You?ve decided blogging is for you and will be valuable for your company.  So, how do you make it effective?  Follow these simple steps as a good starting guide. 

Step 1 – what?s your focus going to be? 

Here are four questions to help you narrow it down:

1. What?s your goal?  To inform?  To entertain?  To persuade?
2. What?s your perspective?  Are you giving advice?  Are you sharing your knowledge of a certain subject or specialism?
3. Who?s your target audience?  Your customers, prospects, peers or influencers? 

Step 2 ? blog content 

The challenge of social media content creation is that it must be fresh and deliver a compelling read to your target audience.  In terms of what it can achieve, focus what you write in your blog to achieve the following outcomes: 

• Give your brand a personality that can connect with consumers.
• Build brand authority by providing thought leadership on topics related to your products and services.
• Improve SEO by adding new content to your site that will increase search engine crawl rates.
• Provide a forum to encourage conversation, share expertise and gain consumer input.
• Serves as a vehicle to announce new products, services or opinions .
• Generate internal links to pages on your site where you want to drive traffic.
• Update other social media outlets simultaneously.
• Become a content generator for other marketing and sales collateral.
• Motivate consumers and media to continue visiting your site. 

Remember, your customers don?t care about you, your products or your services.  They care about themselves.  So your focus should be about solving their challenges through valuable, relevant informational posts.  Don?t use your blog as a sales pitch for your company, they must give impartial information to your customers and prospects around your chosen subject matter.  

Step 3 ? blog schedule 

A blog is not a one-off event, it must be written often and regularly, in order to reach your target audience, and achieve the objectives stated above.  It can only achieve these if you plan your blog timetable.  Having a visible schedule (wall planner or spreadsheet) will also increase the chances of you actually writing the blog, otherwise it will slip down your priority list.

Step 4 ? where to post your blog

Now that you?ve developed your content and schedule, you can start to think about the different ways to distribute that content to customers.

• Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+.
• RSS and Blog-to-Email Feeds
• Email Newsletters
• Guest blogging
• Guest webinars
• News releases
• eBooks/White Papers 

This is obviously a summary of how to write your blogs.  Overall it?s meant to encourage you to write one as they really are a very effective marketing tool.  If you?ve found success from your blog let us know.  Conversely if you think blog writing is a pointless task let us know too, I?d love to write a blog about that!