The next big step for advertising your company: Blogging

When there are so many startups out there, and you want yours to be the one on top, holding a board saying “I have exactly what you’re looking for! Here I am!”, what does an entrepreneur do?
Advertise!!

Advertising your brand or product over the internet is an inexpensive and effective way to reach out to your customers. Starting a blog for your company will
• Increase your visibility
• Add value to your product
• Share your skills and knowledge
• Encourage interaction from customers
• Let people know what’s new in the company

Many blogging platforms come with built in themes and features and you can create your own unique blog in minutes. They offer you a free domain name (like “.blogspot.com”) and allow you to publish your own blog. There are a few major competitors on the internet, namely WordPress, Blogger (by Google), and Ghost.

So which one is worth your time? WordPress is a user friendly, free, simple website that allows you to create and manage your blog without having to know web design or code. Its versatile, and you can easily move to other platforms or your own domain name. It also has support for mobile and desktops which makes it the most popular. Blogger is simple and easy to start with as well, however Google owns all your information and its difficult to move to other platforms. Ghost is a new upcoming blogging platform, is very easy to start with and is a great alternative to WordPress. However, it does not come with free web hosting and its harder to find support for it online. You can check out Ghost – https://ghost.org/ and Blogger – https://www.blogger.com/ here.
We’ll be introducing WordPress here today as its ideal for businesses and offers a number of great features.

Step 1: Go to https://wordpress.com/

To get started, pick the type of business you’re in and sign up with your email-id. You can choose from the millions of themes and templates WordPress offers and choose a name for your blog. Try to keep the url name relevant to your business (eg. startupfreak.com) and easy to remember.

Step 2- Select your category                                                                    

step 2

Step 3- Select a template

step 3

Step 4 – Select your theme

step 4

Step 5- Select a name for your blog and a free plan to start with.

Step 6 – Sign up with your email-id and create a password.

Step 6 – Publish your very first blog! 

Under posts (on the sidebar), you can add new articles, edit existing ones and schedule a time and date for each article to be published. This feature is useful if you want to post an article at a future date. WordPress allows you to put tags on your posts, which could link readers to other posts with the same tags. Tags are words describing what the article is about, which category it falls under as well keywords used in the article. Blogs are not as formal as business meetings, so feel free to make your articles a little personal (as if you were writing to a friend), but remember to keep the content of the post about your products and topics relevant to your product. Some blogs include an FAQ to answer questions about their products. Don’t forget to add pictures! Visuals are a great addition to any blog.

Next, you can use their sharing options to connect your blog with your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ accounts etc. WordPress offers a set of standard plug ins which include sharing buttons for readers to share posts with their friends on social media. They also have a statistical plugin that gives you a visitor and likes count as well as most popular posts over days, months or years.

Another important feature of blogs are comments. They’re a great way to interact with potential and existing customers while finding out their preferences and how the marketplace is changing. WordPress has a very easy to use form builder under plugins where readers can send you queries, or any other information you might want to obtain.
Getting started with WordPress is easy, and there’s plenty of support available online (Click here for the WordPress faq- https://en.support.wordpress.com/category/faq/).
With the internet becoming the new global marketplace, it’s essential you reach out to your customers as soon as possible and blogs are a great place to start, whichever industry you’re in!

About the author

– Srishti is passionate about learning new things, writing and understanding the startup landscape. Currently studying computer science and interested in business and technology

About Sangeeta

CEO & Founder StartupFreak, Economics & Marketing is her favorite subject and focuses on helping small and medium enterprise to set up their business online

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