You’ve been called into a meeting and told that it’s been decided that you’re going to be in charge of writing a company blog to enable your company to:

1. engage your customers / potential customers
2. be positioned as a thought leader in your space
3. get your branding / product message out there
4. keep pace with your competition

So what are the first steps? Well, obviously, you need a blog to write on. There are several platforms out there that you can use, but the big ones are Blogger, Typepad and WordPress. I’ve used all 3, and currently go with WordPress on all new projects, as it’s just so much more flexible, as the others are updated that may change. Therefore the advice below is directed at WordPress users, although you can adapt most of it to the other platforms.

You’ll then need to select a good name for the blog and set up hosting, unless you’re going to run it off an existing site, in which case you’ll just want to skip to getting the blogging software installed. You do have the option to set your blog up directly on the blogging platform servers, so instead of GreenWidgetsblog.com you’d have GreenWidgetsBlog.Blogspot.com. This is something that you want to avoid. By putting your blog on their servers you’re giving up a degree of control, and should you one day decide to migrate to another platform it’s going to be a big headache.

So now you have a blank blog, what’s next? Well, first you need to get a blog template created and set up. This look and feel may be determined by your corporate style guide, but if not, there are many free templates available on the web that can be found by doing a simple Google search i.e. Free WordPress Themes, these can be modified by anyone with some php and photoshop experience.

The next step is to do some customization of the template that you’re working with, not so much in terms of look and feel, but in terms of functionality.

1. Akismet - This is a no-brainer. This plugin stops the spammers from infiltrating your comments with blatant attempts to push their non-related sites.
2. All in One SEO pack - This plugin allows you to modify the title tags, the descriptions, and the keywords, while also allowing you to set up sections for no-indexing so as to head off the potential issue of duplicate content.
3. FeedBurner FeedSmith - This plugin detects all ways to access your RSS feed, and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed to allow you to track every possible subscriber.
4. Get Recent Comments - This plugin should only be used when your blog is established, and receiving a nice amount of comments and trackbacks. What it does is display the recent comments and trackbacks, which then encourages more people to comment, and shows the blog as being an active one.
5. Simple Tags - This plugin allows you to easily generate Technorati tags within your blog posts. This increases the chance that your blog will be found for a particular search on Technorati. Exactly why that’s important will be discussed in my follow-up post next Monday.
6. Sociable - This plugin allows you to select from a list of social media sites, which will then display at the bottom of each post to allow readers to easily submit / vote on your posts, which can increase the likelihood that they will vote for your post.
7. WordPress Database Backup - This plugin created backups of your WordPress database. Handy to have for if you ever have a catastrophic disaster.
8. Other Plugins - There are over 1,000 plugins in the official WordPress database. Some replicate functionality, others offer specific functionality that you may or may not need.

Next, go open a Google Analytics account and put the code on your blog, this will allow you to see your traffic stats.So now you have a blog, it has the look and feel that you desire, along with the functionality that you believe you’ll need to succeed. Next comes the easiest and the hardest part… the content. When you first set up your blog you should have a good 5-10 posts prepared and ready to go live, you should also have a content plan.

• Who is going to be writing?
• How often are they going to write?
• What are they going to write about?
• How long is an ‘ideal’ post?
• What is the approval process?
• Are there any off-limits topics?

Ideally, you want to have a minimum of 2-3 posts per week, with more being better, as long as the topics are relevant and the posts are worthwhile enough, with fresh ideas / perspectives, and not simply regurgitations of current industry news items or your own marketing collateral. Having a regular posting schedule helps your readers follow your blog. This doesn’t mean that you have to rigidly stick to that schedule, but it does help set expectations. For example, on this blog we have 5 authors, and each has a scheduled day to post, but we can still post on other days, should inspiration so strike.

There is no ‘ideal’ post length, but you do want to make the posts easy to read, by breaking them down into nice chunks, with bullet points sprinkled within. If you have a really long post, think about breaking it down into a series of posts, don’t force people to read an 8,000+ word treatise in one go for each blog post that you put out, while it may work for an author, it’s more likely than not not going to work for a Green Widget manufacturer such as yourself. Speaking of which, I’m going to stop here and continue next week, with a discussion on what you need to do post-launch of your brand new corporate blog.

Filed under: Education and Training, SEO, Social Marketing on Monday, October 8th, 2007 by Simon Heseltine |
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