In this world of up to the minute information, user participation and conversational communication, you may wonder if there is still a role for the traditional website? The answer is certainly yes. But in order to keep pace you almost certainly need to modernise it by integrating a blog. Why is a blog important and how do you create a successful one?

The line between a blog and a website has been blurred to the point of no longer existing. If you only take one point away from this article it should be to not think of your blog as a standalone entity but rather as an integral part of your overall online presence.

We can define a blog as a conversational part of your website. Where as a news section would have once been home to announcements and content you wanted to push onto a reader, your blog usually comprises of industry commentary and articles. Of vital importance a blog seeks to encourage discussion and feedback. If yesterdays news section was a notice board then your blog section is more akin to a magazine.

Why do you need to integrate a blog into your existing website?

• It gives you a structure to add new content very frequently and therefore gives your audience a reason to return frequently.
• New content and organically growing websites are popular with Google, so in simplistic terms it is good news for your SEO campaign.
• It enables you to create two-way information flow, learning more about your customers and prospects. This sense of online involvement is central to the emerging “social media” generation.
• It enables you to present a more developed argument than 140 chars on Twitter will ever do! But also moves the so called “discussion” to your branded forum.
• It provides you with a technical structure that enables you to link back to content. This might be from email updates or more general social media posts. These links are at the heart of web analytics and provide one of the basic components required for effective measurement.

Setting up a stand alone blog using one of the free services will achieve little for you and you will miss out on some of the advantages listed above. It will not reside on your organisations domain (bang goes the SEO value) and it may well have limitations on the design (so difficult to make it feel like a coherent part of your web presence). You may well have limits imposed upon the technical implementation, but not become aware of these until you have invested significant amounts of time.

Unfortunately many blogs are launched to great fan fairs but are then left to quietly die in a dark corner only a few months later. But it doesn’t have to be like that. Blogs usually fail for a small number predictable reasons.

Writing is difficult!

Actually writing is easy, getting started is difficult. To avoid staring at a blank screen start to develop a list of topics that your blog will address. Inspiration for topics can come for a variety of sources (magazines, radio or other blogs). Remember that your business blog is about your views on your industry or sector NOT a forum for tedious press type releases. Develop your list around broad topics that you find interesting and that a “good customer” would also find interesting. This helps your audience self select. Supplement your topics list with article headlines within each topic.

One of the advantages of a blog is that it enables you to deploy content quickly as the world changes. But to avoid content droughts, adopt a trick from media agencies and develop an editorial calendar. This is quite simply a 6 or 12 month schedule of articles that you will publish irrespective of what else is happening in the world. It establishes regularity and trains your readers to know they should visit at a set frequency.

Consider ways of spreading the work. As well as offering different styles and perspectives through your blog, this makes running the blog more manageable and interesting to read. Larger organizations should identify a number of individuals and develop them as featured “reporter / journalists” on the organisations blog. If you are a micro business, consider offering external “experts” or partners the opportunity to write a column for your blog.

Irrespective of who writes the content, it needs a consistent voice and perspective in order to not confuse or alienate the readership. Blog content should be concise and conversational. Make use of the variety of multi-media that is available; think video. Often a post can be made more engaging by embedding a link to an appropriate YouTube or Vimeo video. Make sure you are careful about copyright and attribution requirements when linking to other peoples content.

As your blog grows don’t let your old post languish in a database never to be read again. You will be writing on a set of consistent topics, so it is quite likely that newer posts can link back to previous blogs and update or develop a previous point of view.

Blogs do not just happen.

Blogs need to be managed and owned if they are to succeed. Nominate a blog manager of Editor that is responsible for maintaining the editorial calendar and ensuring that contributors contribute and dates are met. Whilst this person may be known as the blog editor, actually the role is probably more about project management.

Whilst your blog posts will be found through search engines, you should give your blog a further helping hand by making posts as shareable as possible. From a technical perspective this is about “like” and “Tweet” buttons, but from a management perspective it is about ensuring content is likely to cause the reader to want to share it. Traffic from search is valuable, but leveraging your readers social graph is significantly more valuable. Consider other ways that your content will be discovered, could you make use of email notification and digests?

A blog is an important part of your organisations social footprint and overall web presence. Careful up front planning will lead to a manageable workload and measurable success. If you would like to discuss how this would apply to your organisation contact n3w media today.