Business Blogging Tips – All Time Top 10
Business blogging tips.
After four months of studying business blogging and testing various blogging tips, I’m ready to share my top 10 business blogging tips. These 10 little gems, will be broken up into three separate posts.
What did I do over my summer vacation? Why study business blogging of course! I was asked to speak on a panel about business blogging at the Product Development and Management Association’s 33rd Annual Conference in Anaheim, CA. See my related post – PDMA 2009 – Got Blog – The Perfect Storm. So with the primary goal of not embarrassing myself and the secondary goal delivering value to the audience (just being honest – survival instinct kicked in), I set out to learn all there is to know about business blogging. While it would be arrogant to think that I actually did learn everything, I have managed to put together these top 10 actionable business bogging tips. Hope you find them useful.
Top 10 Business Blogging Tips
Business Blogging Tip 1 (Finding Subjects to Blog About)
The first step in successful business blogging is to find the conversation online. You need to know where and what is being said about the subjects you and your customers care about. Google alerts and Google reader are great ways to start.
Google alerts notifies you every one of the terms you listed appears in Google’s index. You can add your company name, the names of employees, product names, or even the names of your children. My college age daughters love the last one.
Create a Google alerts accounts and enter important words or phrases. Use quotes to reduce the amount of unrelated email you receive. Also, adjust the "how often" column to place greater emphasis on more important phrases.
Google reader allows you to subscribe to different sites related to interesting subjects.
Create a Google reader account, click "add a subscription" and search for the phrases that interests you. Next, simply click the "subscribe" button that appears under the listing. The next time you view your Google reader account it will be populated with all of the updates for the sites you selected.
Business Blogging Tip 2 (Stay Organized)
Let’s face it we all have too much to do already. Business blogging is one of those extra duties that can easily be pushed to the back burner. Did you ever notice that what separates good from great companies has less to do with having a great idea and more to do with doing the right thing day in and day out? Well blogging is one of those day to day tasks, that if done regularly, will really pay off.
Below, I described my approach to managing this extra duty, this pain in the neck task, this beast we call business blogging. My approach isn’t perfect, but it works for me and maybe it will work for you. If you have suggestions, I would appreciate a comment.
The first step is to develop a method to collect and organize blog post ideas. I suggest that you use Instapaper. Instapaper offers a Firefox extension that places a “read later” button in your Firefox tool bar. When browsing Google reader or any web page, simply click “read later” and the page you are on will be saved to your Instapaper account. Within Instapaper, you can organize web pages into folders. I have folders for SEO (search engine optimization), PPC (pay per click), social media, and blogging. When I come across an interesting article, I simply save it to Instapaper. Later, when I have time, I read the article and decide if it deserves further attention.
Here’ my favorite part. There’s a iPhone app that syncs with Instapaper. This give me the flexibility to review the pages I’ve selected at my convenience. How cool! The iPhone app isn’t free ($5) but it was well worth the few dollars.
Create an Instapaper account. Next, download the Instapaper Firefox extension and install the "read later" button. If you have an iPhone, I suggest you buy the mobile app to sync and access your stored articles on your phone.
Business Blogging Tip 3 (Use your Todo List to Collect Post Ideas)
Many times, I’ll be sitting at my desk reading an online article or just daydreaming when suddenly, POW!, I come up with the mother of all blog post ideas. Of course this only happens when I don’t have the time to whip out a post. To avoid losing track of the Idea, I use my todo list to capture thoughts and document links to reference material. Then later, when I have about an hour of quite time, I’ll review list of post ideas and start writing. There are a lot of great todo list choices, but I like Things. Things is a Mac application from Cultured Code. It won the Macworld Best of Show 2009 award. The desktop app costs $50, and the iPhone app isn’t cheap either at $10. For me it was worth the money.
Document post ideas in your todo list. I use Things which allows me to record ideas and store notes including links and my thoughts about a subject. Then later, when I have time to write, I scan my list of post ideas, select one and start typing.
I hoped you enjoyed Business Blogging Tips part 1. Click a link below for Blogging for Business Tips – Part 2, and Corporate Blogging Tips – Part 3.
