The Business of Blogging

• Introduction
• What is a blog?
• A blog for your business?
• Some blogging tips
• A word of caution
• Examples
• Further reading

Introduction

Blogs are one of the current major buzzes on the web. Sites with regular posts of relevant content, an archive and a comment system are able to open a regular dialogue with their audiences. This form of publishing facilitating two-way communication is one of the major players in the participative environment of the web today.

Adding a blog component to your site can add value to your web presence, help reposition your brand and provide a valuable addition to your marketing and PR strategy.

What is a blog?

The term Blog originated from web log, traditionally a personal online journal. With the advent of easy blogging tools, the use of blogs has exploded with a new blog being created every 7.4 seconds on average (Source: MediaWeek). Blogs are characterised by regularly posted articles, an archiving system, and a comment feedback system for individual posts. They are most often written from a personal viewpoint in an informal tone.

A Blog for your business?

A blog need not be a personal forum to talk about your cat, your young child or the most disgusting food you've ever tried. Today we are seeing many blogs that provide industry news and expertise. A blog offers an ongoing reason for users (ie. existing and potential customers) to come back to your site. It allows you to demonstrate your valuable knowledge in your field of expertise, and gives your audience a feedback channel to respond to your posts. It also allows you to tie your marketing message into your content in a way that is still adding value to the user experience. A blog can be a great PR strategy for promoting a sense of transparency and openness.

A typical blog system uses a simple content editor for posting articles so that the whole process is simple and does not require technical fuss. The author can concentrate on the content while the blog system takes care of the publishing. A blogging system can also be plugged into your existing site's CMS or used in tandem with it.

Many small to medium companies are starting to blog, however many larger companies are yet to get onboard. It's a good time to get ahead now, before the large companies make blogs a standard part of their web presence.

RSS

One of the real advantages of a blogging system is the automatic publishing of an RSS feed (RDF Site Summary, Rich Site Summary, Really Simple Syndication - also known as an XML feed) that any good blogging system generates. RSS is a technology whereby members of your audience can choose to subscribe to your content and be alerted whenever it is updated, receiving a summary, or the whole posting.

RSS can reach your audience in a similar way to email marketing but with the further advantage of not being subject to Spam filtering or Spam compliance and privacy laws. It is not delivered by email and the user has control over the subscription process, so it is completely optional and unobtrusive.

RSS is set to make a major splash in the mainstream consumer market shortly, with Internet Explorer 7 set to tightly integrate RSS into its web experience. Mozilla's Firefox browser already supports subscribing via RSS as does their email package, Thunderbird.

See also FeedDemon, Bloglines, and Google Reader for other tools for subscribing to RSS feeds.

Search Engine Optimisation

Adding relevant content to your site frequently makes it valuable to your audience and greatly helps to increase your organic search rankings. Google regards blogs as highly relevant, and will index your website very frequently if you post to your blog regularly.

Some blogging tips

• Know your subject matter. Write about what you know inside out, and stick to it, that's what your audience returns for.
• Short and sweet articles are good. Get to your point early and elaborate in any subsequent paragraphs (a good tip for writing content for the web in general).
• Be patient. Your blog will become useful to your audience when you have written several posts in your archive.
• Link to your sources, supporting articles and influential peers in your business community. A blog entry can simply be a link to an interesting article accompanied by your thoughts on the matter.
• Share your opinion.
• Write in a conversational tone. You don't need to sound too professional as long as you know what you are talking about. This doesn't mean you should throw out your spelling and grammar and write in SMS speak though...
• Structure your writing in a way that is easy to read and skimmable. Break up passages of text with images, subheadings, bullet points, block quotes, etc.
• Make your blog interesting and fun to keep your readers coming back.
• A useful measure of public opinion of your brand is to find out what other blogs are saying about your company or product. Blog search tools like Technorati and Google Blog Search make it easy. If you can handle blunt and brutally honest but valuable product feedback, it might be found by searching for "I hate [your company/product name]".

A word of caution

A blog is a good step to opening a dialogue with your audience and bond with consumers, but you need to be ready for open and honest two-way communication.

Many bloggers give up very early on. Be ready to stick it out if you want to see your blog go places.

Lastly, understand that blogs are part of a growing, open, participative and user focussed environment. If you are not ready to hand over some of the control in your relationship with consumers, your business may not be ready to join the ranks of the bloggers.

Examples

• Randy's Journal  - blog of Boeing's vice president of marketing.
• Joel on Software - an influential blog in the IT field. The author shares his insights into the software industry and promotes his small software company 
• IE Blog - Microsoft now have blogs for many of their development arms. This one is for the Internet Explorer development team.

Further reading

• What a Blog Can Do For Your Small Business
• Blogs: Communicating at the Speed of Business
• BlogWrite for CEOs
• Irrational Blogguberance?

Henry Tapia is a senior designer and user experience specialist at Glass Onion.  If you want to discuss anything to do with this article, please don't hesitate to contact Glass Onion.