Earlier today I took part in a panel discussion at an IABCLV (International Association of Business Communicators/Las Vegas) luncheon. My portion of the presentation was focused on blogging for your business. After the event I was asked if my list of tips would be available online. Hey now, that's not a bad idea!
I wanted my presentation to be more of a discussion, so there are no pretty slides and no detailed notes. Just a few short bits of information to start off a conversation.
10 Business Blogging Tips
- Blog regularly
- Create an editorial calendar
- Get others in the company involved
- No press releases
- Your blog can be professional without being ‘stuffy’
- Write about your industry, not just yourself
- Did something big happen in your industry, then give your opinion
- Allow comments
- Get your readers involved
- Respond as often as you can
- Where possible, try to make your responses lead to further discussion
- The broken window theory
- You have to monitor your site’s comments or if people see spam or inappropriate material, they’ll think it’s acceptable and will likely continue the trend or just leave.
- Link back to old articles
- Ever been on a wiki-crawl?
- Related posts plugins
- FULL RSS feed
- Ipad, iphone = reading on the go. Let people read your full articles
- Sharing tools (twitter/facebook/digg/stumbleupon)
- Let your readers promote your content for you
- Facebook page for your blog/company
- Add “Like” buttons to your posts
- Auto-publish your posts to your facebook page
- Set expectations at your company
- Just like business success doesn’t happen overnight, neither will your blog’s
If there's something you think I've missed, let me know!
Posted in Conferences
thanks for posting!
Editorial Calendar – that one is huge – and you have to stick with it as well… but that is the first part about business.
Wiki-crawl. I am not sure what that is, without looking around for it… Are you talking about crawling wiki-like sites and getting links back to your site, or linking to pages on wiki's… or internal linking, wiki-style?
Wow, I'm slow to respond… sorry about that!
Here's an awesome editorial calendar plugin for WordPress: http://stresslimitdesign.com/editorial-calendar-p…
As for the Wiki-Crawl… You ever go to wikipedia to look up something like The Rolling Stones and then 45 minutes later you are still on wikipedia but now you are reading about dung beetles because you clicked on link after link after link in the articles? That's a wiki-crawl.
I would add that it's important to categorize and tag your posts, so the information can be sorted and organized. Down the road, you may want to put a page on your site that shows just posts about a certain topic, or email someone a link that leads them to all posts in a certain category.
The categories and tags have technical SEO benefits for your site as well.
sorry I missed the luncheon! (IABC member)
Owen, I totally agree. Though, I'm really bad about tagging my posts. It's something I need to do more often… right up there with actually posting more often. 🙂