The Internet is literally smothered with new emerging blogs every day. However, the basic fact that separates each of these blogs from the others is the motive and the attitude responsible for their creation.
You can use the effective platform of your blog to highlight your business. Building a long-term business through blogging requires measured steps towards aligning your business to the creative side of blogging.
Balance of the business niche and blogging niche
Understand your specific motivation for creating the business. It is the key to the motive that will form the foundation of your blog. The niche of your business will be closely related to your blogging niche, so that your business turns up in the most popular circles of your target audience group.
For instance, if you own a start-up restaurant business, you will want to blog in the food and drinks niche; however, if your restaurant is on a special destination, you also need to relate your blog to travel destination specialties to put your restaurant on the map for your target audience to find you.
On the other hand if you want to make money out of discount coupons, as we do, then you need to find out cool discount deals around and blog about them; in our case we feature cool deals as that of photos.com and istockphoto discount deals.
Long-term plan for your business blog
Blogs are excellent platform to voice your opinion and highlight your business's individuality. Businesses do not turn successful overnight and in retrospect, your blog will need time and consistency to mature in to a super effective medium. Starting a blog with a long-term plan is good business sense. Prioritize between the frequency of your blog posts and the quality of your posts content.
You might want to take in to account that informative content will make it possible for you to connect with your audience, peers and gather search engine rankings with the right efforts. Frequency of posts can be fixed at something that you are comfortable with, keeping the frequency steady over time is more important.
Broad niche focus
You understand that your blog needs to relate to all the niche areas where you might find target audience to interest in your product or services of your company. However, blogging is an endeavor in itself. You cannot start a blog without an isolated view towards the specifications of your blogging niche.
You have to take calculated steps towards exploring each aspect of this niche, with creative information through blog posts, Improved SEO techniques as well as networking with niche peers.
If you keep a broad niche focus from the initial stage of your blog, you can include other niches in the progressive stages of your blog plan. This is a more through approach to keep your blog burnout rate to the minimum.
You can establish your expertise in your niche with a sustained duration of blogging; however, it is important to keep up with interesting topics and news for your blog posts. The eventuality of burning up niche topic ideas decreases, if you increase you niche horizons before that outcome.
Promotional campaign through blogging
Inflation is a very real problem and it has affected most aspects of the market. The costs of advertisements, in various media, are ever increasing. A business blog is an intelligent asset for cost effective business promotion. You will have to take the time to establish your blog's position in popular search engine pages.
The search engine ranking determines the probability of people landing on your business blog every time they search for your product market. Keyword optimization is the first step in SEO and networking with related niche blogs is a great way to share the potential target viewers.
Social media sites to compliment your business blog
Technology has evolved consistently over time and the modern age is rife with the new trend called social media networking. Social media sites are in vogue with a lot many people more than any other form of media campaigns, currently in the market.
With this kind of statistics, it is important to use the potential of social media sites to increase your blog's success rate. Create official business profile pages on popular social networking sites. Promote all your blog posts via these sites to get a better viewership.
The idea of using a blog to create a long-term business is primarily based on exposing your business to a global market online. It is important to support this fact with an effective offline support system.
Create a network of mail service, customer support, as well as shipping services to make sure that you can deliver your promises to the customers. In case your services are oriented online, you should follow up with potential customers for long-term business networking.
Jane is a blogger who is in it for the long term. In addition to the above tips, she recommends bloggers use images to increase the value of their blog posts. Visit WeightLossTriumph to see her review article about Photos.com. Her iStockphoto coupon codes are available here. Photos.com and iStockphoto are fantastic sources for quality images that bloggers can use to accompany their articles.
13 replies to "Use your Blog as a prime medium to build a long-term business"
Hello Jane,
Nice Post…People are building blogs mostly for three main niches – make money online, weight loss and self-improvement, without having enough knowledge about these topics. They end up abandoning their blogs once they found out that blog is not the most ideal business for them.
Thanks for the share…
Noah
The idea of using a blog to create a long-term business is primarily based on exposing your business to a global market online. It is important to support this fact with an effective offline support system..
Online business is not to meant to get all the eggs in one basket instantly. It demands patience,long term planning and communication.
