How to Launch and Grow a Business Blog From Scratch [SlideShare]

Roughly six months ago, I was tasked with launching a new business blog for Sidekick, an email productivity tool built in HubSpot's startup labs.

I thought sure, I've been blogging for HubSpot for over two years. Taking full ownership of a new content entity should be easy, right?

Wrong. 

I spent days Googling "how to launch a new blog." And every single time, my search results showed the same, repeated, worn-out, and unhelpful advice.

"Just start writing!" 

Ummm about what?

"Share your blog on social media!"

Yeah duh.

"Create quality content and it'll get found!"

How?!

I felt completely lost.

Fortunately, I was working with an amazing team. My manager, Brian Balfour, had perfected the art of audience research. And my teammate, Dan Wolchonok, had the perfect mix of coding expertise and marketing passion to quickly ship experiments. The three of us worked together to launch what is now the Sidekick Blog, and within five months we generated over 22,000 engaged email subscribers and retained an average of 30,000 monthly blog viewers. 

Now, we didn't reach these numbers by making all the right moves. We messed up plenty of times. But the most important thing I learned throughout this entire process was that it should not be this hard to learn how to launch and grow a blog. So I documented every step we took, hoping to share a starting playbook that others could adopt and employ. Below is that playbook. Check it out to learn how you can actually launch and grow a business blog.

If you found this deck helpful, please share it. The more its shared, the fewer marketers are left in the dark when they take on the exhilarating (and hairpulling) process of launching a business blog. Here are some tweets you could use: