Recipe: Publish Your Own Writing with a Blog

Publishing a blog allows you to combine both writing and publicity techniques in one activity. As a blog author, you are publishing your own stories on the Web. So you are not only the writer, you are also the media outlet.

A blog allows you to post articles, tips, comments, essays, news, and resource links to a website easily and quickly. Many blogs also include photos, graphic images, and audio or video clips. Blogs can help you fill the pipeline by attracting new clients who find you through search engines, social media mentions, or links from other sites and blogs. They are also an excellent follow-up tool, and you’ll read more about that in Chapter 8.

To start authoring your own blog, you will need a blog theme and a series of blog topics. The concept for your blog should be a sustainable theme of continuing interest to your market niche. Coin a clever or evocative title for your blog that expresses the theme. For example, a communication skills trainer could name her blog “Can We Talk?” and a hypnotherapist could name his “Getting Out of the Habit.”

Visit several blogs aimed at your market niche to see what topics others are writing about. You’ll discover that some blog posts are lengthy articles or essays, and others are brief comments or tips. Many blog posts contain links pointing readers to articles, books, news, resource sites, and items written by other bloggers. You’ll also notice that authoring a blog takes commitment. Keeping your blog up to date will require posting to it regularly, once per week at minimum. You will need to develop a substantial number of topics to begin with, and keep coming up with new ones over time.

You create and update a blog using blogging platforms like WordPress or Typepad. Some platforms are free to use and some require a fee. A blog can be hosted on an existing website or you can set up a special site just for your blog. Many blogging platforms offer free hosting, although some require you to display their ads on your blog.

Like any other website, a blog must be promoted in order to receive a lot of traffic. But the good news about blogs is that they are naturally rich in keywords relevant to your market niche, so they often achieve good placement in search engines without as much additional effort on your part. Also, as you make new posts, your older posts will be archived, automatically creating multiple pages that the search engines will index. If the topics you write on are interesting, informative, and useful to people in your niche, other sites and bloggers will begin linking to your blog, sending more traffic your way.

When you first launch your blog, be sure to announce it to your clients, prospects, colleagues, and referral partners. Mention it in all your marketing materials, and link to it from your e-mail signature, any other websites you maintain, and all your social media profiles. You can also submit your blog to blog directories, such as Technorati or Blogs.com.

Each time you post, mention your new post in your social media updates. You may also wish to summarize your newest posts in your e-zine or broadcast e-mail updates.

Give your blog visitors a way to subscribe to your blog, so that they will know when you publish new posts. You can allow people to subscribe via their favorite RSS reader, such as Google Reader or Pulse. Or they can have your posts sent to them via e-mail. Some blogging platforms have this e-mailing feature built in, or you can add it with services like Feedburner or AWeber.

If setting up a blog for the first time seems too technically complex or you need design help, hire someone to help you with design and installation. After your blog has been created, you should have no trouble posting to it without assistance.