How to start a blog for your business

Last week, I talked a bit about the value of blogging and how it’s still worth your time and effort. If you missed the post and still need convincing, go check it out—I’ll wait here 😉

Hokay! Now that we’re all caught up—depending on your business maturity, there’s a few routes you can take.

Best way to start a blog for established businesses: use your CMS

If you have a website, you’re already most of the way there. Most popular content management systems (think: Wordpress, Squarespace, Hostinger, etc) have this functionality built in, and typically only need a few clicks to get going.

You might have to make some decisions like individual post layout, blog roll layout (aka the main landing page for your blog, where all the posts show up), and URL structure (ie, yourwebsite.com/blog), but other than that, you don’t need much.

I use Squarespace—here’s a peek at my blog’s back end

What makes it the best

Think of your website as one of the few digital properties you own—and it’s critically important to build equity in it. You do that by making it increasingly valuable and filling it with can’t-miss content.

Keeping your blog on your site helps you continually build backlinks and content to market, and keeps you much more in-tune with your site in general. (Have you ever felt like you just…forget about your website, or like it’s on set-it-and-forget-it mode? This forces you around that.)

If you want to see your site’s organic traffic moving up and to the right, blogging is one of the best ways to do it. And if you’re smart and pixeling your site with Facebook or LinkedIn’s tools, you’ll be building audiences that you can use to remarket to later if you choose.

☝Hot tip: take a few minutes to think through tags and/or categories—I’ve seen this get waaaaaay out of hand in a blog’s back end, especially for small businesses on the larger end of the spectrum. As the team grows, turns over, and tries to figure things out on their own, everyone uses their own tagging system and it’s extremely glutted. Make the bones of a system—not only will it keep you organized, it ultimately helps your strategy come together.

Best way to start a blog for freelancers and solopreneurs: Substack

Ever since I discovered Substack, I’ve been a little obsessed. I feel like every time I open the app, there are so many delicious posts waiting to be read, all of which are obsessively tailored to my interests. The more you interact, the better your algorithm gets.

Check out Substack’s interface—on the left is the social-media-like home feed, and on the right is their media feed.

What makes it the best

Substack is great when you don’t have an audience yet or are looking for community. It’s a narrower place to be discovered—instead of the entire Google universe at its fingertips, searches are pulling from thought leaders on the platform.

On the community side, it acts a little like social media: you can post notes, like other writers’ notes, share links to your latest long-form content, and more.

It’s also extremely media-rich and makes it SO much easier to repurpose content or explore other forms of content. For instance, you can record and embed an audio version of your blog post right in the app. You can add videos and photos if you like. You can then take those pieces and put them on other social media platforms.

If you build an audience, you can easily monetize your Stack as well—but make sure you’re providing an insane amount of value. I’ve already noticed many users complaining about the monetization system; it’s just not possible to shill out $8/month for everyone and everything. I get the sense that users are going to become extremely ruthless with who they invest in (as they should!)

☝Hot tip: If you’re going to go the Substack route, be prepared to engage. Discovery is easier there than in other places, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. It’s extremely community-driven, and you won’t be successful if you take a back seat.

Best way to start a blog for digital product creators: Kit (formerly ConvertKit)

Okay, so, this is kind of cheating—Kit isn’t really a blog tool. But it is a content creation tool that can work exceptionally well with long-form content.

And, look: we don’t always have time to create long-form content for every corner of the internet. If you have an email list and an audience, this is probably the most valuable route to you, and gets you in front of interested parties as much as you’d like—but still leaves plenty of room for repurposing.

Kit makes it SO easy to design a template, and they’ve broken down the steps of email marketing to be totally idiotproof.

What makes it the best

Sure, there are lots of similar tools out there (Kajabi, Beehiiv, Gumroad, I could go on), but there’s something so simple and beautiful about Kit that just sucks me in. It makes it so easy to create forms and landing pages; categorizing and tagging your subscribers is idiotproof, and you can publish your content to a blogroll-type page to continue linking back to it on social media, just as you would with a website.

It’s also seamless to set up a product, create drips, collect payments, and easily run a storefront. And, if you get to that point, you can monetize your newsletter here, too.

☝Hot tip: You can get started on Kit for absolutely free. The paid version opens up more features, but you can do plenty without it. I recommend this as a newsletter service for small businesses over something like Mailchimp or Constant Contact, even if you don’t plan on selling anything through your newsletter.

The hardest thing about blogging

By FAR the hardest thing you have to do? Just start. It doesn’t have to be good. Get out the crappy posts first when no one’s looking. You can make them perfect later and then market them all over again 😊