A blog is a great tool to attract new customers to your business, share tips and secrets with industry professionals, express your opinions or just to share information with friends and family. But many times blogs are set up, mismanaged and end up not being used at all. If you plan properly before you build your blog you can get things up and running smoothly.

In order to do just that there are a few things you should address before you start blogging:

Set Goals

First off – what are your goals? Why are you starting a blog? Is it to voice your opinion on a subject matter or to sell more products on your e-commerce site. The goals of your blog should be in line with your business model.

If you happen to starting a blog to voice your opinion on a subject, your goals should align with that model. A great goal for this type of blog would be to encourage users to sign up for an email newsletter or sign up for an RSS feed.

If you happen to running a e-commerce site your goal would obviously be driving more traffic and getting more sales. You will want to attract more traffic and attract users who are looking for your specific products. You can easily gear your blog to help you attract potential customes. Post testimonials or reviews of your products or services, create posts that preview upcoming innovations of your products or anything else that will get potential customers excited about your business.

How Will You Measure Success?

Figuring out how you will measure the success for your blog is important. You’ll need to measure success in order to understand how much time should be invested into it. There are quite a few ways to measure how well you blog is informing. Here are a few key once:

SEO Rankings:  When you publish fresh new content frequently, it can help you increase your organic rakings on search engines. Keep an eye on where you rank for the terms your business is targeting is a easy way to measure success.

Sales and Conversions: The goal of any business is to make money and blogging can help you do just that. Keeping track of how sales and conversion increase  as you blog can be an easy factor to understand.

Overall Traffic: Blog posts should be something that people come to your site to read, thus increasing overall traffic numbers. Looking at how people get to your site can also tell you quite a bit about how your blog is performing. If you are seeing many return visitors, chances are people are enjoying the posts you are publishing and are coming abck to your site looking for more. You also can take a look at what pages people are landing on when they reach your site from search engines. Are they landing directly on a blog post? If so, that means your posts are ranking well in search engines.

Interaction: One goal of any blog should be to encourage interaction with your customers and fans. Are they frequently leaving comments or sharing your posts on social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Google+? Those are both key indicators of how your blog is doing.

Set Up Analytics

Part of measuring success is setting up a proper analytics package. If you are a small business you can easily set up a free Google Analytics package on your site. With this you will easily be able to understand how people are getting to your site and what they are doing when they get there.

Who Is You Audience?

Will you be blogging to industry professionals? Or will you be trying to attract new customers? Keeping this in mind before you start writing is extremely important. You will want to create a common theme through your blog posts so you target the right audience.

If you are trying to attract new customers to your reality business you do not want to produce content about ‘How To Sell A Home’. It would be wise to instead create blog posts related to new homes you have on the market or about the quality of the schools in the towns you sell homes in.

How Often Will You Post?

Keeping a schedule for how often you will be posting on your blog can help you in two ways – it makes you as the writer dedicated to a deadline. And it also gives your readers a reason to check back frequently. If they expect a new post every Monday morning, soon they will just automatically come to your site each and every morning.