By Katy Dwyer, Partner and Creative Director, Hand in Hand MarketingI’m a big believer in blogging for your business. Blogging has many advantages, such as:

• It’s a form of content marketing helping to show potential customers that you are an authority in your field.
• Blogging on a regular basis adds new content to your website, helping your Search Engine Optimization, and is content you can share on social media.
• Regularly blogging on your website, and displaying a date with the blog posts, helps to show potential
• customers that you are active and open for business, as opposed to an old, out-of-date site that’s no longer relevant.

For many people, the process of starting to blog is a daunting one. Not knowing where to start or how to write a blog can be overwhelming, and may keep you from ever getting that all-important blog up on your website. So I’ve put together six tips to help get you on your way to blogging success!1. Start reading other blogs.You’d never write a book without ever having read a book, right? To get into the blogging arena, you need to start reading and following other blogs. Use a service like Feedly.com to find and follow blogs that interest you.2. Write what you know.Before you start writing, you need to decide what you are writing about. For obvious reasons, your blog should reflect your industry. Your industry is what you know, and what you want to set yourself up as the expert in. It helps, though, to put together some general topic guides for yourself. Is there a particular subject within your industry you are passionate about? Do you like to keep up on new trends? Do you find the history of your industry fascinating? How is your industry relevant to current world, political, or pop-culture news? These are all great topics that can be the categories you create for your blog, and will help to guide you as you write.3. Set an editorial schedule.Most blogs will fail if you don’t make a plan to post on a regular basis, and stick with it. What is that regular basis for you? It’s whatever works for you. Once a day, once a week, once a month… none of these answers are right or wrong, but put the schedule in place. And remember: Quality over quantity. Choose a schedule that allows you to write useful, well-written, keyword-focused blog posts. Writing a large number of sub-par posts won’t be beneficial to your business or SEO.4. Consider your audience.Remember that you are trying to write for a particular audience—and that audience is your business’s target market. Using industry jargon, writing about advances in your field, or the how-to’s of your industry may be of interest to you and others in your field, but is that what your customer wants to know? Sometimes the answer is yes, but not always. What do your clients and customers most often ask about? What are they most interested in learning about? I wrote this particular article specifically because a client asked me how to start blogging.5. Get other to write for you.It’s your website, it’s your business, but that doesn’t mean it always has to be you doing the work. My favorite tip when it comes to blogging is the use of the guest post. Ask colleagues or friends to write a guest post on your blog. It should have some relevance to your audience. But you also may reach a new audience when employing this tactic. Consider that your guest blogger will likely share the post with his or her contacts, colleagues, and friends. That could be a whole new group of people you are now reaching, that you wouldn’t have reached otherwise.6. Don’t get discouraged.Just because you start blogging doesn’t mean an audience will immediately flock to your website. Don’t get discouraged though! Give it time, and work it! Be sure to share your posts across your social media profiles. Include a few favorite post links in your email signature. And keep posting. Over time (6 months or more), if you pay attention to your website analytics, you will hopefully find that your blog posts may start becoming the entryway into your website.If you’ve been putting off starting that blog, these tips should take a little of the fear out of that leap.[author]About the Author: At Hand in Hand Marketing, Katy Dwyer works with small businesses to provide everything from broad strokes--like marketing plans--to visual branding, such as logos and websites, and promotional items, apparel, trade show displays, and printing. She's worked professional as a graphic designer and marketer since 1999.[/author]