CONTENTS

1. What do you want to do with your blog?
2. Who are you focusing on and addressing in your Blog?
3. What results are you looking for?
4. Which Blogging software is best for you?
5. Where to display your Business Blog?
6. How much time do you want to spend on your blog?
7. How does it fit with your other Marketing activities?
8. How will you promote your blog?
9. How will you measure how successful it is?

As you start to plan your Business Blog and decide how you wish to set it up, there are a number of areas that you need to evaluate to ensure that it delivers the best results for you and your business. The answers will help you to focus your efforts in the right areas, to lay out a plan forward and ensure that the blog has the strongest possible impact in your target area.

The planning phase is very important and the areas that we will be looking at here fall into the following categories:

Before we start

Firstly, I should point out that you do not have to be a great writer to run a successful blog, that is not what blogs are about. If they become too honed then they can also become staid and uninteresting. However, it does help if you enjoy writing and of course if you have something to say on the subject.

However, there are some individual characteristics which I think that it is worth mentioning up front.

• As I already mentioned, ideally you should enjoy writing as this will come through in your posts and your responses to others;
• You should be prepared to maintain a regular posting so that the blog is kept up to date;
• You need to be prepared to share information and ideas and to be open: people will find the information if it exists, so better that they find it from you;
• There will be a need to put in the time and effort to research and maintain the blog;
• Be prepared to “put your head above the parapet” – if it’s a ‘me too’ blog then it is possible that it will not stand out sufficiently.

So on to the planning stage, and we start with looking at the Business Objectives that were mentioned in the diagram above.

1. What do you want to do with your blog?

When you set up a personal blog then you can talk about whatever you want and post when the urge takes you. However, if you are serious about using a business blog, then it should be viewed as a business activity with associated costs in time and money. Consequently, it should have goals that you wish to achieve either in terms of visibility, new customers, PR value, feedback, general communications etc. From the start, you need to be clear about how you wish to use your business blog and what you want to achieve with it.

The range of potential uses for your blog from a business and marketing point of view is wide and varied. I like to consider them from two points of view:

Business Marketing Perspective

• to build a network of contacts for your company
• to create better relationships with customers and potential customers
• to position as an expert in your field
• to elicit feedback from a target audience
• to put a human face or personal perspective on a business
• promote a service area / product through “educational marketing”
• to create product evangelists in partners and/or clients
• … and many others

Functional Perspective

• Distributing company news / case studies or press releases
• FAQ or Q&A sections
• Providing an Information Hub for those in your Market or Niche
• Pre-sales tool to support your sales team
• Product Development Aids
• Internal Team Building
• Public Relations Tool
• …and many others

If you know what you want to achieve then this will influence your individual postings and help to focus them.

[Suggestion: you might like to start to write down your thoughts on what your main aim is in creating a Business Blog so that you can develop the idea. In the hardcopy document on this page, you will find a workbook section at the back which outlines these elements.]

2. Who is your target audience for your Blog?

Just as with your products and services, you need to decide who your target audience is for your Business Blog, and consequently who you are writing for. This is likely to influence not only the content of your postings but also their tone according to how you wish to be perceived.

You may be looking to reach and interact with potential customers in which case a certain type of information and slant to your posts will be applicable. If the blog is aimed more at suppliers or partners than the content and tone may have to change accordingly.

Of course, you may be looking at an internal blog, as more companies are now doing, so in this case the audience would be your co-workers, members of a project team perhaps or all company staff, according to the purpose that the blog is required for.

This part of the process should also allow you to confirm that a blog is going to be a good way to reach this audience. In most case it will be. However, since a blog is a business expense, in time if nothing else, the question of whether there are better ways to reach this audience is a valid consideration.

3. What results are you looking for?

You should also have an idea of want you wish to achieve with the Business Blog in terms of results. As it is not a direct selling or business development tool, there are no hard and fast rules for what criteria you should use as they will relate very much to your own objectives.

I have given a selection of criteria that you could use in the last section of this part of the course, but they might include ones such as number of visitors, sign ups, contacts or perhaps resultant clients if you are able to identify where the initial lead came from.
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If we now turn to a couple of technical aspects, we will need to decide what blogging software would be best suited to your planned Blog and also where the Blog should appear – this might be a separate domain or as part of your current website. It may even be that this be your whole website.

4. Which Blogging software is best for you?

There are a number of different blogging software systems that you can use to run your Business Blog. Some are almost instant to set up while others take a little bit more work although they will then give greater flexibility as your requirements and your understanding of blogging expands.

It is important to select carefully at the start because, although by no means impossible to change, it is relatively time consuming and there are certain difficulties involved, not least of which is ensuring that all your valuable information indexed by Search Engines will still lead to the right place after the switch!

At one end of the scale you have those systems which are hosted for you, that is to say that you need do nothing more than sign up, choose a template and off you go – the information is stored for you and all you have to do is write. The most well known of these is Blogger, owned by Google, however there are others which offer the same.

Some of the better known and more complete packages which work well without customisation but nevertheless offer comprehensive development potential include TypePad from a company called SixApart and an open source system called WordPress. These have more flexibility in what you can do and the options available.

For a Business Blog, our advice is that you need to be in control of your own system and so we recommend that you avoid the systems which are hosted for you. As it is a valuable marketing and business tool, and as such you need to have complete control over it rather than rely on potential issues with other companies.

