~by Haley Lynn Gray~
Starting a blog for your business can feel intimidating if you’re not especially technical. It isn’t. If I worked it out, you can.
Here’s what I’d tell someone starting now — including a few things I got wrong.
Decide the cadence before anything else
Daily, weekly, fortnightly, monthly. It matters far less which one you pick than whether you’ll hold it.
Monthly, sustained for two years, beats weekly abandoned in March. Be honest about what fits your actual life, then treat it as a commitment rather than an intention.
If you’re unsure, start monthly. You can always increase; quietly stopping is much harder to recover from.
Write what people actually ask you
The most common failure isn’t technical, it’s choosing subjects nobody is looking for.
The best source of topics is your own inbox. Every question a client or prospect asks you is a post. They asked it, which means other people are typing it into a search engine, and you already know the answer because you’ve explained it before.
Write about things you genuinely know, and link to sources where you’re citing facts. Linking out to other people’s work is good practice and good manners.
Avoid the temptation to write about whatever’s trending in your industry. You’ll be the four hundredth person covering it, and you have no particular advantage.
Own the platform
Put your posts on your own site first, always.
Your blog is an asset you control, the way an email list is. Something published on someone else’s platform can be deleted, deprioritised, or lost when that platform changes direction. Publish on your own site, then share it elsewhere — and let your site be indexed first.
Images, and the part that can cost you
This one deserves more attention than it usually gets.
Only use images you have a clear right to use. There are companies whose business model is finding unlicensed images and pursuing the site owner for substantial sums. It happens to small businesses regularly and “I found it on Google” is not a defence.
Safe routes: images you made or photographed, properly licensed stock, or free libraries where you follow the licence terms exactly — including any attribution requirement.
Two things I’d add from recent experience. Keep a record of where each image came from, because in three years you won’t remember. And be aware that free libraries now host AI-generated images alongside photography, usually without labelling them clearly — so if authenticity matters to your brand, check the contributor rather than assuming.
Tools like Canva make it straightforward to create your own graphics, which sidesteps the problem entirely.
Promotion, in proportion
Share each post where your audience actually is, and schedule it rather than doing it manually — any scheduling tool will save you hours, and the specific one matters less than having one.
But I’d temper what I originally wrote. I said promote, promote, promote. The truth is that a post that answers a real question will keep bringing people in for years, long after the promotion stops. A post nobody was looking for won’t, however energetically you share it.
Promotion amplifies. It doesn’t rescue.
On guest posting — I’d change my advice
I used to recommend guest blogging to get links back to your site.
I’d be considerably more careful now, having seen the other side of it. Search engines have spent years devaluing link-building schemes, and sites that accept guest posts for links are frequently accepting paid placements too.
I know this because I’ve found them on my own site — articles submitted years ago with commercial links quietly embedded in them, pointing at businesses with no connection to anything I write about. Clearing that out has been a substantial job.
So: write for a publication because its readers are your readers, and because the piece is worth publishing. That still works and always will. Writing anywhere that’ll have you, for the link, is a strategy with a poor return and a long tail of cleanup.
And if you accept submissions on your own site, read every link.
The honest timeline
Nothing will happen for a while.
Your first posts will be read by a handful of people. That’s not a verdict on the writing — it’s what the beginning looks like, and it’s the stage where almost everyone stops.
What changes it is accumulation. Thirty decent posts answering real questions will do something that three brilliant ones can’t, because they cover more of what people search for and they’ve had time to be found.
Start monthly. Answer real questions. Own the platform. Keep going past the point where it seems to be working.
About the author
Haley Lynn Gray is the founder of Leadership Girl, of In2itive Biz Solutions, and of the Women’s Entrepreneur Network — a community of more than 77,000 women in business.
She writes here about what happens when running a business starts demanding that you lead one. More about Haley →
