Business Logs

Helping companies communicate better

Blogging Advice

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.