Last week, we posted our first three of seven top tips to help you manage the blogging process and generate content that’s fresh, interesting, current, and relevant to your readers.
As a reminder, they were:
1. Define your goals and the purpose of your blog
2. Know your readers
3. Recruit a variety of people to contribute to your blog
We know you are waiting in suspense, so here are our final four top tips:
4. Brainstorm topics of interest. At HDG, we included our design team and our management team in this process. We didn’t want to miss out on any great ideas! We have since set up a whiteboard in my office for parking new ideas as they arise. As part of this exercise, you might want to look at a number of blogs to see how others are using this space, from within and outside of your industry. Here are a few to get started with:
• Adventures in Organization, by Rubbermaid http://blog.rubbermaid.com/home/. Rubbermaid uses their blog to give their customers ideas on how to be better organized in their daily life. Lots of tips and photos.
• The Business Impact of IT, by Andrew McAfee http://andrewmcafee.org/blog/. Teacher, writer, and researcher, Andrew McAfee has maintained his blog since March 2006. He writes about technology’s impact on business as a whole, and his posts are extremely interesting. Thought-leadership material, plenty of interaction with readers.
• Roth on Wesleyan is the blog of Michael Roth, President of Wesleyan University. He uses this blog to post his reflections on university life at Wesleyan. Michael Roth has made 160+ posts on his blog and has received 560+ comments, so far. Wow! http://roth.blogs.wesleyan.edu/
5. Put processes in place to manage your blog. Set up a calendar to keep contributors on schedule and to ensure postings are made on a regular basis, and establish an editorial process to ensure that your postings reflect your organization well. For HDG, we are all planning to contribute to our blog. We have an assigned month for each designer (and we can’t wait to see what they come up with). Before we publish, Diane and Carl review the posting. Now, we have to make sure we stick to it.
6. Think Goldilocks: Not too long, not too short, but just right. During our planning at HDG, we decided that if we approached every posting on our blog as though it were an essay, nothing would get done and we would probably bore everyone. There are no rules here. Vary it.
7. Use your own voice. This is an opportunity to connect with your customer and show your personality—strengthen the ties! Are you feeling anything yet? Want to see some passion and loyalty, check out Southwest’s blog, Nuts about Southwest http://www.blogsouthwest.com/.
Now, you have a way to organize the process, produce great content, and a schedule for publishing, it’s time to think about promoting your blog. We’re here to help with some creative ways to drive your customers and other stakeholders to your site! Call us to chat more about this.