Blog Strategy

In our recent posts about the advantages of blogging for business (part 1 and part 2), we discussed how blogging is different from most forms of business communication, and why it makes sense from an SEO (search engine optimization) perspective.

Somewhere between the detail of a full book and the brevity of a 140 character tweet, is the blog.

Blogs are different than just about all of the other writing you've done (or outsourced) for your company, and they carry different expectations than your standard web content. One of the unique qualities of a blog is that companies can disseminate news and information in a tone that’s different from the rest of the copy on their site.

Whether or not your organization currently has a blog in place, your first job is to determine if you need one. Not every business will benefit from a blog because not every business has something they want to tell people three times a week...or even twice a month. If yours is that business, acknowledge it and move on to a form of marketing that better serves your site.

As you seek to discover whether or not your organization can use a blog to help achieve its goals, you may find yourself coming to a determination of the blog's purpose. It's difficult to say what will matter most in the success of your blog, but without a clear, maintainable purpose, your blog will almost certainly not achieve greatness.

Regardless of how simple or silly some of the most popular blogs in the world seem to be, you can be sure that there is a clear purpose behind each one.

Too many organizations genuinely believe that having a blog in place and frequently updating it is enough. It's a good start, but there's something more that separates adequate blogs from the ones that get promoted by readers.

Where good blogging takes time and attention, great blogging requires both of those as well as a copious supply of creativity. Brainstorming the first possible blog posts may be fun, and even easy. But what happens when that initial material has been covered? What happens when the novelty and excitement of your new blog has worn off?