Getting started with your Online Blog
Apart from being the ‘in’ thing to do on the internet, blogs are an excellent way to communicate with people and sharing your opinion, enjoying interesting exchanges and getting some publicity on the side. Blogs are especially useful for those with online services and businesses which need to create some ‘buzz’. Here are some start-up tips for blogs:
A blog needs a blog management system which is nothing except a set of password protected web pages which allow you to post/edit/delete content on your public site. You can sign up on any of the listed blogging sites and get started:
1. Blogger.com: Free
2. Blogspot.com: Free
3. Wordpress.com: Free
4. Type Pad: $4.95 - $899.95
5. Movable Type: Free
However, there might be some country specific blogging sites which are popular as well such as iBiBo.com in India and so on.
Once you have your blog address sorted out (blogger.yourname.com), you can start almost immediately by creating an interesting profile, ranking up topics and sending invites to people to visit your blog.
After the set up is done, the real task of actually making your blog INTERESTING for someone to read starts. Many people take to blogging as a duck takes to water. Avid bloggers love to talk and thus love to write their opinion about things they feel strongly about creating an interesting blog by the way. The message is simple…to be successful in blogging, you need to take care of the following points:
1. Choose a theme or topic which will be discussed/commented on on your blog. Not only does this help in targeting readers, it also makes it easy to create an in-depth blog on a specific subject.
2. Update regularly. Though many bloggers update their blog as often as five times a day, it might be just too much for some people. However, you must update a regular pattern of updating content so that users keep returning.
3. It pays to be honest. Blogs are suppose to take away the marketing jargon and fluff and be one-to-one…based on this premise, blogs have become so popular and it is honest, humane and genuinely interesting content which gets a blog popular.
4. Value. Reading a blog should enrich me in some way. Humor, realism, technical knowhow and knowledge sharing are some of the reasons for the success of most blogs. Tone of the blog should not be preachy and the length of each blog post should not be more than 500 words.
5. Podcasts and vblogs are fast becoming more popular than the written word and these elements should be included in your product strategy.
If you are unable to research all the content on your blog, you can hire researchers to help you through as well.
4. Talk about your blog. A blog is actually no different when it comes to web promotion. You can use all the techniques of SEO for it and the added advantage is that you post many of the links across sites such as Digg.com, Technocrati.com, Del.ic.io.us and other topical blogs to create more user awareness to the point of discussion. Link building, an AdWords campaign and promoting RSS feeds are all part of the buzz factor for blogs.
5. The big word in blogs: Syndication! If you are a subject matter expert, then you should push for syndication with sites which pay regular writers to develop content for them. Syndication is easier on the net with multiple tracking tools available and gives respect to the writer and helps popularize the blog. Syndication is an excellent way to ’soft-market’ your blog.
6. Track that blog! For better results (and more hits) you need to track the blog on a regular basis as well. This includes reviewing comments received and respond to them ( remember blogs are suppose to take away the layers of corporate bureaucracy which exist in organizations), see what OTHER blogs in the same category are talking about and use simple traffic analysis tools to understand who is reading your blog.
Though I have listed only six points in my tips on how to create and market your blog, once you start doing them, you will notice that they take a good deal of time to start implementing each suggestion. The idea should be to set up a framework and then start populating content while development the marketing plan for the blog.