How to Start a Successful Blog, Summaries of Marketing Management

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H O W T O

Star t a

Successful

Blog

Introduction

Identifying Your Blog’s Purpose

Determining Your Blog’s Goals

Mapping and Planning Your Content

Setting Up Your Blog

Creating Your First Blog Posts

Promoting Your Blog

Analyzing and Optimizing Blog Performance

Monetizing Your Blog

Conclusion

Table of Contents

HubSpot Content Management System

HubSpot offers a content management system (CMS) that helps businesses manage their website and blog easily from one place. Our platform optimizes your content for various devices and for conversions. Try our comprehensive, all-in-one CMS and marketing platform and ramp up your marketing and sales efforts at any level of expertise.

HubSpot Academy Business Blogging Course

Are you ready to take your blogging skills to the next level? Prefer to learn via video courses? HubSpot Academy offers a course with 3 lessons and 14 videos from our trained instructors, as well as quizzes to help you learn more and ultimately master business blogging.

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When many professional bloggers sit down to write a blog post, they often have a fictional representation of their target persona in mind. They may even have a physical picture of this fictional person tacked up at their workspace to help focus. Creating a buyer persona is a great way to identify how you’ll be using your blog. What is this ideal customer searching for online? Where do they get their information?

Let’s say you are a meal delivery service. Your ideal customer is a busy, 25-40 year old professional who lives a healthy lifestyle and earns an upper-middle class salary. In business, this is called a buyer persona. Buyer personas are a representation of your ideal customer guided by your own data and market research.

Ways to identify buyer personas for blogging

Dig through your data and look for patterns.

• Are most of your top customers a certain age?
• Do they live in a particular region? Use forms on your website to collect relevant data.
• Ask for company size, title, and other information that may help you identify your target audience Survey your sales team and find out what attributes the best customers have in common. Interview customers and prospects. Ask them how they found your product or service, why they like it, and who they may recommend it to.

Identifying Your

Blog’s Purpose

FEATURED RESOURCE HubSpot Make My Persona Tool

Consider your blog’s relationship to your company. It can exist as its own entity or be incorporated into your website and brand. For HubSpot, our blogs are a part of our core brand and on the subdomain blog.hubspot.com, which is in our main navigation under “Resources.”

For SEO purposes, this helps your company build authority for your primary domain while maintaining your brand. Having a separate domain for your blog may make sense for certain business situations, like if three similar companies are starting a blog together under one domain. Keeping your blog aligned with your brand identity and as a subdomain or page on your main website will help improve rank and authority for your company.

How your company and blog

are connected

Like we mentioned before, blogs can be used for different purposes, meaning they will have different goals depending on the use. When determining your blog’s goals, start with your purpose.

• Why are you creating this blog?
• What do you want your reader to do with your blog?
• What will success look like 3 months from now? 6 months? 3 years?

Since blogs are a long-term content strategy, you’ll need to choose goals and milestones to track progress and analyze which posts, times, lengths, and keywords perform best. We’ll tackle metrics later, but for now, it’s time to explore some blog goals and the pros and cons of each.

GOAL

Drive traffic For this goal, your primary goal for the blog is to drive new viewers to your website or product pages. To achieve this goal, your main activities would be keyword research, frequent publishing, and link-building efforts.

Determining Your

Blog’s Goals

PROS Low cost

CONS Takes time, not a quick-hit option, competition for keywords

GOAL

Retain/convert customers

Blogs can be a great way to keep your audience up-to-date with product features, explore new or industry-specific ways to use your service or tool, or a place to feature customers who are using your product extremely well. After all, it’s easier to sell to current customers than acquire new ones.

PROS Less expensive than attracting new pros- pects, turns customers into promoters and brand advocates, success stories help convert others

CONS More timely to gather info and work with partners/product teams to create content than just writing evergreen or topic-based content

GOAL

Brand awareness Brand awareness is the extent to which people know about your company. By sharing your knowledge and creating a voice and direct dialogue with your audience, you can help grow your brand identity and reach. To drive brand awareness, try guest blog posts and collaborations as well as frequent social media publishing.

PROS Promotes your business as an expert, allows you to steer the conversation about your brand

CONS Hard to measure, time consuming to post and analyze social media efforts, takes time to see results

You’ll need to think about: How frequently you can create content What types of content will you post Your goals for the blog How social media will factor in

Creating and publishing a blog for a certain goal is a strategic move and requires planning and research. You can search which keywords are most popular in your industry or niche and how people search for your brand, then tailor your content and marketing strategies accordingly. Since Google is the top search engine around the world with 70% of the search market share, we’ll focus on their algorithm when it comes to ranking.

When thinking about keywords, Google’s algorithm considers a lot when surfacing content—beyond the blog post itself. You’ll need a comprehensive blog strategy and a willing team to set yourself up for success later down the line.

And if you’re interested in learning the steps to create meaningful content for your audiences, check out General Assembly’s free content marketing lesson.

Mapping and Planning

Your Content

Topic clusters +

pillar pages

Topic clusters are the latest and greatest in search engine algorithm changes. Basically, the algorithm looks not only at a given page or topic, but how it relates to other topics that fall under the same “umbrella” or pillar.

In this diagram, the main subject is at the center, the pillar page. This should be a broad subject. Let’s go back to the meal delivery service from our buyer persona example. Say the pillar content is pairing wine with food. Some cluster content ideas could be how to pair red wines with meals, how to host a wine tasting event, or how to use wine while cooking. In each of these topic cluster blog posts, you’d link back to the main pillar page using the same anchor text, for example “pairing wine with food.”

TOPIC CLUSTERS

To plan out your own pillar pages and map out your topic clusters, you can reuse some of your keyword research. Start by listing out your most broad search terms. Come up with 5-10 pillar pages. Then, brainstorm 15-20 content clusters for each pillar page. Make sure they are specific, long-tail keywords for the topic clusters.

