The rules of business blogging

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Posted Monday, 21 April 2008, 01:54 HST @412

As business blogging becomes a key success factor in some industries, business bloggers sometimes face pressure to produce excellent metrics right from the start. Their managers sometimes try shortcuts to success, only to find that the online community can see through these tricks.

SEO 2.0 has posted an excellent list of 10 things a business blog should not do. These include:

Number 1) Writing under an assumed name. I use an old email address (billso) for my domain name (billso.com). My real name is listed on my about page.

Number 9) Requiring employees to read, rank and promote the blog. I do not require my employees or students to comment or rank my blog articles. I do assign blog articles for my students to read with their assignments. My blog articles provide up-to-date examples that my course textbooks cannot provide.

Building reputation and authority

SEO is an acronym that means search engine optimization. There are thousands of blogs and online businesses that offer advice on getting more advertising revenue, more readers and a higher Google rank.

Many bloggers get caught up in revenue generation, as I mentioned in my billso.com article of 27 March 2008. It’s much more difficult to build a blog’s reputation and authority. These attributes can be measured by counting the number and kinds of inbound links to a blog, a blog’s search engine ranking, and quotes in the mainstream media.

For readers, reputation and authority are difficult concepts. It takes little effort to lose these attributes. SEO Chicks has some more good examples of what not to do with a business blog. It’s a bad idea to set up a flog, especially in the United Kingdom:

A ‘flog’ is a fake blog usually created by a PR or online marketing firm for the purpose of falsely representing themselves as a consumer, usually for the purposes of creating a buzz around a specific product or brand. Sometimes this is done as a brand or online reputation management activity.

There’s usually hell to pay when the mainstream media or the blogosphere discovers a flog or a fake.

2 responses so far ↓

1 Tad Chef // Tuesday, 22 April 2008, 11:15 HST @802

Hey Bill, thanks for the mention, I feel honored. Indeed blogging for educational reasons is not quite the same as business blogging I refer to in my post so some rules have to be adpated to this context. For instance I do not recommend to blog using your real name if you blog privately. Now are students blogging privately or in a business manner? It depends.
2 billso // Tuesday, 22 April 2008, 13:25 HST @892

Tad, those are great comments. On a private blog, students should use their names, especially if comments are part of an assignment!

On a public blog, it’s a whole different story. this is a big reason why I’m taking I’m setting up separate blogs for my courses this August. billso.com will carry my main articles, and the course blogs will require IDs and passwords from the students.