Starting a blog is a brilliant thing for people to do. It’s fun, it allows people to engage more and write about their interests and hobbies, and it also teaches the blogger a lot of great skills usually taught on an online MBA that can be transferred into a lot of aspects in life and professional roles.
When you blog, there’s a lot more to it than simply writing a post and uploading it. No, a good blogger needs to create a nice-looking website, figure out a nice niche and name, conduct research on the best type of content for their target audience and they also need to be able to market their post well so that it’s seen by as many people as well.
These extra responsibilities of blogging are what makes it a good thing for people to do to help them prepare for work. There are a lot of things that you have to do to run a successful blog that one also needs to be able to do when they are working in a role in many industries.
Starting a blog can be beneficial to an individual’s career. Here are a few reasons why as well as some tips when first starting your blog.
Market Research
To create a good, popular, and regularly read blog, a lot of market research is going to have to be conducted to inform you on how to operate your blog. Creating a blog without understanding your market, your ideal audience as well as the type of content that the people you want to connect with enjoying means that you will struggle to build an audience and make a splash in what is a very congested form of media.
A blogger needs to at the very least conduct some research on other blogs of the same niche, to see what they’re doing well as well as what they’re not so good at. This can help the blogger figure out what they should do and what approach they should take to help them stand out. Pay close attention to the color scheme these other blogs use, the language they use, as well as the type of content they put out, as this will help you become a better blogger and inform your output.
Market research is also a very important part of a business and is taught on an online MBA. Much like in blog writing, learning about your competitors will help businesses know what they should be doing and what they can do to stand out from the crowd. Writing a blog can help people develop this skill, which will be greatly beneficial for roles within business and marketing, which you can prepare for with an online MBA. Market research within a business also includes the practice of analyzing your current audience an creating a customer persona of them to learn more about their interests, age group, ethnicity and any other form of information that can help marketers create more targeted adverts and content to draw these people in. A blogger can also do this to make their work more appealing.
Marketing
Without good marketing, a blog will struggle to get views and an audience, meaning that all the effort spent writing content will be in vain. This is why a blogger needs to learn a few digital marketing techniques that can be discovered on an online MBA specification to help their content get some traction and to help them eventually gain a following.
To help them get organic traffic to their website, a blogger should learn a bit of SEO marketing. This type of marketing is all about optimizing your website for search engines, meaning that doing this will give your website a better chance of coming up on Google when a keyword you’re optimizing for is searched. There are many different ways a blog can be optimized, which some on-page options include adding keywords within your titles and content, making sure to write meta descriptions, as well as alt text for your images. You can also try to build up links on different websites that lead to your page to build authority too.
When optimizing for a keyword as a blogger, you want to make sure that you’re picking a good keyword. This is because you want to optimize for a phrase that has a lot of searches each month, but you don’t want it to be too competitive because it means that it’ll be harder to stand out among the other websites and blogs aiming for that keyword too. A good way to figure out good keywords to use within your content is by using SEMrush, as this searches keywords and presents you information and alternatives to help you find ones that have a good search rate, but not too high competitiveness.
Another marketing strategy bloggers can adopt is through social media marketing. This is where you create a page and post content on that social channel to interact with followers. To do this well you’d want to create content on your socials that are entertaining and informative, that occasionally links to your blog posts and articles.
Learning these marketing skills can be greatly beneficial for online MBA graduates as they’re widely used in business to help get the company in front of more eyes and potential customers. Starting a blog and learning how to market it will prepare you well for marketing roles in your professional career.
Need Similar Skills
The overlap of skills between blog writing and in a professional career is vast and doing this hobby can teach you a lot of keep attributes that can make you far more employable.
One of the main skills and one of the most obvious that consistent blog writing can instill is good communication. Writing articles, editing them, and researching for them can help a person develop greater critical writing skills that can help in a wide array of professions. It can help you polish up your grammar, spelling, and tone of voice, making you a stronger writer and better communicator, which many businesses will value. This skill can also be developed on an online MBA.