Pillar pages should be a comprehensive, long-form blog post that include everything someone would want to learn about the main subject. For “Pairing Wine with Food” as a pillar page, you could include sections on types of white wines, types of red wines, common flavor palettes in each, pairing wines with foods, how to set up a wine tasting, and more.

Publishing cadence

How often and when to post will largely depend on what your company does, how big your company is, and how much of an audience you’re looking to attract. That being said, the more you blog, the more traffic you’ll attract over time.

And more traffic means more leads and more customers. As a team, it’s your job to decide how much time you’re willing to invest in your blog. But as a general rule of thumb, once a day or a few times a week is a good place to start.

Prior to launch, you can build up a bank of evergreen content (content that is always relevant and isn’t tied to anything time-based) which will give you a cushion to get a team or process up and running to keep up with your publishing cadence. Try a CMS (content management system) like HubSpot where you can schedule and plan content as drafts or as scheduled posts for the future.

Balancing content types

When it comes to content matter and post style, blogs are extremely versatile. You can post infographics, how-to posts, list posts, newsjacking posts, slideshares, editorials, etc. Evergreen content means posts that are always relevant. These types of posts are helpful for growth, but too many and folks will think a robot is publishing your content. Make sure to mix it up with topical posts, newsjacking articles (jumping on a news trend and quickly relating it to your industry), and announcements. The team over at Flying Hippo swears by the 80% rule—80% evergreen content and 20% topical/editorial/time-sensitive content—as the best breakdown.

Both post types are beneficial to your business. Evergreen content gains momentum over time and can grow to rank as a top article for a given topic. Editorial or newsjacking posts tend to perform well at the start and tail off after a couple of weeks. The combination of these types of posts will help your blog grow and keep growing over time.

Over time, analyze which formats perform best to tailor your content strategy toward your audience. The more formats you try out from the beginning, the better your data will be.

In order to successfully launch and maintain a blog, you’ll need an effective content management system (CMS)—a digital system that enables you to host digital content. While identifying your target persona and generating content ideas is the strategic side of launching a blog, now you’ll need to consider the equally important technical side.

Choosing a CMS for your blog What to look for in a CMS

EASE OF USE If you don’t have a lot of technical support at your company, choose a CMS that’s easy to use. Most content management systems come with templates you can use or support to help you design it, so make sure you choose one that will work for the skills on your team.

KEY METRICS YOU CAN TRACK

Does the CMS allow you to track metrics like conversion rates, page views, and where your traffic is coming from? Analyzing the success of your blog will be incredibly important post-launch, so make sure your CMS allows you to easily track the success of your efforts.

RESPONSIVENESS

60 percent of all searches on Google come from mobile, which means it’s essential for your blog to be optimized for any device that your user opens content on. A CMS that automatically makes your content responsive to device type is a must for marketers in today’s mobile and tablet world.

Content Management System

Request a demo

Once your post is out in the world for the first time, you can go back and edit, but you’ll miss out on data from before the change... if you haven’t set up tracking properly. To set up blog analytics, you can use a tool like Google Analytics or use HubSpot’s blog tools in the CMS.

Most CMSs will have built-in blog page analytics. From there you can learn how many people viewed a certain page on your blog and you may be able to see more like what devices they’re on, where they’re located, bounce rate, and time on page. If you prefer Google Analytics for tracking, install the Google Analytics code on your blog (usually in the header.) Here’s how to install the GA code on a HubSpot blog.

When sharing blog posts on social media and running campaigns to promote blogs, make sure to use UTM codes on the end of your blog sharing URLs. UTM codes can track campaigns, sources, mediums, pieces of content, and terms.

Setting up tracking and analytics (^) Designing Your Blog

Once you’ve chosen a CMS, it’s time to design your blog and optimize it for search engines and lead generation— turning visitors into prospects and, ultimately, customers. To accomplish this, you’ll need a blog design that’s easy to access and shareable.

Most content management systems will offer you free templates that you can modify and use if your team has less design experience. Need a little inspiration for designing your blog? Check out these awesome examples.

Making CTAs and conversion points

Think of your high-performing blog content like real estate. You’re getting lots of traffic through this one central location and the traffic is people who are at least somewhat interested in the general realm of what you have to offer. CTAs are a way to flag down those who may be interested in you and offer them something more.

Blogs can have many types of CTAs. These include pop-ups, header bars, slide-ins, in-text CTAs, buttons, image CTAs, and more. You can also include links or buttons to share posts on social media, email to a friend, or save the link to your reading list.

When choosing which action you’d like your reader to perform, consider if this piece of content would attract a visitor/prospect or lead/existing customer. For prospects, offer another piece of related content or a downloadable template or infographic. For leads, offer a course or access to a personalized demo of your product or service.

CALL TO ACTION

When working with developers to create your first successful blog, make sure to include them in the planning process as early as possible. Your developer teammate may note up front that developing in WordPress may not be compatible with your CMS or tracking. Then, if your team had already decided on features, templates, or styles, you would have to start from square one with your developer’s recommendation for a CMS.

Working with developers

Make sure to give plenty of time for development and give yourself a cushion for unforeseen technical difficulties. Present your developer with a vision for the blog and be clear about what you’ll need. List out requests like:

Slide-in CTAs The ability to tag posts A featured image for each post Comments/no comments A feed of recent posts Social shares on each post

Use a project management software or another way to organize the plan for your blog launch, and make sure it’s clear who will manage the blog moving forward. Work with your developer(s) to ensure that everyone is on the same page when it comes to updating the blog, being able to edit and publish posts, and who should be trained on how to manage the backend or any templates.