One of the most common questions I get as an SEO and long-time blogger is, “When should I start a blog?” And, in all honesty, it depends on the person and the business. But if you’re looking for some hard-core signs, I want you to shift your focus. Instead of thinking about when you should start a blog, I want you to consider the things you should do before starting a blog.
What should you do before starting a blog? Rather than one thing, there are actually four things you should do before starting a blog for your business. You want to have an optimized website, be comfortable and confident in your offers, track your leads and traffic sources, and know your audience.
Let’s break down what those things look like and what they don’t look like if you’re considering starting a blog –
If you love to listen to learn, catch the related episode on Everything SEO here:
What to Do Before You Start a Blog: 4 Must-Haves for Every Business Owner
First, I want to preface this by stating that blogs can have multiple purposes – in fact, there are multiple business owners with larger pre-existing audiences who start blogs to send them to rather than to create a new channel for new audience members to connect or find you. These four things are best for when you want to gain long-term traffic through Google and build long-lasting relationships with your community.
Let’s talk about the four things you should do before starting a blog:
#1. Optimize Your Website for SEO
You need to have a strong foundation if you want to start building out your blog. Optimizing your website for SEO looks like fixing any outstanding issues like random 404s, redirect chains, broken backlinks, slow page speeds, and having an SEO strategy in place for your main pages – aka targeting keywords and making sure all the backend details are filled out.
Having an optimized website will allow you to make the biggest impact possible with your blog. Even if you’re only able to do a self-audit or run your website through a free tool, tackling as many of those issues as you can before you start your blog can make a huge difference.
If you feel like you need a really good deep-dive into your website and content, I recommend looking into an SEO Audit, an offer that does all of that for you (and more).
#2. Get Comfortable and Confident in Your Offers
Or rather, get comfortable and confident in how you want to monetize. If you’re starting a blog as a business, it’s likely that in some way shape or form you want your readers to book with you, buy from you, or download your free resource – or potentially even listen to your podcast. All of these things determine the content you’re going to make.
For example, if you’re a copywriter you may want to try and attract copywriting clients so your content would involve a lot of copywriting tips and the problems that copywriting can solve, tailored to your own services of course.
But, if you’re a copywriter with a digital product shop and your goal is to make more passive sales, then your content would stem from your digital products. If your digital product teaches someone how to write a welcome sequence, then your blog posts would revolve around topics and problems solved by a good welcome sequence.
And you don’t have to focus on your offers, you can opt to focus on tool reviews (like my review on Pixistock) and collaborations for your affiliate offers or even bringing more awareness to your podcast because you’re great at conversions over there. Just remember that if you don’t know what your purpose or next step is in your blog post, neither will your readers.
#3. Have a Lead Tracker
This doesn’t have to be something super complicated and you should be tracking where your leads are coming from anyways, but this is one of the main things I recommend before starting a blog.
One of the reasons I love blogging is because you’re giving your audience little peeks into how you and your business think – your values, your quirks, and your beliefs. But, that doesn’t mean you should neglect the analytical side of it. You should be tracking if you’re generating new leads from your blogs.
You can do this by adding a drop-down question in your inquiry form that says “blog post” or “google” or if your call to action is an email sign-up, you should have a designated embed just for blog posts.
#4. Know Who Your Audience Is
Not just a surface level answer either, I want you to really know who you’re writing for before you start your blog. If you don’t know who your audience is, I guarantee that Google won’t know either and that kinda defeats the whole purpose of blogging.
Also, knowing who your audience doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re niching down, so don’t be scared to be specific in who you’re writing for. It could be as simple as women vs. men, adults vs. teens, business owners vs. homesteaders. Google loves to place your website where it needs to be and it looks at who your content and website are for and who best matches the search intent of their user.
Writing for your audience doesn’t need to be difficult either, just think about how your audience would want to be spoken to – what makes them comfortable and cozy? What makes them feel connected to you?
What Do You Do If You Don’t Have These Things When You Want to Start a Blog?
Go back and do what you can – and if you need a little help I have some amazing recommendations. But, go back and look at your copywriting and website, is it optimized for SEO and conversions? Look at your branding, do you have a brand strategy? Do you have your audience defined? Do you know and feel good about your offers?
I understand that your business may pivot or change in the future and that’s okay. But, to see the best results you need to have a consistent business that aligns with your content – if you’re constantly making changes to your business brand, audience, and offers, your blog no longer has the connection it needs.
As always, if you want to chat with me head over to Instagram and send me a DM. If you want to start a blog but you don’t want to do it yourself, check out my quarterly blog writing packages.
