Thursday, November 11, 2010

A blog about blogging: Part 1

NOTE: I'm turning over the reins a bit here. As we work through our list of social media topics, we're going to be covering over the next few weeks, I'm letting Sara (our assistant writer and PR specialist) weigh in on the topic of "blogging" for this particular post. Please feel free to leave comments for both of us here!

Blogging is perhaps one of the oldest forms of social media. A blog can be a great tool for sharing knowledge and building relationships with family, friends, consumers and other businesses.

This entry is part I of a series about blogging that I will be linking to various articles/blogs on the subject.

What is a blog?

Blogging is writing a few paragraphs every few days or so and posting them online and hoping that someone will stumble upon it, read it, and find themselves interested in your business, or at least your expertise, right?

WRONG! There's a lot to blogging that a lot of beginning bloggers (and some veterans) don't consider. Some of it is technical--they don't know how to use the tools that their blogging platform provides for them to reach out to new readers. That, I will cover later. Right now we are going to consider the most basic blogging blunder, which in addition to terrible alliteration, is publishing unfocused content.

The articles you publish on your blog are what your readers come to read. But it is important to recognize that you want to attract a faithful audience that will return to your blog frequently to read and comment on posts. To do that, you need to focus on a specific audience that you want to attract the attention of, and gear your content toward their interests and needs.

What questions are they asking on Twitter? What topics are they most interested in? Write about it. Even if you are hoping to attract a broad and diverse audience, you need to start small. If you get a group of followers that are regularly reading your blog, rely on them to spread the word and link to your posts.

Also, remember that blogging is as much, if not more, of a learning process for the blogger than the reader. Constantly be looking for new information to share. The more you read, the more of an expert you will become on a topic and the easier it will be to establish yourself as one.

Thirdly, create boundaries. These boundaries will keep you from publishing articles outside your area of expertise, and keep your blogs short and reader-friendly. One rule I like to follow: The mini-skirt rule. Make sure your blog entries are long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to keep it interesting.

For more info, check out this blog from buildabetterblog.com:
http://www.buildabetterblog.com/2010/09/3-secrets-of-great-content-creation.html

You can contact Sara and Elisa at: bigideas@kearley.com for more information.

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