Last week I gave an intro to Blogging and the 4 Corners of Web Marketing. This is part 2 of the series on blogging for businesses and focuses on how to get going on your blog.

There are many blogging platforms out there these days, but for the simplicity of this article I am going to talk about two of the more popular and easy blogs to setup for your business. I do recommend you hire a web designer or developer to customize your blog to match your branding. If this is not feasible at this time in your business, than you will have to settle on one of the given templates.

The top two free blogging platforms are Wordpress.com and Blogger.com. You can log on and go through the signup phase and get yourself a new blog without knowing any web code. Now one of the issues with using these two services is that now you have a url that contains their branding, so for example you url now is ###this.wordpress.com. Not a big deal if this is a hobby blog, but for a business it looks a bit unprofessional. You can purchase an upgrade from Wordpress to use your own domain and I highly recommend it.

Most of the templates that come with a free account give you a change to upload a logo or a new header banner. If you have the ability to create one yourself, than please do. Make sure that it is professional looking, you do not want pink elephants on your business blog.

So now you have your blog. In the previous post I talked about what types of posts are possible for your blog, but for starters why don’t you put up a post about who you are, what your business is, and state the reasons why you have set this blog up. This will give your readers a quick glimpse into your business life and also if they are interested, you may have picked up your first readers.

Please go ahead, setup and customize your blog this week. As this column progresses I will be talking about the many ways to get readers to your blog, provide solid content to your readers, make money off your blog and use it as a tool to grab and retain new customers.

Next week will be an introduction into Email Marketing. As always - If you ever have any questions on the article, feel free to contact me or post comments below.