit for your company.

3. Find your topic

What would be good for a first blog post? You are practically introducing yourself to your audience through your first blog. So, it’d be best to introduce them to your business and what you do in a more casual way.

Another hack to narrow down on a topic is to look at your audience’s pain points from the market research and start with a topic based on that!

4. Create a Blog Outline

Initially, a blog outline may seem like a task that’s not necessary, but you’ll thank yourself later. Once you reach the stage of doing multiple blogs a week or having a few writers, having one layout comes in handy. This also helps you keep it uniform and sets you apart from the rest. It works as an identifier, so your audience will immediately recognize that it’s yours.

5. Write your blog

Now comes the focal point of our discussion, writing. A typical blog consists of three sections; introduction, body, and conclusion.

Your introduction works as a hook and sometimes decides whether the reader will scroll further. Hence, it is important to ensure it is captivating enough to get the reader reading till the end.

Your blog’s body contains all the information you want to convey about the topic. Keep your body interesting and make it conversational. Humanizing the content is utmost of importance for a blog. Your reader is human and so should be your content — addressing a human.

Now that you’ve mentioned all the points you wanted to in the body, summarize it in a few sentences in the conclusion. Also, add a CTA (call to action) in the conclusion as a step for your reader to take after reading your blog. The CTA could either lead to another related blog or an action you want them to take such as BUY, SHOP, or CONTACT US.

6. Edit and finalize the title

PROOFREAD. PROOFREAD. PROOFREAD.

Yes, you don’t want your readers pointing out mistakes you could have easily avoided. Once you are done writing the blog, take a break, go for a walk, perhaps. Once you get back, read through the blog and look for grammar mistakes, spelling mistakes, and other minor things. Though minor, they make a huge difference. There are free tools available that help you with grammar and spell checks. We personally use Grammarly and our team can’t do without it! Further, if you have included any stats or facts, cross-check them and make sure they are accurate.

Once you have proofread, see if the title you made in the beginning still makes sense. If not, change the title to what feels appropriate for the blog.

7. Add images and links

Who doesn’t love visuals! One way to make your blog more interesting is to add relevant images. They could be infographics, statistics or other related data. Your blog doesn’t necessarily have to be filled with images, two or three are good. Most importantly, have a good title image that acts as the face of your blog.

If you are suggesting them a product or a service, add a link to the respective pages. Similarly, if you want the reader to check out the next blog, add the topic and link it to the page.

8. Publish

You should be optimizing your blog for SEO while publishing the blog. A few steps to follow are:

• Add meta title and meta description
• Add meta tags
• Make sure all the headers and titles are highlighted
• Add keywords to the blog and alt texts for images
  

Now that you’ve followed all the steps, go out there, publish your first blog and reward yourself!

The first step always seems to be the hardest. It’s alright if you feel overwhelmed or cannot get a few things perfect. The goal is to get started. Few blogs in, and you’ll start getting the hang of it and make improvements as you go. If you think you do not have the time to maintain your business blog, you could always outsource them or find affordable blogging services. We can help you get started with blogs. We'll create the perfect strategy for your business to be recognized. We'll research keywords, create the perfect strategy for your business and write out your blogs to generate more leads to your website!