Blogging Tips for Home Business Builders

If you’re building a home business on the Internet, it might be time to consider starting your own blog. These blogging tips will help you get a clear vision for what you want to do with your blog, and key things you should think about when getting it started.

Your home business can benefit from blogging in many ways. If you are in a “people and relationship business” like network marketing, you can use your blog to create and highlight your personal brand and attract prospects for your products or opportunity.

If you are more of an Internet marketer seeking to sell products and services to a niche market, these blogging tips will help you as well.

It really isn’t hard to start a blog, just keep in mind that it takes some work and consistency to “get found” online but you can do it!

Ten Blogging Tips for Home Business Builders

1. Be Clear on Your Purpose

It’s critical for you to be clear on why you are blogging. Is your primary purpose to promote your personal brand and build credibility in your field? Are you more interested in directly promoting a business opportunity you are involved in?

I suggest that you have a “home base” with the purpose of promoting and branding YOU. This is a blog that will always serve that purpose, even if for some reason you switch to a difference business opportunity later. This is your credibility and brand builder – I think it’s best to create content about your specific opportunity elsewhere.

2. Choose a Professional Theme

Choose a professional blog theme that reflects you and your purpose in a professional way. Since this will be focused more on branding and business, you’ll want it to have a clean, crisp design. I can’t recommend free themes, due to a lack of support and possible bugs in the coding. Paid themes are optimized to be search engine friendly and come with more features and support. Don’t go on the cheap with this one.

3. Maintain Consistency in Your Content

Your blog will be your brand, so whatever niche you choose, maintain consistency. You want to establish leadership in your niche. For example, a network marketer might create content around the theme of “what it takes to be successful with a network marketing business”. Always strive to appeal to your chosen audience. If you deliver consistent content that answers their questions and helps them solve problems, or uplifts and motivates them, they will come back again and again.

4. Update Your Blog Frequently

This is one of those blogging tips you see a lot, because it’s important. People just expect blogs to be updated often. Static websites are designed to convey specific information over a period of time, but blogs should be more dynamic. Posting fresh content often helps keep your fans coming back frequently to see what you’re up to.

5. Use Social Widgets and Invite Visitors to Share

The Internet home business community, as much as any, knows that any list of blogging tips would be incomplete without mentioning the social aspects of blogging. There are many reasons to be social, not the least of which is to help attain search engine rankings which bring you even more traffic.

Use social sharing widgets for the most popular sites (Facebook Share, Facebook Like, Twitter, Google+, these are a good start). Especially important – invite readers at the end of each post to share your content if it helped them.

6. Build a Presence on Popular Blogs in Your Niche

Do you want more traffic, more visitors, and more branding for you and your content? Of course! Find authority blogs in your niche, visit them, and leave intelligent comments to posts. If the other visitors leave links to their blog in comments, visit them and comment if you like their content. Doing this will help you get more exposure and familiarity with others in your niche, which will in turn help you get more traffic and reputation as well!

7. Keep Up to Date With Plugins

WordPress plugins can help you add many new features to your blog. As you are visiting different authority blogs in your niche, see what plugins they seem to be using. There are some excellent plugins that help visitors share your content, as well as provide social proof. I found one recently that creates a widget to display my most popular posts, based on Twitter and Facebook shares. Things like this encourage your readers to check out that content, and gives it more appeal and authority (because visitors see that other people have shared it).

8. Enhance the Readability of Your Content

One of the blogging tips to help keep readers on your site longer is this – use images to enhance the appearance of your content, and write in short paragraphs (2-4 sentences). Images related to the topic of the post are just a nice addition (use professional quality images). Breaking up the sentences makes it a lot easier on the eyes. Have you noticed a tendency to just skip reading posts that have very long blocks of text? I know I have.

9. Always Be a Student

While the typical list of blogging tips might start by stating how simple blogging is, it’s still important to understand that the Internet changes constantly and grows, and blogging platforms and tools grow right along with it. I’ve been amazed at how many new plugins and tools for enhancing and marketing a home business blog are released each year. Strive to keep up to date on the latest stuff.

10. Be Who You Are

Blogging tips aside….even if you get all the technical blogging stuff right, the heart and soul of your blog is still YOU. It’s great if you admire certain leaders in your chosen niche, but always remember how important it is to be YOURSELF. You personality, style, and unique charm will shine through every post you do. This is why some bloggers are so much more popular than others who may seem to publish better content. Personality and style of delivery.

I know a guy in the network marketing niche who has a style that is different from any other I’ve seen. He is brief, direct, warm, and very dedicated (posts almost every day). His posts are not works of art, aren’t always formatted perfectly, don’t always look like the textbook post, but guess what? He is massively popular and gets many thousands of visitors every month. Why? Because his personality and style compels people to listen to his stuff. It’s that simple. He IS himself and it pays off big.

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