Small Business Blog, where to begin.

        So as I explained in “Blog writing from a Old School Internet Geek”, I wanted to share my journey building a good blog, I have decided to build a Technology small business blog around my small consulting business, what I have come up with here are some factors I think are important in building a successful small business blog, I have 9 or 10 Ideas so I will break this section into 2 separate blog postings, I will link to all of them at the end for easy access.

1. First decision in the creation of my small business blog was deciding what type of customers I am looking for and where do they come from, I also wanted to make sure I can provide content that will help them, also important is finding out where they hang out when online, sites or related content, maybe forums and even chat rooms.

2. Another important decision I needed to make was deciding if I wanted to have my blog be part of my business website like www.tech4000.us or did I  want it to have its own address like www.freesupportforums.com I had to take into consideration a few things, I think I want to eventually make my blog its own business and maybe sell some advertising there, also I figured that if I keep them eparate it will be easier when trying to rank on the search engines.

3. Next thing I considered was my domain name, and keyword choices I might want to use when targeting a niche, a great tool I found was Google Keywords, a great keyword suggestion tool you can use to research a keyword that you might want to use when listing your site, also keep in mind, if your small business blog is going to have video then you might also want to use a resource like the YouTube Keyword Tool  pick keywords that rank high the google search engine. When choosing a good domain name, you will want it to be brandable, and recognizable with respect to your business, you’ll want it to have potential in the various search engines, and most important, that it sets you apart from the competition and is as short in characters as possible.

4. The next decision for me was a fun one, choosing my Blogging Platform and Theme, I have always loved using Joomla for my platform, you can choose whatever you like, if you’re a novice to the blogging world, you might want to start at Blogger, the theme of your small business blog should be directly related to your niche, take for example, with a technology blog, I wouldn't want to have a summer theme, or use pink and blue, I believe this is the best part of the process, so when setting up your small business blog take your time on this step.

5. Next thing I decided to do was setup my Social media accounts, I will list the few that I used, there are other options, browse around and choose the ones you think will help, or match your Niche, I decided to keep my personal social media accounts separate from my business, depending on your Niche you can decide to do either, Google+ and Facebook will allow you to create business pages, so you can separate them.

                 Google+

                 Facebook

                 Twitter

                 YouTube

                 Linkedin

Sofar this is where I am at in launching a blog, I have focused on launching a Small Business blog, this seemed to me to be the best choice since I will be applying these ideas to my blog at www.tech4000.us, you can apply this setup to any type of blog with little modification.I would love to hear any other ideas you might have that can help anyone get started in launching a small business blog.

I have posted Part 2 in this Mini Series “Launching a Small Business Blog” part of my series titled “Blog writing from a Old School Internet Geek” 

We will be covering topics like, Measuring your ROI, Drafting posts, and press releases, as well as Google Adwords, Google Adsense and more.