The rules of business blogging

by billso on Monday, 21 April 2008

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.

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Tagged as: authority, blogging, business, crime, key-success-factors, management, media, privacy, reliability, reputation, student, teaching, UK, USA

  • http://seo2.0.onreact.com Tad Chef

    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.

  • http://billso.com billso

    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.

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