As well as communication, learning how to blog will also help you develop great organizational skills and time management. This is because, for most people, when they start a blog, it would usually only be as a side hobby, meaning that you’ll have other comminutes such as studying an online MBA or work. This means that for you to have a successful blog and be on top of the other parts of your life, you’ll need to have good organization and the ability to prioritize tasks. To improve your time management skills, many bloggers use scheduling software that allows them to plan posts, write them way before time and add them to their calendar to be posted at the desired date and time.
Organization is critical within a business or professional setting, as most roles will have you juggling different tasks at once, so getting this skill homed in while blogging will be very beneficial.
Additionally, writing something and putting it out into the world takes a lot of confidence and self-belief to be able to do that, so posting and writing a blog shows that you have that desire and determination to succeed and do well. It can also show resiliency, especially if your blog does well, as you’re likely to come across challenges and nasty comments towards your blog. Overcoming these challenges shows your determination, which is a crucial skill for a business that can also be obtained on an online MBA as you’ll be expected to always want to improve and better yourself to make yourself a better member of staff.
Teaches Analysis and KPIs
When you’re blogging and want to blog well, you’re going to have to get familiar with some form of analytical software, to be able to track how your blog website is doing. This is either be through the inbuilt analysis tools in many blog creating platforms, but the best analytical software is hands down Google Analytics, so blog writers must link their website to that platform.
This is because the tool can tell you any key insights toy our website which can help you make your blog better, such as where users are coming through, what pages they visit the most, and how long they spend on each page. Google analytics can also introduce you to some key metrics, and analysis terms often learnt on an online MBA, such as bounce rate and click-through-rate which will be very helpful to learn as they’re widely used within a business.
Learning Google analytics and getting familiar with it can be very useful to prepare you for business, as many marketing roles use it to help them track adverts, social posts and so much more, so getting to grips with it will serve you well for the future.
Tips for Getting Started
Now that you know how starting a blog can benefit your future career prospects, you’ll most likely be thinking what the best things are you should do to start one effectively. Here are a few top tips and techniques for those who are just starting out, to help them get a more competitive edge and create a blog that deserves to be read.
Choose the Right Platform
When first starting a blog, one of the early challenges will be to select the right blogging platform for you. There are a lot of great options out there, with many people enjoying the ease of use of WordPress, while others like the customization options offered by Wix, but there was plenty of great options to go for.
All these platforms will offer you templates to create a nice-looking blog, as well as tools to customize it and make it unique. It’s a good idea to try them all and see how you get on with their editing tools, as you want to find a platform that you understand well and know how to navigate.
It’s also a good idea to go for a platform that is free to start but offer a paid premium service. This is because once your blog starts getting a readership, you’ll want to make it look as professional as possible, which will be offered by the premium versions.
Find A Niche
When deciding what your blog should focus on writing about, it’s important to try and be creative and to find a good niche that will make your blog unique and thus more interesting for people to engage with. A lot of bloggers make the mistake of having their blog be too broad and generalized, in an attempt to appeal for everyone. New businesses make this mistake too, but by studying an online MBA, you’ll learn about what pitfalls you should avoid. The reason this is a good idea is that being too general means that you may struggle to attract an audience. Instead, it’s best to be more specific and focused on one thing, as this will allow you to home in on a passionate customer base. So, for example, instead of having a generic food blog, perhaps you can focus in on east African dishes, or lactose-free recipes.
When finding a niche, it is also still important to make sure you write about something you like and that you’re passionate about. This is because if there’s no interest from you, your content will suffer and will lack quality, meaning that potential readers will be put off. To figure out what to write about, think about your hobbies and interests and choose a specific field within that to focus on and explore. If you’re having fun writing it, readers will have fun engaging with it.Offer Value
When writing a blog, you want to make sure that your content has value and deserves to be read. This means that to be successful, your articles should be informative and teach the reader something and benefit them in some way. You need to tune into what the public wants and be able to act upon it. It’s not a good idea to regurgitate information found on other blogs, and you need to offer something unique. A good way to find out what people in your niche want to discuss and read about is to search in Reddit or chat boards and see what constantly keeps cropping up, and then write an article about.