Getting Started With Business Blogging

I know a lot of business people who look at starting a blog the way they think about taking their vitamins. They know they should, but they don't know why.

Here's the executive summary: because it's how a lot of your customers, partners and other key audiences want to interact with you, and because your competitors are doing it. Think of it the way consumer products companies must have thought about advertising 100 years ago: a new and necessary business communication tool you need to deploy whether you "want" to or not.

So at some point, you will need to seriously consider whether and how to do a business blog. And when you do, make sure to head over to The Blog Studio and download their free Guide to Business Blogging. It's a great primer on how to get started, from planning to implementation.

Here are a few tips gleaned from its pages:

• When you are ready to develop a blog, figure on doing it in four steps: identify your general goals, figure out what resources you have to apply to the project, establish your blogging goals and establish a budget.
• The general plan for creating a blog involves planning the content you expect to write about on a regular basis, the information you plan to post that will stay more static, what technology you will use, and then finally your graphic design.
• Plan to write content that's skimmable. That should take some of the worry out of your mind. People are skimming on the web, not settling for a long read. That means you should use short, punchy sentences and paragraphs, humor, headings, boldface type and keywords.
• Don't just look at blogging as a cost center. It can also generate revenue from ads (direct revenue), new business leads (indirect revenue) and spinoffs like e-books (passive revenue).