You have decided that a blog is the right thing for your business — Congratulations — you are correct.  Your website will begin to become a serious factor in generating business leads and sales for your company.

Here are 5 tips to consider as you plan the launch of your business blog

• Don’t fuss over the design:  I can’t stress this enough as I have seen dozens of clients continue to make tiny, insignificant changes to the design of a business blog and stretch out the launch for months and months.  The most important benefit that your blog will provide to your website is that you will be adding fresh, relevant content to your website on a frequent basis.  GET THE DESIGN CLOSE AND THEN LAUNCH.  START GENERATING SOME CONTENT AND FIX THE DESIGN ON THE FLY.
• Get it indexed: Make sure that the content on the blog is getting indexed as quickly as possible.  Indexed is a term that means that the search engines have “crawled” the content.  You can ensure that your blog content is getting indexed by linking to it from the home page of your website and linking to it from other web properties that your company has as well.  You should also create an XML sitemap of your site and blog and submit it to Google and Yahoo.
• Pick a Posting Frequency And Stick To It: Make sure that everyone that is involved in the blogging project is aware of their responsibilities.  If you have decided to update the blog every day (recommended)— you need to stick to the plan.  Read this post about why business blogs fail.  Your blog will cease to generate traffic for you if you have an irregular or non-existent posting pattern.  Don’t bite off more than you can chew — start with less posts and then ramp up.  Never ramp down.
• Don’t get too salesy –  Your blog is different than the main part of your website.  You should be concentrating on informing your target market — not selling them.  If you try to use your blog as a sales tool, it will fail.
• Integrate with social media –  Plan to hook your blog up with Facebook, Twitter and/or Linked-In.  This will help to distribute your content and will make it easier for the search engines to find your content and index it.

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