Business Logs

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Blogging Advice

The Foundations of Good Business Blogging

If you’re thinking of starting a business blog, you’re probably wondering, “Will it work?”

Are business blogs worth it?  Maybe you’ve heard success stories of businesses that used blogs to increase their sales and improve their brand.  Maybe you’ve heard how online business has become social, so you need to start a blog to join the conversation.

But still, you’re wondering, “Will it work for me?  Will it work for my business?”

In my experience and research, I’ve found five characteristics that successful business blogs share in common.  I believe if you have these five characteristics, your blog will have a great chance of succeeding.

1) Passion

Are you passionate about your industry?  In a social environment like the internet, passionate bloggers attract the biggest crowds.

If you love your industry, that will come through in your blogging.  Your passion will attract other people who love your industry.  These people will become your evangelists.  They will tell others about your blog and your blog will grow through word of mouth.

However, if you don’t have that passion, if you’re blogging strictly to increase sales instead of blogging to add value to your industry, people will sense your selfishness and lack of passion.  They’ll visit other blogs instead of yours.

2) Knowledge

You don’t have to be the world’s foremost expert in your industry.  But you do need to know more than the average person that’s interested in your industry.

Fortunately, you can take time to do research to increase your knowledge.

3) Focus on readers

Successful bloggers understand their readers.  Instead of blogging about topics they find interesting, these bloggers are always asking questions like:

What would my readers find interesting?
What would they find useful?
What topics would entertain them?
What are their most common questions?

You can be more focused on your readers by going to places where they hang out (like forums and other blogs) and observing their interactions.

4) Consistency

If you keep your blog regularly updated, you will have a steady stream of traffic.  Your readers will be like avid magazine readers.  They will visit your blog regularly in anticipation of your newest post.

5) Patience

Successful blogs don’t happen overnight.  There is definitely a sowing period for most business blogs where you won’t have much traffic or comments.  However, if you’re patient, you’ll reap great rewards.

Business blogging is like building a reputation in real life.   It takes time to build a reputation but every little bit of counts even in the early days.  As you continue to add value in your industry through your posts, you’ll soon have the stellar reputation that leads to much higher traffic and sales.

Getting Smart About Taking Blogging Advice

There are hundreds of blogs out there that are writing entries solely on how to be a better blogger. Many of these authors aspire to become rich and successful simply because they are writing about how to become rich and successful, which has always been a cart-and-horse problem to me. When your blog is just starting and you barely have triple-digit RSS subscribers, who are you to tell anyone else how to blog and how to market a blog?

This is the problem I’ve always had with articles about “how to blog”, “how to get more traffic”, and “how to boost your RSS subscribers” — so many of these articles are written by blogs that have no business writing about these topics. Heck, even when I’ve had a blog with thousands of RSS subscribers I didn’t quite feel qualified to write on these topics because I knew I was still low on the totem pole. Of course you don’t have to be qualified to talk about a specific topic on your blog — you can talk about whatever you want — but I never wanted to do a potential disservice to my readers.

Opinions are like a**holes, everyone’s got one. Some people like to spam forums with links to their blog to gain traffic, and others like to write cohesive and witty comments. Obviously in that scenario you can figure out which is the better method, so why is the spammy tactic the one that so many people write about as an effective method for promoting your blog? One reason is that bombing forums with links is a common talking point on lists that give you “Top 100 Ways To Promote Your Blog” which are taken to heart by newer bloggers. Just because people include it in an article doesn’t mean it’s a good idea, so don’t take these lists at face value since many of them are created just to get traffic to their blog.

Blogs about blogging, articles about writing articles on your blog, when does the meta craziness end? Well just because information on blogging is abundant doesn’t mean that you should read one blog, one article, one author, and then call it the gospel. You need to fact-check your information, read a dozen lists and articles, create your own best practices, and then create strategies that work best for who you are, what your blog is about, and who you’re trying to reach. The same moral rules that apply in the real world also apply online, so whenever you come across a “tip” that seems a little shady, just ask yourself, “would doing this technique/method make me annoying to someone else?” and you’ll figure out what’s a bad idea and what’s not. It’s actually pretty simple, but sometimes the goal of having a check get mailed to you once a month is more alluring.

Don’t take tips from just anybody, in fact, don’t take tips from me at face value either. Read many things, decide for yourself, and then create strategies that still uphold your moral values. Doing everything that someone puts on a Top 100 list is a fast-track to nowhere. Doing a few things really well (like leaving smart comments, emailing authors that you appreciate, writing accurate & interesting entries) will get you well on your way and you didn’t even have to sacrifice your morals during the process.

Skip Prestige, Do It For The Fun

I do things very differently from a lot of my friends in the design consulting profession. Everybody seems to be looking for the big client, the big money, or the well-known website, but I skip all of those and concentrate on projects I know are interesting and fun to work on. I immediately turn down projects I think are going to take too long, be too draining, have too much corporate political bullshit, or won’t let me express my creativity because what’s the point? It doesn’t matter how well a project pays, if it’s a hassle to deal with it every single day for X months then you’re going to be miserable. Money != happiness.

Some of my friends from school graduated and are now trying to make it on their own, but what’s difficult to figure out is that you’ll hate consulting work if you pick the wrong types of projects, and now those same friends are totally burnt out after only a year or so…..

Down Under Underblogged?

According to the article The Lost Art of Blogging in the Sydney Morning Herald, Australia is drastically underrepresented in the blogosphere.

“With Australia’s population of 21 million, we comprise 5 per cent of English speakers. But with 75 blogs out of 9000, we comprise less than 1 per cent of English blogs. We are underrepresented by a factor of six or so.”

It seems like lack of bandwidth availability in Australia might be a key problem, but are there other factors that might be contributing?

