How To Start A Blog: Amplify Your Inbound Marketing (Part 4)

Editor’s note: This post was originally published on 8/30/19 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehension.

This is the fourth blog in a series of articles highlighting the advantages of inbound marketing.

Catch the series here:

Inbound Marketing Strategies Score Outrageous Success (Part 1)

Inbound Marketing Services That Drive Revenue (Part 2)

Inbound Marketing Strategies: The Buyer Persona (Part 3)

How to Start a Blog: Amplify Your Inbound Marketing (Part 4)

SEO Marketing: A Crucial Component Of Your Inbound Strategy (Part 5)

How Social Media Marketing And Inbound Go Hand-In-Hand (Part 6)

Email Marketing Powers Your Inbound Strategy (Part 7)

Inbound Marketing Strategies To Solve Your Sales Problems (Finale)

You’ve probably heard this before: Blogging works. 

You have to do it. 

Why aren’t you doing it yet? 

You aren’t hearing this advice because it’s glorified. Blogging works, especially as part of your inbound marketing system.

Here’s how to start a blog and why this one factor will help power your entire marketing campaign.

Inbound Marketing Recap

The four pillars of an inbound marketing campaign are to attract, convert, close and delight customers. 

One of the ways to attract and convert an audience is knowing how to start a blog.

You need to educate your audience, help solve their problems, show them the viability of solutions and more. 

You can’t shout it from the mountaintops. If you do, chances are, you’ll be shouting to an audience of none.

But inbound blogging can give you an effective platform to speak to a rapt audience – one that is interested in what you have to offer.

How To Start A Blog

Here's what you need to know to get started.

1. Know Your Buyer Persona.

The first thing you need to do to begin blogging doesn’t involve writing at all. It requires that you get to know your audience – or in inbound marketing speak, your buyer persona. 

You see, you need to shoot at the right target (or audience) before you start writing.

Here’s why. If you're a B2B company selling HR software, your audience should need this same product.

But this is still a broad audience. You need to know if you’re marketing to:

• Large companies with lots of employees.
• Smaller businesses with less than 10 employees, for example.
• A specific industry.
• A certain field, such as insurance, medical services, etc.

Do you see how each audience would require a different approach? And how you COULDN’T write to ALL audiences?

Once you know your audience inside and out, then you can move onto the next step.

2. Write for your audience.

That’s the biggest piece of advice we give anyone who wants to know how to start a blog.

Sure, there’s SEO to worry about. And your sales funnel. And your leads. And automation. And about 400 other things.

But if you don’t build your blog on this foundation, it’ll be more likely to flop.

That’s because PEOPLE will read your blog.

If you don’t make it easy to read, insightful, and with a voice that matches your brand’s mission, you’ll be wasting your words – and your efforts.

To get you going in the right direction when starting your blog, here are some tips:

• Use a conversational tone and keep it light. People are attracted to blogs because they aren’t full of boring, standard advice found elsewhere.
• Make it unique. Use your experiences and background to offer tips that are different from everyone else’s blog.
• Do your research. Find out what your competitors are doing, and fill a void.

Now that you’ve put your audience first, you can move onto the nitty-gritty: search.

My, how things have changed.

It used to be that keywords ruled and were the only way to get found on the internet.

Now, pillar pages, content clusters and user intent or much more important.

Yes, keywords are still a component of a good blogging strategy, but if you’re just getting started, focus on answering your audience’s questions, speaking to their problems and challenges, and positioning yourself as an expert.

Let your marketing agency or marketing consultant worry about keywords and SEO.

Pro Tip: 

At Flight Media, we use an integrated approach of user intent, content clusters, pillar pages and keywords. Ask us about it! 

3. Send your blog to the right people.

Increase your blog’s reach with strategies that will amplify your efforts.

Here’s some advice about how to share the blog. 

You should send it to:

• The people in your company. They should read it so they know your vision and mission. We use a tool called Slack to notify everyone in the company when a blog is published so they’re reminded to share it across social media, too.

• Your social media profiles. This is key because you’ll increase the blog’s reach. As followers read and share the post, more people will be exposed to your brand and ideas. This sharing will also help search engines recognize the value of your content, and increase your rankings.
• Your email list. Everyone on your email list should get a message every time you publish a blog. If you had an email list of 10,000 subscribers and 5% of them would click to read your blog posts from an email, you'd immediately get 500 visits to that post!

Final Thoughts 

Take blogging seriously, because the benefits of your professional blog are huge.

As part of your inbound marketing strategy, you’ll attract the right audience, show search engines your site is valuable, and get leads.

This well-oiled machine all starts with knowing how to start a blog.