While the specific requirements will vary according to the goals and expectations, you should be able to answer the following questions from the start:

a) What do you want to do with your Business Blog?
It’s really important that you have a clear idea from the start of what you want to do with your Business Blog – this will help it to have the focus that will benefit it with both readers and search engines alike. The more focused it is, the more successful it is likely to be.

b) Who is your target audience for your Business Blog?
Avoid trying to make it “all things to all people” – it’s just not possible. It’s all about focus again and so decide on who your target audience is and then write the blog for them with content they’ll be interested in and a style that they will warm to.

c) What results are you looking to achieve?
It’s all well and good for me to say that you should be considering these elements if you want your blog to be a success, but just what is “a successful blog” for you? What goals do you have for your Business Blog and just as importantly, how are you going to measure them? You will need to show results for the time and effort involved – therefore, from the start, make sure you know what results you are looking for, what criteria you want to work with and how you wish to measure them.

d) How will it integrate with your other marketing activities?
Blogging is an excellent marketing tool. However, it is not a magic wand to cure all marketing ills, so take time and effort to use as well as possible with your other marketing, business development and customer service activities. (Check Marketing and Promoting your Business Blog.

e) What Blogging software to choose?
There are a number of options available, each with their own plus points and negatives – what you need to do is decide which is most appropriate according to the control, customisation or future-proofing you require. Probably the best advice I can give is to choose one which will grow and develop with you as well as fitting with your current business and technical requirements. Free hosted software (such as Blogger) will seldom do this or give you sufficient control, so look at Wordpress (full version) or Typepad as good starter points. [My own preference is for Wordpress.]

f) What to call your Business Blog?
Rule of Thumb: choose something which you are still going to feel comfortable with in a year’s time. Either let it reflect your company and branding, or make sure it contains your keywords … or preferably both. You might like to check some additional ideas on choosing a Business Blog name here.

g) Host it on your website or on a different domain
As a general rule, if it sits comfortably alongside your website and complements the information on it, then integrate it into your website. That will be good for your company both from a branding and a Search Engine point of view. If, on the other hand, you are looking to present an objective view on your industry or want to create a separate identity then a separate domain name would be more appropriate.

h) What domain name or subdirectory name to use?
Try to use something descriptive – if you are using a separate domain, then choose a domain name which either reflects the branding you wish to achieve or contains your main keyword (or preferably both!). If it is a subdirectory then describe the purpose it will be serving such as “Information Centre” for example. Please, please, please … only use “blog” as a name as a last resort!!

i) Look and Feel of the Blog
If you are using it as part of your website, then integrate the look and feel with the rest of the site. There is absolutely no need for your visitors to know that they are on a blog – and of course they really won’t care! Remember it’s the benefits that blogs offer that is important, not the technology. If it is on a separate domain, then design your Business Blog with the image you want to portray but don’t use the default template that comes with your blog software. Default template = zero differentiation!

With all of these elements in place then you are starting off on the right track and should have the foundations in place to create a successful Business Blog. By doing so, you will find that it will save you a lot of time and inconvenience in the future and will make the blog that much more effective in achieving your business goals.

Related posts:

1. Finding a Domain name for your Blog
2. Starting to write your Business Blog
3. Choosing a name for your Blog

Since business blogs can be both quickly and easily updated, and because they are inherently interactive, they provide the perfect medium both to display expertise and to help to start a relationship with clients. The additional benefits such as a more prominent profile with Search Engines is a clearly a plus but the ability to clearly demonstrate what you can do and the knowledge and experience that you can bring to a client’s situation are critical.

Looking at it from an overall business perspective, some of the main benefits that can be achieved through business blogs are:

• Differentiate your business: help to break down the impersonal corporate wall that can surround professional services companies and provide a personal face to what you do. The knowledge and expertise that you bring is of course, but who you are and your personality are also key to a successful commercial relationship, as well as being critical branding elements and business tools – so USE them!
• Educational Marketing approach: use the developing content of your blog to show your potential customers what you can do. This is a much more powerful approach than traditional direct selling methods and it will help to build better relationships with your marketplace. It will also help you to become a “partner” rather than simply a “supplier”.
• Demonstrate your Expertise: as you offer a specialist service, then gaining recognition as an expert in a certain field and being able to demonstrate real credibility is hugely beneficial. A blog can act as a shop window to these skills and is doubly effective if it is THE place to go for information in a specific niche. Using the internet for research, potential customers will certainly find the information they are looking for – so make sure that they find it on YOUR blog!
• Interact with your marketplace: open up the services that you offer and the benefits they provide by letting people interact with you by commenting on your articles, case studies or news releases. When your service offering is strong, then the more that people know about you and have the chance to talk with you, the better your situation will be.
• Knowledge Leadership: when people are interested in what you are writing about, they will want to hear more and will recommend you to others. By expressing your ideas and thoughts openly you will encourage this and help position yourself as a leading exponent in your field. But to be considered a leading light in your area, first you need to communicate your ideas with others.