My own recommendation is WordPress, not as a hosted system (wordpress.com) but as a system which you can control for yourself (wordpress.org).

5. Where to display your Business Blog?

With either of the methods, a hosted solution or maintaining your Business Blog yourself, you will still have the option of it appearing as a separate domain.

The standard for a hosted solution would be a domain name like www.yournewblog.blogspot.com, where the host’s name (in this case “blogspot” from Blogger) is part of your domain. It is advisable to avoid having your domain in this format as it can come across as unprofessional. Fine for personal blogs by the way, just not so appropriate for Business Blogs.

Much better is to show it as a separate domain ie. www.yournewblog.com or as a subdomain or your current website ie. www.company.com/yournewblog/. You can achieve this either by pointing the blog at this address from your hosted account or simply setting up your own Blog from this new address.

Is it better to incorporate the Blog as a subdomain of your current site or as a separate domain? Both are fine so it depends on its use more than anything else. If you are using it as a way to promote case studies, press releases, articles etc. from your company then it would be more appropriate to include it in your current site. If it is a new service, then a separate domain will allow you to adopt a slightly different stance and more comfortably differentiate it from your other activities. It also gives you more flexibility over domain name selection for branding or Search Engine purposes. Don’t forget that you can include the content, or parts of the content, from this separate Blog on your main site by embedding an RSS feed if required.

If you don’t have a website for your company already, then you might consider it sensible to combine both in a blog based website and have total control over your web presence right from the start. This will not be appropriate to all businesses but is certainly worth considering and will depend very much on your current circumstances.
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Turning now to the marketing requirements, you will need to be aware that time needs to be spent both writing and promoting the Business Blog. Although we will look at the techniques you can use later in the course, putting your initial thoughts down now will help greatly later on.

6. How much time do you want to spend on your blog?

Whether you compare them to websites or other marketing techniques, Business blogs are going to be exceptionally cost effective in pure monetary terms. The real cost comes in the time that you are willing to put into the blog to get the results that you want to achieve. The more time that you are able to put in then the better the results are likely to be so long as the blog has been set up to help you in your efforts.

When estimating the time that you will require, you should consider not only the writing involved but also the research and planning that you will probably want to do as well. This is particularly true if your aim is to position yourself as the expert in a certain subject area or niche as you will want to keep very much abreast of what is going on across the area so that you can reference it and comment upon it.

To give anything more than an estimate of the split would be impossible – people read, write and generally work at different paces. However, I don’t think that a 50:50 split between research and planning, and then the writing would be an inappropriate level.

7. How does it fit with your other Marketing activities?

While it is an excellent business development tool, a Business Blog is not a magic formula which single handedly deliver clients on a plate. Like any promotional activity, either online or offline, it works best when combined with other marketing activities – as they say, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”.

You should therefore look to consider not only what the results of the Business Blog are likely to be, but also how it might interact with the other marketing activities that you are undertaking. A blog and an RSS feed can work independently of an emailed newsletter for example, but perhaps it would be better to interlink them and offer the subscriber more choice in terms of how they wish to receive the information they contain.

Perhaps the Business Blog, or part of it, could be linked with a direct mailing as a Frequently Asked Questions resource where the recipients could read additional information and, importantly, ASK additional questions through the comments feature. This would start the relationship on a totally different footing. The same might be true in conjunction with telemarketing or mailings to promote a conference or product launch with the blog giving the interactive support and back up.

8. How will you promote your blog?

We will look at this area in more detail later in the course, but it is a good idea to have an idea of how you wish to get the message out to your target market that you are providing a service which should be of interest and of use to them. You are spending a lot of time and effort on providing this so make sure they know about it.

Clearly there are lots of methods associated with general websites which are still applicable for a blog so you might like to start with ones that you have used for them.

Don’t forget that you should be using both online and offline methods to promote it as well, so as you make your plan do incorporate it into your offline activities as well. A diagram that I use when working through eMarketing and offline marketing options with clients may prove useful in this respect and you can find it below.

9. How will you measure how successful it is?

What criteria would you like to use to see how successful it is? Ideally they will be in line with the main objective that you set out for your blog but it’s necessary to have some way of measuring this.

• you might consider that it is the number of new or repeat visitors to your blog;
• it could be the number of comments that you receive on your posts because you are looking to achieve a certain level of interaction;
• the number of subscribers to your RSS feed may be important because you feel this shows active interest;
• the number of blogs and websites which link to your blog or refer to your articles via trackbacks;
• the number of new customers who get in contact through the contact form on your Blog;
• the sales generated by the blog either directly or indirectly;
• the number of sign ups to a newsletter which you have as a marketing call to action etc.

As you can see, there are a number of different ways you can use and so it is a case of deciding which is the most appropriate for you in accordance with the aims you have for the Blog. As a Business Blog is an expense, albeit primarily in terms of time and effort rather than large financial outlays, you should be able to evaluate a Return on Investment (ROI) in some form or other. You do not need to have this finely calculated from the start but you should be clear what you want to achieve.

What’s next?

With the answers to these questions coming together, we can move forward to actually setting up the Business Blog.

For this, we will need to:
- Choose and domain name
- Decide on the look and feel of the Business
- Start to think about the Categories, decide how to deal with comments etc.

This is what we will be looking in the next part of the course.

Link to Part 1 of the Better Business Blogging eCourse