Better Business Blogging » Developing a Blog

Blogging Tips: Carry a Notepad

Mark White, Blog Consultant — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 22:58:31 +0000

It can sometimes be difficult to keep coming up with ideas for the next posts on your Blog we will always have moments when we struggle to know what we can post while still ensuring that we keep the quality and the focus.

My main suggestion to help overcome this is simple: keep a notebook with you at all times. Why? So that you can note down ideas that come to you during the course of the day – and, believe me, they can come at the weirdest moments. They could be triggered by any event, something that you see or a comment that somebody makes to you. Note down the idea and any associated thoughts that come with it and then you can then dip into these ideas as and when you need to.

Is that all I have to say on the subject? Well, no actually. There are a number of the other methods that Ive used which Id also like to pass on.

Write about current events
Keep an eye on what is being written about your industry through various news media and ideally through the use of RSS feeds which gets you the news ultra quickly. Select an event or piece of information and give your comments on it and perhaps its implications, while referencing the article where appropriate.

Read other blogs
Keep an eye on other blogs and what they are talking about you will probably find subjects that you wish to develop further, ones that you wish to comment on in your own blog (dont forget to use a trackback!) or ones that simply spark new ideas that you can write about. Other blogs are great sources of current thinking and new potential ideas.

Write a series
Select a topic and write a set of posts around the theme you have selected. Try to plan the series out in advance (at least the titles) and then write them as you need them.

Revisit old posts you have written
Check back over some of your old posts and see if there are ones that could be developed more fully. You may feel that there are now updates or new information that you would like to add to them, so do so in a new post which references back to the original one and develops the ideas further.

Answer Questions
Use contacts from people who have asked for information or have asked questions which have developed on your original post and opened up in turn new areas or topics. Take these questions or the points that they raise and develop the answers into new posts.

Get a guest blogger in
You do not need to write all of the posts yourself, many Business Blogs will in fact have two or even more people working on them. However, if you dont have people who post regularly, you can still have a guest blogger who might come in to post on a particular subject where they have a specialist knowledge.

There is of course a final option – simply take a break from posting for a few days. There’s no issue with that – just let your readers know and they’ll be waiting for your return with bated breath.

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Blogging Tips: write a series on a specific topic

Mark White, Blog Consultant — Wed, 31 May 2006 18:54:09 +0000

Writing a series of posts on a topic which is important to your overall subject area is a great way to generate additional areas of interest in your Business Blog – it can also be an excellent way to get you started as you begin to post on your blog and are looking for ideas and themes.

In fact, creating a series in your Blog can help in a number of different ways, such as:

it will help to develop a very definite area of focus within your Blog and create key topic areas which will support the overall primary theme of the blog;

it will give you a number of posts to write on a single topic which will help to get you started and gain some momentum in your writing;

it will encourage you not to make your blog posts too long because you will have to segment a topic into a number of shorter posts;

as people pick up on your blog, they will be able to trace back previous articles easily and then be more likely to revisit for updates;

you will be able to promote a series more easily than individual posts later on, hopefully when you have built up the number of visitors to your blog;

as they are likely to be themed within a topic, then they will also be nicely attractive to Search Engines (especially so as you will of course group them in a category) and will add additional internal links.

Try to avoid making the series too long or too spread out, although you can of course come back to it and develop it further later on. Particularly, if your readers ask for additional information, then this gives you the opportunity to develop the initial series further. It may even give you ideas on how to develop the series in other directions.

However, try to plan out the series out in advance (at least the titles) and then write them as you need them. Alternatively, if this inspires you as a topic then write two or three posts at once and, using the edit time feature, set them to appear at intervals in the future.

In my own case, I selected SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) for Blogs as a subject. For me, it warranted a series because of the amount of information that the area contains and yet is perfectly suited to being divided into smaller self contained articles. If I am honest, there has been too much of a gap between posts within the series but I think its a worthwhile set its a series entitled SEO in Blogs if you want to have a look.

Try it it really works.

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Moving your Business Blog from Blogger to Wordpress

Mark White, Blog Consultant — Mon, 01 May 2006 18:21:22 +0000

Business Blogging Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Q – You recommend that you should have full control over a Business Blog and therefore that a hosted service like Blogger be ideal. Why is that and how can I move mine from Blogger to Wordpress?

A – Yes, you are right. Just to clarify, I have nothing against Blogger for personal Blogs – in fact, it has done an enormous amount to open up this opportunity to more people than ever before.

However, I maintain that a business needs to have control over something as important as its own Blog which it has invested time and effort in planning, developing and promoting. In addition, there have been instances reported where blogs on Blogger have been mistaken for spam blogs (so called splogs) and deleted. For this reason, you have to work with a blogging solution where you have total control your own information and access.

You will also find that a system such as Wordpress offers some incredible opportunities in terms of Search Engine Optimisation and information gathering which will help you to achieve better Search Engine rankings and higher level of visitors and subscribers. At the same time, it offers much greater potential for future development with the plug-ins that are available and so “Future proofs” your investment.

To turn to the second part of your question: the process can be relatively painless depending on the complexity of what you want to do. The latest release of Wordpress (version 2.0) has a transfer program built in so if you are setting up a new Wordpress blog then most of the work is done for you. You can find the process in the “Options” section of the Wordpress interface and it will guide you through the process. Its as simple as that!

There are two other elements which you should consider: if you want to retain the type of look and feel that you had with Blogger then you will need to customise the Wordpress template but here as well you would have a great deal more flexibility than before. The second element is ensuring that information indexed previously by the Search Engines still leads to the correct articles. If you had Blogger appearing at your domain then this should be possible by recreating the same permalink structure.

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