This is part 7 of a new series on how to start a business blog, and is aimed at businesses of all sizes. In these articles, I’m going to address business-specific concerns and requirements for business blogging.
One aspect of personal blogging that doesn’t translate into business blogging is blog design. Personal blogs are like kitchen junk drawers, overflowing with widgets, advertising, blogrolls, shoutboxes, music lists, phases of the moon, and all other kinds of cruft. It’s one of the things that makes personal blogging personal, and nearly all of these things have no business being on a business blog.
There is still a large percentage of the general population who may be your customers that do not know what a blog is when they see it. People tend to ignore that which they don’t understand. Leave out all those blog-specific items and focus on the content and fulfilling the purpose of the blog. All you generally need are the following:
- Subscription tools for visitors, both RSS and Email, with the email more visible and prominent than RSS.
- Categories
- Archives
- About or author information
Make sure your business blog carries your brand. Do not just get an off-the-shelf or free template. That’s not you. It’s somebody else. Have your blog theme or template professionally designed, or for goodness’ sake at least customize a free theme enough to “make it yours.” If you’re redesigning your entire site to use the blog CMS, have your theme professionally designed. There are plenty of good designers out there, myself included.
Some final tips:
- Pay for a good stock photography and let your blogger(s) use it to add visual interest to posts.
- Make sure your blog looks great in all common browsers: Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Firefox, and Safari for the Mac.
- Make it clear that it’s a blog. Use the word “blog” or “weblog” prominently at the top.
- Use non-bloggy terms, like “permanent link” instead of “permalink” and “links to this post” instead of “trackbacks.”
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