Blogging Advice

In my last entry Alexander brought up an interesting question of where a blog should be placed in relationship to the company’s homepage. Both 37signals (Signal vs. Noise) and Jon Hicks (Hicksdesign) have their blog on inner pages and not on the homepage.

Is this appropriate?

For these two sites I think their blog placement is perfect because the topics they discuss do not always relate to the company. Their blogs hit wide-ranging topics which a casual visitor who is looking for their services may not be interested in reading about.

However, having a blog allows them a greater chance of bringing in business so placing them on a totally separate domain would hurt them more than help them I believe.

With regards to our site, the subject matter that we discuss integrates perfectly with what our services our. Therefore, we found it much more appropriate to make the homepage a blog.

So to answer the question of where is the appropriate place to put a blog it depends on the topics that are discussed on the blog. If they venture to far from the core services that your company is offering then you may want to place them on subpages. If the blog is nothing but company information relating to your services and products then I think it is a great benefit to have that front and center.

Before blogging technology, we would all create websites that had their content in place before launching. Now I am finding that many sites that utilize weblogs only have the blog architecture in place and launch with the overused “welcome” entry.

I believe this is a mistake.

What draws people to sites and has them continuing to comeback is the content. Also, don’t forget there is only one chance to make a strong first impression on readers. Why would you want that first impression to be one entry that contains almost no content with a simple welcome message?

When creating a site that has an integrated weblog, it is very important to launch with entries already written and published. That way, you allow users to come and explore the site which helps them decide right then if they wish to make a return visit. Hopefully the content that you have provided encourages them to return, but you have a greater chance of success now than you did before with the one welcome entry.

After the Google shutdown earlier this week (when all web workers let out a collective *GASP*), our favorite search engine explained what happened on their corporate weblog:

“A very small percentage of our users and networks – most notably, a few media outlets that write about us — were heavily infected with MyDoom, so our systems temporarily blocked their queries. By noon, service for all our users had been completely restored.”

I don’t know about other areas, but here in the metro Washington, D.C. area Google was blocking my queries for about 5 hours – 5 of the most intelligence-free hours of my life. But they dealt with it like a champ and talked directly to their customers.

PR disaster averted, IPO about to explode all thanks to a blog.

Blogs can become addictive for both readers and writers. Once you start to maintain a successful blog, you will find that it can be hard to walkaway from it. When the pressure from your community to continuously update builds to a level you can’t handle, you begin to suffer “Blogger Burnout”.

Wired.com has an article concerning “Blogger Burnout” and I recommend that you go read it. Effectively what it shows is how powerful a force a blog can become for the person who maintains it and the community that reads it.

Could you imagine a community being this passionate about a blog your company maintains? It’s possible. However, all the people mentioned in the article share a passion for writing on their blogs and therefore it is easy to see why they are so popular. I have written about passion and this article shows the negative effects of it.

If you are going to write daily on your blog over an extended period of time you have to understand that the readers of the site are going to expect writings daily. I am sure the majority of Kottke’s readers would like for him to write daily, but understand that this isn’t the case because his writing schedule has been more of an almost daily instead of consistently daily.

If your company decides to start a blog a key decision is how frequently you will write for it as this will dictate the mindset of your readers. Make sure that the individual or team that is going to maintain the blog is capable of keeping up with the schedule and that their passion for it does not die, because once it does the burnout sets in.