This is part 7 of a new series on how to start a business blog, and is aimed at businesses of all sizes. In these articles, I’m going to address business-specific concerns and requirements for business blogging. Previously: How to Start a Business Blog, Part 6
One aspect of personal blogging that doesn’t translate into business blogging is blog design. Personal blogs are like kitchen junk drawers, overflowing with widgets, advertising, blogrolls, shoutboxes, music lists, phases of the moon, and all other kinds of cruft. It’s one of the things that makes personal blogging personal, and nearly all of these things have no business being on a business blog.
There is still a large percentage of the general population who may be your customers that do not know what a blog is when they see it. People tend to ignore that which they don’t understand. Leave out all those blog-specific items and focus on the content and fulfilling the purpose of the blog. All you generally need are the following:
- Subscription tools for visitors, both RSS and Email, with the email more visible and prominent than RSS.
- Categories
- Archives
- About or author information
Make sure your business blog carries your brand. Do not just get an off-the-shelf or free template. That’s not you. It’s somebody else. Have your blog theme or template professionally designed, or for goodness’ sake at least customize a free theme enough to “make it yours.” If you’re redesigning your entire site to use the blog CMS, have your theme professionally designed. There are plenty of good designers out there, myself included.
Some final tips:
- Pay for a good stock photography and let your blogger(s) use it to add visual interest to posts.
- Make sure your blog looks great in all common browsers: Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Firefox, and Safari for the Mac.
- Make it clear that it’s a blog. Use the word “blog” or “weblog” prominently at the top.
- Use non-bloggy terms, like “permanent link” instead of “permalink” and “links to this post” instead of “trackbacks.”
In How to Start a Business Blog, Part 8, I’ll talk about determining categories for a business blog. Subscribe to my RSS feed so you don’t miss it!
Hi. I followed a link from Tadeusz (SEO 2.0) and had a look at your business blog guideline set. Good idea to work out some rules like that. Well done.
Regarding the design issues I recognized that design becomes more and more important since open source templates are available for everyone with much better quality than ever before.
I agree with you that it`s important for people running a business blog to carry the companies brand. I suggest to start with a template meeting the requirements and keep in mind that the first result will never be the end of the story. When you start rethinking your blog later on you will like to make changes to this and that. A blog is a living source and design is a thing that really likes to live with you, too. So in my opinion it is important to start producing content as soon as possible having design and usability issues always in your mind. A blog is something to live with and I`m sure I will have to do some changes on my own blog very soon. Thanks for this reminder, Michael.
@Oliver, Thanks for commenting. Yes, content production can take place as early as possible. Often your flagship or pillar content isn’t quite as connected to current events as other posts, so they can be written far in advance of ongoing work with other aspects of the blog.