There is still a reticence on the part of companies and individuals alike to open up and share more about what they can do – they prefer to keep that under wraps until a contract is signed or reveal parts only behind closed doors.

In today’s environment where information is readily available, the likelihood is that there will be many others in the marketplace offering similar services to you. To ensure that customers find you first, it is critical to broadcast the knowledge you have – the greater the level of quality information that you share, the greater the chance of being found and your services being demanded.

Your blog can help you to achieve just that.

Related posts:

1. The Blog Coach and why hire a Blogging Consultant
2. Linking to other blogs: business benefits
3. The Blog Coach returns

Two very different sites as well and it’s nice to see that they have been so well received after all the hard work put in by Krishna De and Ann Greene who write and run them.

Biz Growth News – Krishna De

A traditional blog in terms of format, though one that is absolutely full of information for a business looking for ideas and new information about anything and everything to do with developing business and building a brand online and offline. Podcasts, webinars and offline seminars as well as the blog itself and yet that is still only scratching the surface of what Krishna offers.

In March, we’ll be looking in a little more detail at the thought processes that went on in terms of the modifications and the implementation of the final result that you see now. However, as you read the posts, you will see that all that this does is complement the great content that Krishna provides. A blog which just cries out to be in your RSS reader!

Allagi Consulting – Ann Greene

This is a full Blogsite (that’s to say a complete website including a blog which is all built using Blog software) which has given Ann Greene, who runs Allagi Consulting, total control over the whole of the site in terms of being able to add and change content as she requires, as well as the ability to add pages and so grow the site when she needs to – with little to no intervention from anyone, including me.

The site also incorporates the Allagi Blog which Ann uses to great effect to look at her specialist area of expertise of team building and team development. Although it’s still in its infancy, the blog was already considered worthy of a place in the shortlist and you can’t say fairer that that!

Do check out both blogs and I wish them both the best of luck in the final which will be announced at the Awards Dinner on March 3rd. In the meantime, so as you don’t miss any, I will be listing the nominees in the main categories in a special version of Spotlight on UK Blogs (in this case Spotlight on Irish Award Blogs) this Friday.

Related posts:

1. Spotlight on Irish Blogs: Irish Blog Awards finalists
2. Use Graphics: make people want to read your Blog
3. How to stop comment spam on your Blog

Likewise, blogs are open to abuse from individuals looking to exploit them at the expense of others, the preferred ways being Spam Blogs and Comment Spam. So let’s see why Comment Spam exists and how we can go about stopping it on our blogs.

What is Comment Spam?

Comment Spam is where a spammer leaves comments on blog posts that have nothing to do with the post itself but merely contain multiple links back to the spammer’s commercial website. Most Comment Spam is now carried out automatically rather than by individuals and its goal is generally just to create links back to a target site (and so improve its Search Engine ranking), though it may also attract a small amount of traffic as well.

If my Comment Spam filter is at all representative, then the subject matter will be familiar to all of us using email, since the same types of subjects and messages tend to crop up in both.

How do we stop Comment Spam on our own blog?

So what are our options when it comes to avoiding having comment spam swamping our blogs, other than turning off comments all together of course – and that’s something I’m certainly not advocating!

• Comment Moderation
  The most time consuming way is simply to moderate out all of the spam comments – that is to say, you look at each comment which has been left and allow genuine ones to appear on your blog while deleting the spam comments. This can become very time consuming (not to mention frustrating!) because once you are “found” by the spam commenters, you are going to be receiving a lot of these. Rule of thumb – the more successful you are, the easier you are to find and the more you will receive – I imagine with such a high profile blog, Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger suffers more than most, as he comments here.
• CAPTCHA methods
  CAPTCHA is actually an acronym (ok, since you asked – Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart – there, now wasn’t that interesting!) but you’ll know it as a distorted series of letters and numbers which appear on the page and that you have to type in. This is designed to prove that you are a human and not an automated visitor – or, in this case, spammer. Typed in correctly, it allows you to submit your comment, but will stop most forms of automated comment spam getting through.
• Specialist Software Intervention
  Just like with email, there are also providers of specialist software which can help us and here, in my opinion, the leader in this respect is called Akismet. Here, the software identifies the comments that it believes are spam and impounds them – it’s also provided free of charge, except for commercial use, which is an additional bonus. Although it was developed by the company involved with Wordpress, it has been modified to work with many other types of blog software so it’s worth checking out. Another plug-in for Wordpress is Spam Karma which also comes highly recommended.
• Getting commenters to log-in
  You can of course elect to only accept comments from people that have already logged in to a registration system which you run on your blog – this way you can be fairly sure that they will be leaving real comments because you have effectively “pre-vetted” them.

