Culled from SME Tool Kit Nigeria

There are a number of reasons for blogging, with several good ones among them too. But first, it’s important to focus on where best you should start your blog; keeping in your mind the fact that sharing actually highlights your desire to care for others.

In this contest, the key points shown below serve as a useful guide for starting your first blog:

1. Reality Check
Carry out a reality check. This will help in establishing why you need to blog in the first place. Furthermore, it also plays a decisive role in helping you decide the ultimate design for your blog, in addition to catering to its content as well.

2. Your Supporters
Establish who your supporters are in real terms and the sort of relationship they have with your potential target market. Not only will you be sharing your content with them, it’s just as probable that they will be heavily involved with your potential target market as well.

3. Your Potential Target Market
Carry out a research on what your potential target market really cares for. Establish for yourself what these prospective viewers commonly read and share online. Design a graphic chart and then fill it in with essential topics and key phrases that can be proven to show some distinct impact on your potential target market. By selecting appropriate keywords, you can enhance the visibility of both your blog as well as website.

4. Content Calendar
Create your own content calendar, with a single blog post for each month being more advisable. In what would otherwise be deemed a best case scenario, churning out one high quality blog post every hour on the hour, similar to that accomplished by a well-lubricated news agency, would be simply idealistic. That would however be less feasible for every business type. So, it would be best to select 12 key topics on which to blog, and allocate one month for each respectively.

5. Word Spilling
Simply adhere to your writing and keep spilling out everything you have onto a word document or a sheet of paper. Select the points which you intend putting across to your target audience and proceed by supporting each one of them with four to five well established facts. At this stage, it’s not really important to antagonise yourself with the blog title, page linking or images. That’s the next step.

6. Editing & Refining
After having finished writing your content, giving it a title, giving it appropriate pages links, and adding images if desired, put in the final finishing touches. You can if deemed necessary still go back to initiate any essential changes, even after your post is actually live.

Now start sharing the blog post on any social media platform that you favour. But refrain from auto publishing! Facebook is not Twitter, Twitter is not Pinterest, Stumbleupon is not Google Plus – hope you are getting the picture! If you need any help, simply drop us line.

SME Tool Kit