Business Logs

Helping companies communicate better

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?