I’ve often spoken about the value of blogging. Whether you’re an individual who wants to make a few extra bucks while providing a commentary on the things that interest you or a company who wants to instill their values and brand in their existing staff, blogging is one of the most influential “non-media” platforms in use today. In the mid-90s, most of us wondered who in their right mind would keep an “online journal”, as it was known before its evolution. These frequently updated web logs (see, “web logs” became “weblogs”, which in turn evolved into just “blogs”) quickly became popular among online junkies who wanted their information fast and less biased by big media.
A blog is traditionally maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, and supporting material such as images or video. Entries are most typically found in reverse-chronological order and support comments by readers in an interactive format. The word “blog” can also be used as a verb.
Although blogging was the staple of ’90s geeks with angst, it quickly grew into a powerful marketing tool, news platform, and communications medium. Further popularized by hosted blogging tools, usage spread quickly in the late nineties, with the initial online journaling platforms being replaced by content management systems and professional blogging tools.
Blogs have gained increasing notice and coverage for their role in communicating news and providing a platform for outreach, marketing, and collaborative information. Not to mention, if you do it right, you can make some good money. Herein, we’ll review what it takes to maintain a successful blog and review money-making options related to blogging.
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Authenticity & Transparency
Blogging is a huge influencer of branding and reputation enhancement, providing that authenticity and transparency are maintained. Authenticity and transparency are the bedrocks of blogging – particularly company blogging. Being open and honest will improve trust within a target community.
When people refer to “authenticity and transparency”, they’re basically saying “be honest”. If you act like you’ve got nothing to hide, and back it up by (gasp) having nothing to hide, your readers will trust you.
Yep, honesty breeds trust – who would’ve guessed?
So, why should we be so honest on the web? Isn’t the Internet where we’re supposed to be able to lie as much as we want?
To put it simply, everyone has a bullshit detectors, and you don’t want to get called out; it would be embarrassing to say the least. To have a successful blog, maintain your integrity, post your actual opinions, offer reason, and allow comments. Engage in a conversation with your readers, but most importantly, write unique content from your honest point of view.
Finding a Niche Market
People have been on a “long tail” marketing craze for a while, talking about all the little niche markets that make up a larger percentage of potential clients. The phrase “The Long Tail” was first coined to describe the niche strategy of businesses such as Amazon that sell a large number of unique items, each in relatively small quantities.
Targeting all those little pockets of people drives highly targeted traffic to sites, so why shouldn’t everyone get in on it? Perhaps without realizing it, many bloggers have already done so.
With the rise of social networking and blogging, we’ve evolved online as we have in other ways; our online personas often mirror our offline lives. Our interests are targeted to something specific and sometimes, such interests don’t necessarily fit into a general blog with wide subject matter – posts such as these often get ignored or lost in the shuffle, and as a result, many bloggers feel they need a niche to be heard.
As a result, blogs have now gone the way of the e-mail address: one for personal use and one for business use (and perhaps one for your alter ego). One for customers and one for employees, each in its own niche within its own community: online society is quickly becoming similar to offline society and there are plenty of niches to fill.
Although in many cases, the point of having a blog is to gain a wider audience, with too much crossover, your audience won’t be as targeted as possible; and once you’ve started crossover readership, it can be difficult to pull it back to your niche focus. It is important to market your site to the appropriate audience, so ensure that you comment on other sites in the same niche, that you advertise appropriately on your site, and that you keep your focus.
There’s nothing wrong with a targeted message to your targeted audience, so don’t expect to please all your existing readers – instead of relying on trying to keep everyone happy, find your own audience based on the niche market of your subject matter… and keep posting!
Internal Blogging for Companies
A blog is an essential tool for companies who want to effectively communicate with their staff. A blog will:
Capture information for short and long-term reference -Foster cross-discipline
communication of information
Localize information and increase “findability”
Decrease deficiencies found in traditional knowledge transfer
Usually placed on or linked from the company intranet, the internal blog should be one of the most easily accessible points to gain internal company information.
Ideally, everyone should be able to post entries; however, to maintain a sense of decorum, it is sometimes best to allow all management to have access to post entries while everyone else in the company should have access to post comments. Typically easier to pitch to the execs than an external blog, internal blogs are also substantially easier to implement with buy-in from senior management, as the content isn’t viewable from external sources.
In addition, an internal blog is more likely to be read by employees than a typical company intranet, newsletters, or general announcements. So, what should be included in an internal company blog? Obviously, any company announcements, including new products, new company directions, staff additions and changes, awards won, events, and especially “fun” things like riddles, links to interesting sites related to the industry – even birthdays and other announcements can be included. Usually just a couple of posts per day are sufficient to communicate all information without overloading your readers. Any more than that, and information can easily be missed.
Space out your announcement and do a “round-up” once a week to reiterate all important communications and links. It typically takes five to ten repetitions for a piece of information to reach and be comprehended by the majority of staff, so the more vehicles there are for internal communications initiatives, the better – and if the staff is young or tech.-oriented, what better way than a blog?
