Yes, I can get away with it, but maybe you can’t.
According to this BBC Article, 39% of bloggers could face the sack for gross misconduct by posting derogatory or damaging details about their workplace, boss or colleagues on their personal blogs.
This blog is created using Typepad but more recently, with the help of Steve, I have discovered Wordpress (so expect a change soon).
Now, being a non-techie, it is a bit more complicated than the ease of which Typepad works but with the wonderful world of plug-ins, oh so much more powerful.
My first attempt was an extension of my work with a client with a Beauty Blog for Men, using cutline (a wordpress theme from Chris Pearson) adapted ever so slightly - there’s no shame in using a template I like to think (if it works and is appropriate).
Over the past two weeks (and with some playing about) I have also loading some cool plug-ins to help me control my tagging (mainly titles and descriptions) to create blog posts that also look nice in search results.
I also found this great article, some of which even makes sense to me: 10 Things I Do After A Fresh Wordpress install.
If you have the budget for a web design agency (I know a good one 
), go for Wordpress , get a template designed and your hosting set-up and even get a little training if you need it… then, blog away.
So, I am doing a seminar today “Blogging For Business” and have spent the past two weeks creating a presentation. Yesterday I did a dry run with a couple of people I work with to make sure it all made sense and a couple of great questions came up, so it got me thinking about the questions I may face today, the biggest question of all of course being, “What’s the point of blogging?”
When I created the presentation, one word really stood out for me and I see it time and time again with all things web:
Engagement
Blogging is all about engagement. You can have all the latest fancy (and faddy) widgets on your blog but if you can’t engage people you are talking to yourself.
A recent report from E-Consultancy about the uptake of blogs for businesses highlights that within the next 12 months 52% of companies will have their own blog.
That begs the question; can a business accept that a blog is not a direct sales tool? When bottom line is so important can business leaders buy-in to the fact that they have to engage with their audience, and that ain’t going to happen with hard sell. Let’s face it, we want to watch the TV programme, not the adverts.
So, as business bloggers we need to become programme makers and that takes great content: Something engaging.
Engaging People
Meanwhile, we also need to be engaging our readers to develop their loyalty. We can’t rely on them buying us, we need to make it happen by giving them a good reason. If you think about it, the relationship is already one-sided if all we are trying to do is sell. We need to put that on the back burner and take a longer term strategy for our blogs.
We can sell by ‘showing off’, proving that we know what we are talking about. A client said to me the other day that they find our website and blog ‘attractive’. She went on to say that if we can make ourselves attractive she had every faith that we could do the same for her business. A soft sell but so much more powerful: She has bought into us on that basis alone.
Engaging An Audience
Social networks and pushing traffic to your blog is also essential to expanding your reach. There are plenty of web sites out there and there are plenty of other people trying to do the same as us, but if we focus on our message, and focus on the quality of our content; we can then focus on the most appropriate social networking sites and engage THE most appropriate audience.
If your audience is not relevant, you may get them up-front but they will soon leave when they see there is no ‘fit’ with your message and their need.
Many blogs in a corporate environment don’t work. Randfish explains the main reasons why. They are all valid points covering lack of transparency - points that we could learn from to make our blogs more effective, perhaps?
When I introduce the idea of blogging to some clients, their big worry is lack of content. In that respect (and I speak from experience and the style of blog posting I do) it’s like buses. A couple of baron days and then a splurge (that’s a technical term).
Now, if I was clever, and could see into the future, I may time my posts so the appear at intervals (Yes you can set your posts to appear and a future time/date). But, I don’t. Partly because I don’t have the patience, partly because I know new articles, links, and posts will come to mind or through my feed reader.
Articles like this, from SEOmoz, also help me find places where I can get information that makes me look clever!
Our web stats tell us that many people read this blog through their web browser as repeat visitors.
If you are one of them you might want to read this guide about setting up the RSS feed straight to your computer - it will save you lots of time in the long-run.
2007 Will Be A Big Year For RSS writes Richard MacManus.
With Microsoft looking to finally release Vista and associated upgrades to their key software (including Internet Explorer and Outlook), many people will no longer need special tools or any extra effort to utilise RSS feeds. So, your blog feeds and the transfer of data could finally being going mainstream.