To know your customer is the one major component in building a successful blog.That is why it is so important to blog about what you are passionate about.
You are a good example of what a prospective customer is all about and what they are looking for, what their needs are, etc.
Hi Jane,
What a fantastic outline of how to literally chart out one’s online success.
The part about strategizing for longterm success especially resonated with me. In the relatively short time I’ve been blogging regularly, I have seen this aspect to be a stumbling point for so many. Having the longevity mindset and the foresight to plan for this being an ongoing focused journey is critical. Nothing happens overnight and it’s important that the online marketer is willing and able to align their expectations to this fact so that they do not walk away too soon because they think that “it wasn’t working.”
I also liked your point about broad niche focus. I think that this actually covers the online marketer in large ways as it relates to Jim’s concern over too much focused attention without knowing whether something will pan out longterm. It’s really all about balance, as you said in your first point. To be successful, we must be prepared to be flexible and apply common sense with our blogging efforts so that if one focused area is not providing the financial outcome we were hoping for that we haven’t dug ourselves too deeply into that niche alone to not have more reach and appeal to other interested readers.
Exceptionally well thought-out article, Jane. Thanks for the fantastic insight!
Highest regards,
Cat Alexandra
Great post! I believe that your blog is like your way of communicating with other people without having a chat with them. Also it gives your readers idea of what kind of person you are. Also, your blog is a good representation of your personal brand and character as a person.
Your are very remarkable Jane. I really believe that having a good understanding of what you really want your blog to be can really make your blogging business more productive and successful in the long run.
Hi Jane
I love the long term plan approach – contrary to Jim Syyap above, everything I do, I am planning it for the long term, to build and grow,e xactly as I am. Anything that is truly worth something will take that bit longer to build and I am now starting to reap the rewards of things I have done earlier this year.
Great post
Nicky
Jane,
Isn’t it wonderful all the things we can do with our blogs to reach our audience and connect with our community. I love what you wrote when you said you should network with niche peers. This is one of my favorite :leveraging” factors.
This allows new blogs to create a community on their blog as well as with other blogs. This gives the blog it’s energy and life. It also levels the playing field sort of speak with other more popular blogs. But like you mentioned there are other factors to consider.
The balance you referred to between business and blogging is key to connecting and engaging with your audience. I think this is equally as vital as building the community in the first place. By letting some of the personal stuff shine you are actually connecting more. It’s refreshing to see these points of view.
Ken Pickard
The Network Dad
Hi Jane,
Welcome to Bob and Rosemary’s place, always a pleasure to see you.
People will hear this so much over time but it’s the truth, consistency is the key to building a solid business online. I think where a lot of people go wrong is that they aren’t consistent with their efforts in any or all of the areas you have pointed out. People often wonder, how did they become so successful? Consistency on a daily basis is the only way you are going to get your information out there in front of the right people.
I do somewhat agree with Jim on the long-term goals. In the past I have had some life changing things happened that destroyed all the goals I had set and it was more than once. I do have goals set as far as six months in advance though because I am aiming to achieve a certain thing but know that focusing on what I’m doing in the present moment is my main goal right now.
Thanks for sharing this with us Jane! Here is wishing you the best for the upcoming year!
~Adrienne
Jane I believe that is where the problem lies with most bloggers. I believe your blog should be built on your passion because that is the only way you can continue even when the money is not coming in. I am glad you gave the highlights on how to do this.
Great post Jane, keep it up and I will see you again before the year ends
Hi Jane,
wonderful guest post here on Bob’s and Rosemary’s blog. I am glad you stress the importance of a consistent longterm approach (in my words, hope I got it). When we blog, we can invest time instead of money. This is critcal for me, because as an MLM blogger, I need to always observe the duplication. In addition to that, it’s not possible in industries like MLM to buy one’s way up. You don’t want to scare people people with sales ads either because it only means that we are not focused on our business.
Thanks for sharing your insights.
Be blessed
Oliver
I have been an entrepreneur-wannabe for some time now. In my experience, 9 out of 10 businesses that I start is going to fail, no matter how fool-proof and long term plans I have. Because of this, I do not do long term business plans of any kind anymore. I just know the general direction that I am headed, then take things one day at a time.