This is the first part of a multi part series on creating a presence and extending the reach of your business with a WordPress blog. In this part however I’ll be discussing the concept more so than WordPress itself.

There are a number of things you need to decide before even thinking about installing WordPress so lets take them on one by one.

What is Your Goal?

Of course the simple answer is, to attract new customers. However, that’s not what I’m referring to here. What you need to decide is what kind of information do you want to present to your visitors? Do you want to use your blog as a lead capture? Do you want to sell something through the blog, a service? A product? Or do you want to provide information that would be beneficial to your customers and visitors?

You also have to determine who your audience is going to be, who you should be targeting. This is very important and something that a lot of businesses just starting out seem to overlook. They try to make themselves attractive to a very wide audience which in and of itself is okay but the problem is that there are other websites that are already established in your niche and have a head start on you. You have to drill down and target a smaller subsection of your general audience. For example: Let’s say you sell classical music cd’s. You wouldn’t want to try and target the general music listening audience but rather classical music lovers. You can probably drill down even further. You may know for example that the average age group for classical music lovers is 40 to 65, they more than likely make over $100K per year and so on. These are the kinds of things you must know before creating your blog. Please keep in mind I used the numbers just as an example and have no idea if those statistics are correct.

If you want to use your blog as a form of lead capture, how will you do it? People today are not fast on the draw when it comes to giving up their email address and name so you have to give them a reason to want to do it. Decide this ahead of time, what can you offer that would have enough value for someone to want to give you their contact information?

This one people seem to have some trouble with. What action do you want them to take? This may sound simple enough but your design will depend heavily on this answer. Actions can be anything, entering their email address into a newsletter subscription form, buying a product or service, reading a specific article or page, calling a phone number, giving you email addresses of friends (ie: recommending you), using social media to promote your article for you, etc etc etc…Only you can decide what it is that you want your visitors to do once they hit your home page.

Research

Now you have to do your research. You already know about your niche/business so obviously I’m not talking about that. I am referring to keyword research. Before you even decide on a domain name you should, nay, you must do keyword research. A huge number of people don’t do this and end up regretting this important step. Obviously if you already have a website, especially a successful or moderately successful site and you’re just adding a blog to it then this isn’t for you, but for everyone else this is a huge step and yes a big deal. An excellent place to start is the Google Keyword research tool and it’s free.

First you have to make sure that whatever domain name you choose is not infringing on any copyrights or trademarks. I unwittingly did exactly that when I registered my very first domain name for a blog I wanted to do about the Ubuntu operating system. So I say from experience, be very careful when choosing a domain name.

Now, back to keyword research and choosing a domain name. A lot of people try to create cute or funny or creative domain names. That’s okay for some and it can work but to shorten your quest to the first page of Google search you’ll probably want to choose a domain name based on your niche’s keywords. Not only is it a benefit for SEO(Search Engine Optimization) but having a domain name that represents your niche will be immediately recognizable by someone searching for your product. There is more to this but to give you an example, let’s go back to the classical cd’s. If someone was to search for “Classical Music” what would tell the searcher more, theblacknote.com or classicalmusiccds.com? This isn’t a trick question, obviously the classicalmusiccds.com domain would be the one to get clicked if theblacknote.com was the other choice. Of course there’s an exception to every rule and you might be attracted to black notes but the majority of people will click on the most obvious result rather than the catchy one. Once you make a list of keywords group them by importance and relevance. You’ll use this later, trust me.

Keyword research is not just for choosing a domain. Since you are in the research part of your project what you want to do is make a list of keywords relevant to your business or niche. The longer the better. Your going to use these keywords later to optimize your blog to get as much love from Google as possible, so try to think outside the box too. Start with the most closely related keywords and start working outwards from there. There are many sources for how to do keyword research so I’m not going to get into details here since I could write an entire series of articles on keyword research. There’s a great article and list of more keyword research tools at Nine By Blue.

Blog Outline and Configuration

I cannot tell you how many people fail to do this and later have a mish mash of a site with no clear concept of what it’s supposed to be. Once you find a domain name and make a list of keywords, don’t do anything else until you’ve done this. I love my computer, iPad, netbook, notebook and smartphone but when I outline a site I revert to my favorite way of doing it, pencil and paper, and I suggest you do the same. Sit down at a clean uncluttered desk and start outlining your blog:

• Pages
• Categories
• Tags
• Keywords
• Content
• Home Page

For each one of these make create a separate sheet of paper just as you think you may want it on your site. You may struggle with this at first, it’s not as easy as you may think. There are many things to think about and consider. First and foremost you want your site to make sense to the visitor. Any information should be easy to find, pages and categories clearly named, images (if used) to further tell your story, there should be a natural flow to your information. If you really want to delve into this all important part of creating your WordPress blog (Or any site for that matter), I recommend “Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web” by Christina Wondtke and Austin Govella.

One of the biggest mistakes people make when doing this step is creating pages when they should be categories and categories that should be pages. When you make mistakes like these they are very difficult to later fix, I shouldn’t really say difficult, more time consuming that anything else. To give you an example I had a client who had created 4 pages for interviews he did of some prominent people. The correct way would be to create a category named Interviews and publish all interviews to this category. This way if a visitor clicks on the category link he or she will see all the interviews in that category but if they read a page with a single interview unless you post links to the other pages they would never know. It’s also easy to add more interviews as he gets more, but to keep creating pages just doesn’t make sense in this example. As I said earlier this is one mistake that I see over and over so please consider all this very carefully and take your time structuring your blog on paper before you ever install WordPress.

One last thing you should do when doing this step is to refer to your keyword list. Use your most important keywords, the one’s that you want to really optimize for, and base your pages and categories on that list. Also keep the list in mind when working on the concept of your home page. Try to visualize the flow of information from top to bottom and left to right and see how you can use your keywords to highlight or accent a particular part of the page (or blog).

If you take all these suggestions seriously and take the time to do all these tasks, I promise you that your blog will have a much greater chance of success. Today a ten year old can start a blog but only a smart and savvy business person can make it a financial success.

In the next part of this series of articles I’ll discuss design concepts and get you thinking about traffic principals and methods.