Remarkablogger

You’ve heard of blogs and blogging more and more, lately. It seems they’re affecting everything from elections to journalism, and especially business. You’ve seen some pretty good blogs on the net and you’re thinking about starting one. What should you do?

Goals and objectives

What is the purpose of your blog? What do you expect it to accomplish for you? If you’re going to be business blogging, how do you anticipate blogging will help your business acheive its goals and objectives?

These questions should be answered before anything else is done, so that you know how to proceed from here. You will probably have to do some research or hire a blog consultant (like me) in order make the best decision about this. If you’re going to do the research yourself on this, you want to find out exactly what benefits a blog can bring to your business. Then you can decide if those benefits compare to the time and cost of creating and running a blog (a feasibility study and a cost/benefit analysis, basically).

You should write your goals and objectives down, like a mission statement. Work on them so they are properly and clearly worded and there are no ambiguities in the language. Blogs must have a definite focus in order to achive long-term success. Keep your goals in mind whenever making decisions about your blog or blogging.

Who’s going to do the blogging?

Once you’ve written down your goals and objectives and you have a solid idea of what you want to do, you then need find the person or people who are going to carry out these objectives. It might just be you from beginning to end, or you might enlist some bright, articulate, enthusiastic talent from your organization.

Remember that blogging is writing. You’ll need people who can write well without too many grammatical or spelling errors, and who can cogently translate ideas into a narrative that most people can follow. You could even enlist the aid of some of your best customers as bloggers. Give a little writing contest, and the winners get to be the company bloggers.

Make sure that you or the people you select have the time to nurture a blog and still accomplish their other duties. How much time depends, but plan for at least an hour a day (if you’re going to do this, it’s important that you do it right, because it may have quite an impact).

Who’s going to set up and design the blog?

Unless you’re quite savvy with things like dealing with FTP and installing software on web servers, you will really save yourself a lot of frustration by having someone else set up your blog for you. If your goal is simplicity and ease of use over anything else, you can go with TypePad or Blogger or other web-based blogging services. Plenty of serious business blogs use TypePad, but Blogger appears to be evolving into a haven for spamblogs and Google click fraud.

If you want a more serious, dedicated blog that’s part of your existing website, you’d be better off with WordPress or MoveableType (TypePad’s cousin). More and more professional bloggers are starting to use or switch to WordPress, but which one’s better has been endlessly debated.

An experienced blogger can help you acquire extra features your blog will need beyond the default settings so that you don’t get deluged with spambot comments and links, and so that the blog best communicates its goals to the audience.

You may have somebody to do the installation and set up, but you want it to look different than the default template or theme. A business blog should express the branding of the business, and should look like it belongs with the main site. It should still be recognizable as a blog. For a serious business blog, this particular kind of work—template or theme design—should not be entrusted to technical types who aren’t strong in communications design and marketing principles. If you’re doing a personal blog or you simply have no choice but to do everything yourself, search the web for help regarding your particular blogging system. There are many folks who are quite good at this sort of thing, myself humbly included.

What guidelines or policies are you going to follow?

For personal blogs, this doesn’t matter so much, you can just do whatever you want. But even personal blogs should have a focus, have goals, and have—even if unwritten—some sort of guidelines by which the blog will operate. Business blogs need to make sure the company bloggers know what’s expected of them, what they should avoid, and how to handle blog crises such as stalkers and negative comments. A quick search online should yield plenty of helpful material for developing guidelines and policies. A good blog consultant should be able to help you with this, too.

Let people know you’re going to have a blog

Get the word out to your family, friends, or customers that you’re going to launch a blog. For business blogs, traditional advertising media work well for this. Because blogging is itself still newsworthy, getting in touch with your press contacts would be a good idea. Let them know you’re starting a blog so that they have time to conduct interviews and write something. The idea here is so that shortly after your blog launches, the story runs.

Blog on!

Following your blogging guidelines, continue to manage and post to your blog. Stay aware of updates to your blogging system and install them when they’re available, so you get the improvements and security patches you need. Watch for blogger burn-out, and rotate or get fresh talent as needed. Every six months or so, consider larger changes to your blog’s design (the blogging world moves pretty fast).

If anyone has any ideas they’d like to add to this, feel free to add your helpful comments below to provide a more thorough resource for everyone.

So, are you ready? Open that word processor, and start with goals and objectives…

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