Which method is the best?

All of the methods above work well from a functional level and will help to avoid the vast majority of comment spam from arriving in your posts. Therefore, when deciding which method to use, I was personally swayed by the impact that it would have on readers wanting to leave genuine comments. Basically, I wanted to make sure that it was as easy as possible for them to do so.

Therefore, I elected to go down the specialist software route which has no impact on readers leaving comments and nothing additional for them to do – I therefore use Akismet on my blogs and those that I set-up for the businesses and individuals I work with. The results? Well, so far so good. It stops 95% of spam and also learns from all the blogs using it, so keeps up with (if not stays ahead of) the comment spammers and their methods. Overall, a big thumbs up from me.

BTW – to make sure that you have all the information at your finger tips to make your own decision, no matter which blog platform you use, I’ll be doing a second post on the subject of comment spam next week where I will try to lay out the different options available for each platform. In the meantime, any thoughts you’d like to share on what has worked for you, then please leave a comment – a real one preferably!

Related posts:

1. Comments: encourage, accept and reply
2. Professional Services Companies: blog well and prosper
3. The Blog Coach and the Irish Blog Awards

Anyway, here are some of the ones that I tend to use.

Write about current events

Something that you probably do on an ongoing basis is keeping an eye on what is being written about your industry, perhaps through various news media and ideally with the help of RSS feeds which of course saves you a load of time and gets you the news in double quick time. So just choose an event or piece of information which is of interest to you and your readers and give your comments on it and perhaps its implications. Don’t forget to reference the article and the site where appropriate though.

Read other blogs

Keep an eye on other blogs and what they are talking about – you will probably find subjects that you wish to develop further, ones that you wish to comment on in your own blog (don’t forget to use a trackback!) or ones that simply spark new ideas that you can write about. Other blogs are great sources of current thinking and new potential ideas.

Write a Series

Select a topic and write a set of posts around the theme you have selected. Try to plan the series out in advance (at least the titles) and then write them as you need them. Alternatively, once you get into the series, you may find that you write a number of them all at once. That’s great! But don’t get carried away and post them all together, instead postdate them (in Wordpress, just change the “Post Timestamp”) so that they publish automatically a few days apart.

Revisit old posts you have written

Check back over some of your old posts and see if there are ones that could be developed more fully. You may feel that there are now updates or new information that you would like to add to them, so do so in a new post which references back to the original one and develops the ideas further.

Answer Questions from Comments on Posts

Use contacts from people who have asked for information or have asked questions which have developed on your original post and opened up in turn new areas or topics. Take these questions or the points that they raise and develop the answers into new posts.

Get a guest blogger in

You do not need to write all of the posts yourself, many Business Blogs will in fact have two or even more people working on them. However, if you don’t have people who post regularly, you can still have a “guest blogger” who might come in to post on a particular subject where they have a specialist knowledge.

There is of course a final option – simply take a break from posting for a few days. There’s no issue with that – just let your readers know and they’ll be waiting for your return with bated breath.

Related posts:

1. Generating Ideas for your Business Blog posts
2. How to stop comment spam on your Blog
3. Green Cross Code of Business Blogging

For me, there are two main sources of ideas: you and everyone else.

Blog Post Ideas – You

You want to make sure that you capture all the ideas that come to you and personally I use a nice and easy solution for this: I keep a notebook with me at all times. Why? So that I can note down ideas that occur to me during the course of the day – and, believe me, they can come at the weirdest moments. They could be triggered by any event, by something that I see which sparks a connection or by a comment that somebody makes to me. I note down the idea and any associated thoughts that crop up at the time and then I go back, review and use these ideas as and when I need to.

Blog Post Ideas – Everyone Else

When it comes to “everyone else”, the best people to take ideas from are your customers, your prospects and your partners – these are all the sorts of people who are likely to ask those questions which others would benefit from as well, so can be a great source of inspiration.

So, make a note of the main ones and make a point of talking about them on your blog. Treat it in the same way as you would when you take questions from the audience during a presentation – that’s to say, repeat the question that has been asked so that the rest of the audience can hear and then go ahead and answer it.

