Building a Business Blogging Strategy From Scratch

By 2005, there’s no shortage of tools for starting a business blog. The harder part is building a strategy around one instead of just switching it on and hoping something happens. Here’s a step-by-step approach for a business starting from nothing.

Step 1: Choose a platform based on who’s running it

WordPress, free and self-hosted, gives the most control but requires someone comfortable with basic server setup. TypePad, Six Apart’s hosted subscription service, trades some flexibility for a setup a non-technical marketing lead can manage alone. Movable Type sits in between, self-hosted but with a gentler learning curve than a raw WordPress install for some teams. Pick based honestly on who will be maintaining it day to day, not on which tool looks most impressive in a demo.

Step 2: Decide on ownership and cadence before writing a single post

The single biggest reason company blogs go stale is that nobody was ever formally responsible for them. Before launch, assign an actual person, not a department, to own posting, and agree on a realistic cadence, whether that’s twice a week or twice a month. A blog that posts consistently every other week beats one that posts daily for a month and then goes silent for three.

Step 3: Set up RSS distribution properly from day one

A blog without a working, easy-to-find RSS feed is leaving most of its potential audience on the table. Make sure the feed autodiscovery tag is in your page’s header so browsers and readers can detect it automatically, and consider running the feed through FeedBurner for subscriber tracking and a cleaner, more memorable feed URL. This is infrastructure work, not content work, but it determines whether anyone besides direct visitors ever sees a new post.

Step 4: Plan for comments, and for comment spam

Comments are part of what makes a blog feel like a conversation rather than a broadcast, but by 2005 comment spam, automated posts stuffed with links to unrelated sites, has become a real nuisance for anyone running an open comment section. Google, along with several other search engines and blog platforms, introduced the “nofollow” attribute this year specifically so link spam in comments would stop passing search engine credit to the spammer’s site, which has already reduced the incentive somewhat. Even so, plan for basic moderation, whether that’s a person checking new comments daily or a spam filter plugin, before comments become unmanageable.

Step 5: Track what’s working

Technorati’s blog rankings and search let you see who’s linking to your posts and roughly how your blog compares to others discussing similar topics, giving you a rough external signal you wouldn’t get from your own site’s traffic numbers alone. Combine that with basic on-site tracking of which posts get the most visits and comments. You’re looking for patterns: certain topics, certain formats, certain lengths that consistently perform better, so you can do more of what’s working instead of guessing.

Step 6: Connect the blog to what you’re already doing

A blog that exists in isolation from the rest of your marketing underperforms one that’s woven into it. Link to relevant posts from your email newsletter, add a link in email signatures and reference the blog when it’s relevant in sales conversations. None of this requires extra content, just making sure existing channels point toward the blog instead of ignoring it.

Putting it together

None of these six steps require a large budget or a dedicated hire. What they require is treating the blog as a real, owned channel from the start, with a person responsible for it, a realistic cadence, working distribution through RSS, a plan for comments and some way to tell whether any of it is working. Skip any one of these and the blog tends to either go stale within a few months or generate a comment section nobody wants to read.