Business blogging is a cost-friendly marketing tactic with great potential when put to work effectively. Over 70% of people choose to learn about a company through articles rather than ads.
There are over 1.9 billion websites but just 600 million blogs. Despite the numerous benefits of business blogging, many businesses are missing out on this opportunity simply because they have no idea how to start, nor the time or resources.
In this article, we share 6 important steps that will help you get your business blog up and running.
Step 1: Develop a strategy
A solid business blogging strategy outlines a clear path to achieving blogging objectives. It is both the foundation and routine that ensures the success of a blog. It covers both the technical and creative aspects of blogging.
Failure to create or follow a solid strategy can lead to a waste of resources and time. This important aspect of starting a blog requires much brainstorming. If you are flat out of strategy ideas, you can always look at your competitors.
Developments in tech and commerce can influence the success of blogging strategies. Therefore, smart businesses review their strategy from time to time to adhere to best practices.
Here’s a business blogging strategy checklist your business can follow:
1. Define business blog goals and metrics
It is essential to clearly outline what you want the blog to accomplish for your business. It keeps your blogging focused.
Also, identify the metrics that qualify as success indicators for your business. If creating awareness is the goal, then high blog traffic is an indication of success.
Remember to set realistic goals.
2. Define your audience
Know and understand your audience. That way, you can create content that solves their problems. Understand that your business blog audience isn’t limited to the customer base alone.
3. Develop an SEO strategy
Search engine optimization is essential for any business blog that desires visibility. A lot goes into a solid SEO strategy. Meta tags, SEO titles, and page description tags and keywords, just to mention a few.
4. Create a content strategy
It is important to outline one or two cornerstone subjects from which you can draw more precise topics.
You should also create a content calendar. It should blog article topics and intended publishing dates. We would suggest relationally ordering your topics so that you can generate internal links
5. Determine the blog promotion channels
Social media is the most obvious way to promote your blog. But there are other options, such as email marketing and guest blogging. Examine various options and figure out which works best for you.
Step 2: Create a style guide
A style guide is a pattern that your blog articles follow. It specifies the tone, structure, grammar, and punctuation rules that you want to see reflected across blog articles.
A style guide is necessary when you have multiple writers contributing to the blog. It gives everyone a template to follow and reduces inconsistencies that would arise otherwise.
Here’s an example of a style guide: How We Write Our Articles: Approach, Objectives, and Basic Rules
Even a blog with a single writer may appear disjointed if there is no style guide to work with. Mismatched style across a business blog looks tardy and that can inspire distrust.
Some very important items to include in your style guide are:
1. Tone
Your blog tone refers to how you want your readers to perceive the blog. You may choose to come across as witty, authoritative, friendly, educational, or controversial.
Your target persona and brand personality should influence what tone you choose.
2. Voice
Most bloggers prefer to write in an active voice. It is more engaging and easier for readers to understand. Also, active voice is the way we speak in everyday conversations.
An academic blog may find passive voice more appropriate.
3. Ambiguous words or phrases
Certain words lack universal spelling. For example, e-commerce, e-commerce, and E-commerce are all accepted variations.
Create a list of such words in your industry and specify how you want them written.
4. Formatting rules
A business blog should establish guidelines for font, use of boldening, italicizing, and capitalization. It can also specify if a bullet or numbered points are preferred for lists.
Another thing to clarify is the format for writing figures, dates, and measurements.
5. Grammar and punctuation rules
British English and American English can have different spellings and even terms. So be clear about which one you’ll be using. Other things to specify include if you use an Oxford comma or put dots in between abbreviations.
Worth reading: Putting Your Best Punctuation Forward: Rules of Blogging
6. Social rules
In today’s society, some words have become problematic. Especially those that seem to evoke sexism, racism, and other forms of discrimination. If it matters to your business image, suggest alternative terms.
For example, instead of chairman, use chairperson.
Step 3: Have a content calendar
A content calendar is a document that contains a list of topics to be published over a period. It’s also called an editorial calendar. It specifies the intended publish date, word count, content type, and for writing teams, the person assigned to each topic.
Your content calendar is the most important and basic content strategy for business blogging. It keeps your blog on schedule to satisfy readers and deliver marketing results.
In 2026, research from Content Marketing Institute showed that only 32% of marketers had fully documented content strategy. Those marketers had better results, clarity, and team communication.
Below is a checklist of what to consider when creating a content calendar.
1. Accessible platform
Choose a platform that’s easily accessible to team members to host the content calendar. You can use Google Sheets or project management apps like Trello or Notion.
2. Break down tasks
Several activities go into posting a single blog post. A content calendar should designate time for things like keyword research, article research, writing copy, sourcing images, and so on.
3. Organize your content by type
If your blog will have different content types like video tutorials, articles, and so on. You should organize your content by type so that you can create a balanced mix.
4. Indicate content goals
Depending on what your business needs per time, set specific goals for each blog post. Some posts may be to boost sales and some others for community building. Making the goal helps create goal-oriented posts.
Step 4: Set performance metrics
Business blogging can be rewarding. A company that blogs receive 55% more website visitors than those that don’t. But how do you know if your blogging efforts are paying off? Simple, check the blog analytics.
Before you check though, you need to know what you are looking for. That’s why you need to identify which performance metrics are most important to business goals.
With metrics, you can examine how posting frequency, writing style and content volume influence blog success.
Some important metrics to take note of include
1. Blog visits
Observing the monthly visit rates can help you identify any factor that may be affecting the blog’s growth. Traffic decline suggests you are doing something not quite right and you need to change strategy.
2. Traffic source
Analytics can tell you how visitors find their way to your blog. It could be through social media or keyword searches. This allows you to understand how to better focus blog promotion efforts.
3. Top-viewed posts
Your top-viewed posts give you an idea of what attracts readers to your blog. It can indicate the most important problems you are solving for readers. You can use lessons from top-performing posts to improve overall blog performance.
4. Social media shares
People share blog posts they find useful or resonate with. They share it with other people they believe will find it useful. The platform they choose to share on can inform your promotional strategies.
Worth reading: The Power of B2B Social Media Marketing: Why It Matters
5. Lead generation
Measure how much your business blogging is contributing to lead generation over time. To identify leads, observe how many visitors visit your blog and move to your sales page.
Step 5: Get some help from a professional blog agency
In 2022, an average post took bloggers 4 hours and 10 minutes to write. Now that the demand for quality content is even higher, it takes a lot longer. Consider how much time it would take someone who’s not an expert.
And so for a lot of businesses, the hardest part of blogging is keeping it going. All the many things to do from writing to SEO and promotion require quite some effort and time.
Business owners often find themselves neglecting their blogs to focus on other aspects of their businesses. Before you get overwhelmed, it is best to get help along the way.
Consider hiring a team of writers or collaborating with content marketing companies like Ojehs, Inc.
Step 6: Create a review plan
Many times, new information comes up that significantly changes opinions previous posts expressed. Other times new blog practices emerge or there is an opportunity to create internal links arise.
All that and more is what reviewing your business blog should entail. Regular review is an important part of keeping your business blog relevant. Without it, you may not reap the compounding benefits of blogging.
Business blogs should be reviewed at least thrice a year. During reviews, you should confirm that backlinks lead to the correct addresses. And that old articles reflect the current blogging style.
Conclusion
There is so much to do when starting a business blog. You need to develop the overall strategy, create a style guide, set up a content calendar, identify performance measurements and make review plans. All of these steps involve several smaller activities and you will most likely need some help.
At Ojehs, we use our years of experience and skills to build and run high-impact business blogs. You can sign up for our newsletter to learn more about building a blog for your business.
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