Do the same in your blog – you will be providing information which will answer relevant and real questions that should help your customers use your product better and help your prospects to understand its potential better.

So that you have this resource developing on an ongoing basis, I suggest that:

• you keep a folder in your email system and make a copy of both the question you receive and the response you send back – this will in itself form the basis of your business blog post;
• after meetings with clients, prospects or suppliers, note down some of the key questions that they asked and which were clearly on interest to them;
• at Conferences and Exhibitions, keep a record of the questions or the areas that visitors to your stand keep asking about and are showing most interest in.

You’ll soon find that you have topics for your posts planned out well in advance and as you write the posts, you will hopefully also start to receive comments which will start to take the discussions and questions in other directions as well.

Related posts:

1. Generating yet more ideas for your Business Blog
2. Great post titles give great reader figures
3. The Blog Coach returns

When you are starting a blog for your business, it can be all too easy to get carried away, rush into setting up a half baked blog and start writing immediately. If you are in this situation then try employing the Green Cross Code of Business Blogging. I first wrote about this idea at Better Business Blogging but I think that the message is so important that it warrants a reposting here with some additional commentary.

Stop! Wait, don’t rush into writing your blog immediately, you need to plan first and decide the focus of your blog.

Look at some established blogs and see how others go about it. Make sure you read some of these to get a better feel for blogging from those already doing it.

“Listen” to the conversations going on in the blogosphere and to what people are saying in their posts, as well as to as much good advice as you can get.

Think about what you have read and take the time to plan your blog in terms of what you want to say and to whom, as well as in terms of your overall goals for it.

Finally, start to blog with all of these elements in mind but make sure you keep reading other blogs, listening to new ideas and thinking how to develop your blog.

To make a success of a blog, you need to spend time planning a variety of elements on your Blog as you start to develop it, and crucially you should also spend time looking at what is being written about and listening what is being said, before you put “pen to paper” on your first post.

I recognise that there are advocates of a more immediate approach – that of simply starting to blog and gaining experience by actually writing one. I can see the advantages of that and of not falling into the trap of “paralysis by analysis” (ie thinking about it for so long that you don’t actually ever do anything).

But I also know that whatever you write while “gaining experience” will still reflect on you and your business and that once it is out on the internet, then there is no easy way to withdraw it. By taking the time to plan and to read what others are writing about, you will gain confidence when you start to post as well as having a framework to work with – remember that when you start blogging, it is the equivalent of entering an enormous noisy stadium full of people talking rather than sitting down to a quiet one-to-one dinner. It can be intimidating so it’s good to be as comfortable as possible when you start.

So, taking it back to basics, to make sure that you start blogging with confidence, I recommend that when you start your business blog, you follow the Green Cross Code of Business Blogging:

Related posts:

1. Using Technorati to research your future Blog or your Market
2. Generating yet more ideas for your Business Blog
3. Starting to write your Business Blog

We will be looking at all aspects of blogging from the planning and design of blogs and blogsites which deliver on their business objectives, through to their marketing and ongoing development. In all cases, the focus will be firmly focused on the business aspect – not in terms of monetising your blog with adverts and the like, but in using a blog to develop business for your company.

The Blog Coach blogsite is designed and aimed at three main groups:

• corporates, small business and solopreneurs which are either planning or merely thinking about setting up a business blog to work for their businesses;
• those companies looking for ways to develop and/or market a blog which they have already set up for their business;
• anyone interested in understanding more about how to use the Social Media Marketing Toolkit they have at their disposal.

While it isn’t specifically aimed at experienced individual bloggers, I hope that The Blog Coach will be able to offer you something as well and I would welcome comments and feedback from you so that it can be shared with others.

In addition to the main categories which will help you identify areas of particular interest, there are also some guiding categories which will help to give focus to the posts. These will be:

• Planning and Setting up a Blog
• Writing and Developing your Blog
• Business Blog Marketing
• Blogging for your Business
• Corporate Blogging
• New Media / Social Media Marketing Toolkit

Although it will be aimed at and looking at the use of blogging in business sense and how to make it work for you, I hope that people running individual blogs will certainly gain from some of the sections.

So, whatever stage you are at with your Business Blogging, I invite you to dip in on a regular basis – to make that as easy as possible, why not add The Blog Coach to your favourite RSS Reader as well? Hopefully you’ll find the areas that we’re going to be discussing useful as well as interesting, and that you’ll feel the urge to join in!

I look forward to hearing from you.

Related posts:

1. The Blog Coach returns
2. The Blog Coach is spotted!
3. The Blog Coach and why hire a Blogging Consultant