So you want to launch a blog for your business… what are you planning to post? What’s the purpose? 9 times out of 10, business owners jump headlong into business blogging with the idea that it’s going to generate business. That’s true in many cases but it’s not like unlocking your front door and letting customers in. Business blogging, like any part of content marketing, requires a sound strategy in order to generate a return. Understanding the 5 W’s of content marketing (and especially blogging) will help you focus your efforts and avoid some of the most common pitfalls.

• Why: Why are you creating content and going after business blogging in the first place?
• Who: Who are you writing content for? More importantly, who are you?
• What: What is it you want to achieve by writing and posting content online?
• When and How: When and how will you be creating the content?
• Where: Where are you going to post and share the content online?

These are all extremely important to refining and developing your business blogging strategy. Let’s take a look at each individual question.

1) Why are you creating content?

You need to understand your goals – not just in content marketing but overall. You should have existing goals in place in your business such as growth, new customer acquisition, improved brand visibility, etc. Are you creating content to work toward existing goals, to work toward new goals or are you just playing follow the leader because your competitors started business blogging campaigns.

2) Who are you writing content for?

There’s a lot that goes into understand your audience. You need to understand who you’re writing for because it’s important to know what they like, what they need, what they dislike, how they find information and how they process that information, and most importantly – how you can help them. You have to know your customers well enough to know what their biggest problems are.

3) What do you want to achieve with your content?

What effect do you want your content to have on your audience? You need to identify what you want them to do once you engage them with the content through business blogging. With that in mind you also need to have a clean plan on how to measure the success of your blogging campaigns. In most cases you want to help your audience and supply a solution to build trust and credibility. Ask yourself how you can anticipate their needs so they see you as a trusted source of information.

4) When and how are you developing content?

Not only must you decide how often you’ll be working business blogging into your marketing schedule but you need to decide how it will get written and who will handle it. Some companies try to handle the content creation in house. If you have a staff with the time to do so, or you work it into a job description for a certain class of employee, then you’re golden. Many other companies outsource their business blogging so they can concentrate on running their business. Decide which is right for you.

5) Where are you going to share your content?

Typically with business blogging a company will develop a blog within their own domain structure so that it fits seamlessly with the site content. Others create a completely separate site developed specifically to be an educational resource free of any obvious links to the sales content of a typical corporate website. You’ll need to plant he most appropriate strategy for your brand and decide how the content will be found, accessed and shared among your audience.

Is business blogging for everyone? No – there are some industries that will do much better using other forms of content marketing. It’s always worth a small investment however, because the potential benefits come quickly when a proper strategy is developed and implemented.