Your Blog Marketing Plan - 5 Key Steps

Article Summary: Your blog marketing campaign will deliver the best results if you plan for success right from the start. Here's how to go about it the right way.

If you have not yet joined the business blogging world, but you are eager to do so, this blog marketing plan will help you navigate the long road ahead of you. In fact, it might even help you shorten that road by focusing your energy on the proven techniques for success.

So without further ado, here's how to take your blog marketing program from zero to popular in 60 days or less:

The Path to Blog Marketing Success

This tutorial assumes that you are truly starting at ground zero (hence the title). In other words, it assumes you do not currently have a blog or know very much about them. If that's truly the case, start right here with step 1. If you've already been blogging for a while, and you simply want some tips for blog marketing success, feel free to skip ahead.

Step 1 -- Launch Your Blog (Of Course)

Some people love to argue over which blogging program is best, and for what reasons. Let me spare you a journey into this opinionated abyss by saying this. What you use to power your marketing blog is not nearly as important as the quality of information you publish through the blog. Your readers will not care what program you are using, as long as the blog is easy to navigate and read, and worth reading in the first place.

With that in mind, I recommend that you use either Blogger or WordPress to power your marketing blog.

• Blogger (owned by Google) is easier to get started with. It's an external publishing tool, meaning you will go to Blogger.com to log in to the control panel. Once logged in, however, you can adjust the settings to that the blog is published onto your own website. This Internet marketing blog is an example of what I'm talking about. I use Blogger to power this blog, and I have it set up to publish the content onto a sub-domain of my website (see website URL above).
• WordPress has more bells and whistles, but it's harder to get started with if you want to publish your marketing blog on your own web domain. Unlike Blogger, WordPress is a self-contained publishing system, which means you will need to download all of the program files and upload them onto your web domain.

Here's the good news. You can experiment with both of these blogging programs to see which one you like best, before installing anything onto your own domain. Go to WordPress.com and Blogger.com to set up a free blog on their hosting domains. Then you can play around with the features to see which publishing platform you prefer.

Step 2 -- Create a Content Plan

Long before you get to the outward aspects of a blog marketing program, you need to look inward and figure out what you should be writing about. What are your blogging goals? What do you hope to accomplish with your business blog? Who is your intended audience, and what information do they seek? These questions will help you identify the most important topics for your blog.

It's also a good idea to do some keyword research to see what kinds of relevant phrases people are searching through Google, Yahoo and other search engines. This is an important step for any blog marketing program, because it will partly determine the kind of search engine visibility and traffic you get. I recommend making a list of the top 50 phrases people are searching -- phrases that are directly related to your products, services and business goals. Put them into a spreadsheet for easy management.

Now that you've done some soul searching and some keyword research, you can start listing the topics you plan to blog about. It's not a rigid plan you have to slavishly follow. It's just a helpful document to give you guidance as you sit down to create a new blog post.

Step 3 -- Start Publishing Great Content

Before you start marketing your blog to the world, you should spend some time developing your content. Fortunately, blogging programs make this easy for you. If you can type an email, you can publish content through a blog. It has the same level of simplicity, so there's no reason you can't publish new information once a day, or every other day.

This is where your blog content plan comes into play. Refer to that document often for blogging ideas, and don't be afraid to deviate from your plan and write what comes to mind. Sometimes the best blog entries are the ones you never saw coming -- those ideas that just "flash" out of nowhere. So embrace them when they come.

Here's what you should take away from this step. There's no point in launching a blog marketing campaign until you have plenty of great content. In other words, you need to have a business blog worth visiting before you go out in search of visitors.

Step 4 -- Announce the Blog Through Relevant Channels

If you've been working hard on your content for several weeks, and you feel your blog is a valuable resource that people will like, you should start promoting it through relevant channels. Find other websites related to the topic you're blogging about, and email them about your blog. Explain why their readers / visitors would find your blog useful. Some of them will ignore you -- that's just a fact of life. But others will be happy to recommend your blog, especially if you've worked hard to make it a valuable resource.

While we are talking about resources, let me stress the importance of this. Your blog marketing plan will be far more successful if you strive to create the kind of blog that provides real value to readers. The best business bloggers realize that it's all about the audience, and giving them what they want. So they do exactly that -- they create content that helps their readers achieve a certain goal.

Step 5 -- Start Networking With Others

Blogging is part of the new "social" Internet experience. As a result, most business bloggers are eager and willing to connect with others online. By reaching out to other blog publishers, you can develop the kind of mutual relationship that benefits all parties involved. In the process, you can benefit from more search engine visibility, more traffic to your blog, and a greater degree of interaction and participation.