Blogging for individuals and small businesses: Part 2 - What

Here goes the second part of this series. On the first part I wrote about Why you should be blogging. Now I would like to write about the What:

Failure to plan is planning for failure. What do you want to achieve? You should:

1. Define your objective and mission. What do you want from your blog? What is your ultimate goal and reason why you want to blog? Think about the values behind it, they will go a long way if you follow them (e.g. "to share my knowledge in ...").

2. Following your objective, write down a few short and long term goals. You want them to be SMART:

a) Specific: "I want to grow my business" is not a good goal statement. Choose instead something like "I want to increase my sales by 20% as a result of new leads coming exclusively from my blog in the first six months".

b) Measurable: Achieve 1000 unique visits a day on my third month blogging. Get 10 new leads in the first six months.

c) Attainable: I said 1000 unique visitors, not 1M. Write at least three articles a week, not thirty.

d) Realistic: Research what is a realistic goal by looking into other similar initiatives. What are they achieving? Contact them and ask them questions. What's the worst that can happen?

e) Tangible: You want to have feedback, grow your network and connect with new people. Get more business, etc. Is the press talking about your articles and ideas?

OK, so now you know why you want to blog and what you want to achieve with your new blog. The next question should be:

3. What am I going to write about? What will my content be? Unless you are already well known, writing a few articles about very diverse topics wont help you much. You want to focus in a few (may be three or four to start with) different but somehow related topics. A few unrelated articles from time to time are OK though. Think about these topics as the different categories you will use to classify your articles in your blog. These categories should keep your blog organized and help your readers easily find the articles they may be interested in. You can also later use these categories to tag your articles. Think about your passions. Writing about them will keep you motivated.

Write down 10 to 15 keywords and their relationship with your topics (e.g. golf is a good keyword for your sports category). These keywords will later help you with your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) activities.

That concludes part two. I hope you will find this post interesting and that you'll share it with your like-minded friends. Part three will deal with the Who (your intended audience).