How to Implement a Successful Blog
29/05/2011
The title of this article is about ‘successful blogs’. This is unusual as very few people decide to implement a ‘successful blog’. Instead the requirement is simply ‘a blog’. This means no thought is given at the setup stage onto what will make the blog successful. Yet some key decisions are made at setup. These include:
- Which platform? A blogging website, Wordpress or some blogging software? Setup cost here should be discounted as in the long term they are not important. Key factors are how the blog will appear, for example on its own domain name, as a subdomain, a folder on your website or even a folder on a 3rd party website.
- How easy to setup? This should not be a key factor as it is only done once. Instead ease of ongoing use is more critical. And what useful features such as RSS feed or feedback comments are provided.
- Blog design. The colours and styling can be changed at any time, but the structure is important. For example will this be a linear blog by date or will it be divided by categories.
So the blog system is planned and implemented as a project. A few sample blogs added and the project completed. Yet in reality the project has just started. Implementing a successful blog involves a marketing plan for the blog and a plan of content.
A marketing plan for the blog?
But isn’t the blog supposed to ‘be the company marketing’? This is a very false assumption. Adding a blog system to your website is just that. You add some pages. This in itself will not help with marketing.
For a blog to help with a company’s marketing, the blog itself must be marketed. This means articles must be written with care, based partially around keyword research, but also meeting the interests of readers. In practise this is best done following a flexible blog content plan. The best blog content plans allow flexibility in responding to news and events and avoid being too prescriptive, but form a framework to ensure all types of desired content and keyword areas are covered in any period of time.
In addition to writing the blog posts or articles, effort needs to be spent in referencing these from other places on your website or elsewhere on the web. This promotes the blog in the eyes of Google and makes it more visible in search results.
Using blogs as part of search engine optimisation work can be effective if well planned, but posting large number of backlinks to certain websites from blogs is certainly not the way to do this effectively. In fact this is more often than not harmful.
