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In this video, Matt Winn from Volusion explains 5 simple tips for launching a successful blog. These include: choosing your blogging software and researching your niche, to establishing an editorial calendar and experimenting with your blog post titles.

Greetings to all of you enthusiastic online business owners and ecommerce junkies!

In today’s episode of Two Minute Tuesday, we’ll go over some best practices in launching a successful blog. If you haven’t started a blog already, it’s one of the best ways to provide fresh content and can work SEO magic for your ecommerce site. And even if you’ve already started a blog, you can still pick up some goodies from this clip, so watch and enjoy!

As always, if you have any questions or topics you’d like to see covered in future episodes, please leave a comment below.

Happy selling!
-Matt Winn, Online Communications Specialist, Volusion

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Here’s the transcript:

Hi everybody! My name is Matt. I’m an Online Communications Specialist here at Volusion, and welcome to Two Minute Tuesdays, where we give you two minutes of ecommerce advice to bolster your online success. Today we’re going to help you launch a successful blog. Now there’s a lot involved, so first you’ll want to figure out which blogging software you want to use, like Blogger or WordPress. Once you decide which software you’re most comfortable with, you’ll want to follow these steps to make sure your launch is as effective as possible.

First and foremost, do some background research on your niche. These are the people that you’re writing to. Usually these people are looking for information related to your industry or products. Thus, explore the different types of blogs that are out there and see what they’re writing about, what the comments are, and what the user profile is so you can create content that similar readers will want to read.

Next, make a list of topics. When you’re starting off with your blog, it can be pretty daunting to write about a multitude of topics, so if you can make a list ahead of time, it will really help out. This goes back to your research on your niche to see which topics got the most pickup from different blogs. Once you do that, you’ll have a pretty solid calendar ready to go.

Now with that in mind, you’ll actually want to put that calendar down on paper. This is called an editorial calendar, which is just a fancy name for the topics and dates you’ll write about. Having a frequency that is solid and consistent throughout your blogging is important because readers will know if they should check your blog once a week, three times a week, etc. Having an editorial calendar helps you keep your sanity too.

Next, make sure you experiment with your titles. In a world with millions of blogs and millions of articles posted every day, your article title is really the only chance you have for people to click into your article and come to your site. So, try out a few methods for creating titles, such as “6 Ways to Do XYZ” or “10 Steps to Do This, This and That.” Experimenting and seeing what works in your titles that lead to higher pickup is a good basis to write your headlines.

Last but not least, write, write, write. A lot of people are worried about starting a blog because they’re not comfortable with their writing. That’s fine. Just because you can talk doesn’t mean you can write, so it takes a lot of practice to create effective, consistent content that establishes your voice. The only way to get better is to practice, so don’t get discouraged – just keep at it and the pickup will eventually come.

If you have any questions, visit our blog at onlinebusiness.volusion.com and let us know – we’re happy to help. From me to you, happy selling!