Top 10 Business Blogging Tips

Want to get your business blog in gear? Here are 10 (plus 1 bonus!) battle-tested tips that you can start implementing today:

  • Host on your own domain: One of the biggest mistakes made by business bloggers is hosting on a third-party domain, such as “typepad.com” or “blogspot.com”. It can be a great way to get up and running with minimal technical fuss, but in the long run it will come back to bite you. Once you’ve built an audience, search engine value, etc., you’re tied to that domain. Get off on the right foot, and make sure you’re using your own domain name from the beginning.
  • Get a real design: Marketing is ultimately about differentiation, and you’ll have a hard time standing out when your business blog looks just like a hundred others. Skip the free themes, and put some money toward hiring hiring a blog design company to do the job right. Never underestimate the effectiveness of powerful design.
  • Integrate the blog with your business site: The classic business blogger story goes something like this — “Blogger gets website. Blogger writes and writes and writes. Blogger builds an audience. Blogger wonders why no new business is coming in. Blogger had forgotten to tie the blog back to his business website.” Don’t be that guy. Integrate the blog into your business site. Make sure readers know who’s doing the blogging, and what else you can do for them.
  • Keep it simple: It’s exciting for your inner geek to play with widgets, plugins, add-ons, modifications, customizations, etc., but your readers really don’t care about that stuff. They came to read blog posts. The cleaner and more pure you can make your blog, the better. Cut as much clutter as you can.
  • Define an “audience of one”: Narrow your audience down to a specific niche (ideally one that meshes with your company’s target market), and then create a persona profile that describes an individual from that niche. Give him or her a name. Find a headshot you can use. Figure out what he or she wants out of your website, and then write all your blog posts to that one imaginary person. This will keep you focused on your audience at all times, and will give your voice a more personal touch.
  • Stay on topic: Related to the last point — once you’ve defined your audience, only post things that are relevant to your audience. (Don’t dilute your blog with posts about your family, a great new movie, or how sorry you are for not posting more. Save that stuff for your personal site.)
  • Provide content, not commentary: Rather than just “reblogging” links to other sites or blog posts with a quick little comment of your own, focus instead on being the site that other people are talking about. Post original thoughts, views, tips, etc., not just your rehashing of what other people have already done.
  • Promote the blog through your business: Business blogging is a two-way deal. Instead of just using it as a lead-generation tool, make sure that your current customers know about the blog as well. It will help to build awareness, increase loyalty, and increase your ability to communicate on important topics.
  • Answer the big questions: Business blogs are most useful in a time of change, and yet this is when many businesses panic and neglect their blog. When something is happening, many people will be hitting your blog for answers. Don’t let them down. If your blog seems to be pretending nothing is going on, people will lose trust in it, even during calm times.
  • Enable discussion: If you want to have a conversation, you’ve got to be willing to take a few thumps. Enable comments on your blog, and don’t go around deleting everything that’s unflattering. The only things that should really be moderated are blatantly offensive trolling and obvious spam.
  • Don’t obsess about traffic: It’s fun to watch your traffic spike when you get on Digg, or get a link from a major blogger, but the reality is that these traffic spikes have little effect on the overall success of your business. Stay relevant to your core audience, work hard to get the word out, and then be happy with whatever you’ve got. Even one interested reader can totally change the course of your company.

Back That Thang Up

I recently received an e-mail from Adam Steinberg at Techrigy announcing the launch of their new BlogBackupOnline service. So, I signed up and tried it out.

Anyone who’s worked with technology understands the value of backups. They’re fundamental. The failure to keep adequate backups can literally result in horrible, life-changing events. (Imagine what happens when the book you’re writing disappears two weeks before deadline, or you loose thousands of family photos, or a software application you’ve been building for a client is lost just when you absolutely need to get paid by them.)

And yet bloggers — some of the most prolific content producers on the Web — almost universally do not keep backups of their work. Instead, they rely on their (usually low-budget) web hosting company, and their (sometimes unreliable) blogging software to preserve the text they’ve written over the years.

It’s a catastrophe waiting to happen.

Most blogging tools offer export functionality to allows bloggers to easily manage backups, the problem is that they procrastinate (or forget entirely), and backups never happen.

Fortunately, there are tools out there that automate this process by allowing you to carry on with business as usual, safe in the knowledge that your writing is being backed up on a regular basis.

The service I mentioned earlier, BlogBackupOnline, is one such service. It pulls content from your RSS feeds (assuming you publish full posts, that is), and saves the text in their database. You can perform scheduled backups or a single full backup, and you can set it to store comments and media files as well.

It’s a bit rough (it’s in beta), the design is funky (typical for web apps these days, unfortunately), and the name is forgettable (“Where did I save that stuff again…?”), but overall it seems like a fairly well-done blog backup service. I’m using it for one of my sites right now, and I’ll update this post if I find any major downsides.

While browsing around the Techrigy site, I happened to notice this:

“Techrigy can help organizations manage the information communicated transmitted with these social media. Techrigy’s enterprise backup engine crawls through corporate data centers and external sources to identify and collect all information about an organization that is being communicated through social media. Techrigy then brings this information into a central retainer where it can be securely stored, analyzed, and mined.”

That may or may not have anything to do with their blog backup service, but the fact that social media data mining is their primary business makes the blog backup thing sound a little sinister. Hopefully they’ll clarify this in the comments.

BlogBackupOnline (currently free during beta; no word on pricing afterward) isn’t the only player in this game, of course. Before signing up, be sure to take a look at some of the other contenders:

Each of these services (and every one of the many other tools out there) has its strengths and weaknesses, so be sure to shop around before making a final choice.

However you do it, though, it’s essential that you implement some kind of service or procedure (maybe just a reminder on the 13th of each month?) to ensure that the writing you spend so much time on will be safe in the event of a major problem.