Corporate blogging: Essential features, platforms, tools and resources

   

Introduction

  A review of corporate blogging Web sites and content (published last month) would have provided you sources of knowledge and insights to get yourself ready for corporate blogging. Hopefully, that article has helped you in the following basic aspects of business blogging:  

• Brainstorm the need, reasons and goals for a corporate blog
• Have a solid understanding of this medium and how it can help engage with our customers
• Build a corporate blogging strategy
• Receive buy-in from the relevant stakeholders
• Receive a broad commitment or allocation of resources for development and marketing.

It’s now time to get into the nuts and bolts of creating a business blog. The decisions at this stage include:

• Choosing a blogging platform
• A host and a domain name (in case the blog is separate from your existing Web site)
• Service provider for design and customisation
• Working out requirements, design, features and technical aspects.
• Content theme, categories, sources for content and editorial policies
• Choosing in-house bloggers, their orientation training and understanding of policies (blogiquette anyone!).
• Marketing strategies, channels, programmes, and service providers. 

   

Blogging platforms

    We have excluded free, hosted blog platforms which although are simple, quick and reliable options, require it to be hosted on the provider’s domain. So, the URL of your blog would be http://yourblog.wordpress.com. There are limitations on design, configurability, upgradability and control.     We recommend that a business blog must be hosted on its own domain (with a URL like www.yourblogname.com or http://blog.yourcompanywebsite.com), must look and feel like your company’s Web site (in other words, aligned with its branding), is easy to customise, to add features and is amenable to change platforms in future.     One of the most popular stand-alone blog platforms is Wordpress which is an open source platform with a vibrant developer and user community, documentation and support forums and a very rich functionality, which is extended by hundreds of open source extensions – widgets, plug-ins and themes. As Wordpress declares, it is both free and priceless at the same time. Learn more about Wordpress. Paid blogging platforms are preferred by many corporate clients because of support, and they are known to be better search engine optimised. Why do people pay for blogging platforms when Wordpress is freely available? This article attempts to garner answers. The most well-known blogging platforms are Expression Engine, TypePad, Compendium Blogware and Six Apart’s Movable Type.     Note that Compendium Blogware and TypePad offers hosted or SaaS plans which allows you to let them host the blogs but the domain name remains yours. Most blogging platforms have their recommended lists of hosts or you may contact your existing host to support the platform.      

Features

    There are a range of features to choose from. Some of the major ones are:   

• Categories and archives: Most bloggers organise their posts by categories and also let readers view posts by month. You can post in multiple categories. Most blog platforms offer categories and you can choose options or customise how to order categories. I recommend categories but archives IMHO are not of much use to most readers.
• Tagging and tag cloud: Tag your posts with relevant keywords and then use a tag cloud to show those keywords. It quickly lets a reader know about the theme and focus of your Web site as the strength and size of tags indicate their extent of coverage. MakeCloud can help create a tag cloud.
• Excerpts of recent posts on home page: Most themes blog platforms have this dominating feature
• Commenting: Blog platforms provide this feature with options to moderate comments and to show trackbacks. Wordpress plug-ins such as Akismet filter out comment spam with a high degree of accuracy.
• E-mail subscription: If the blogging platform does not offer it or has a widget of its own, most e-mail service providers (example iContact provide options to invite e-mail subscriptions that directly update your hosted e-mail lists.
• RSS feed subscription: You may burn your feed at FeedBurner
• List of popular posts
• List of recent comments
• List of related posts next to a post
• Membership to generate loyalty using MyBlogLog or FriendFeed.
• Bookmark, share or tell a friend about the blog or a post using Tell-a-Friend widget, Sharethis or Add this.
• Rating and recommendation tool such as one offered by Outbrain.

  You may review the features of a few blogs and check out their blogging platforms, features and content themes. Some of these blogs are: 

• Gigaom
• TechCrunch
• Web Business Age

Design

  An advantage of blog is that it has a blogging platform which is just a form of a content management system and has consistent design and framework. You only need to choose the options and features you’d like to have on:  

• The home page
• Category home pages
• Individual posts
• Static pages such as About us, Contact etc.
• Logos and styles for features to include on common areas such as header, footer and sidebars.
• You may build your own templates or use (or customise) a theme. Wordpress has thousands of professional themes such as Thesis theme offered by DIYThemes that runs the popular blogging site Copyblogger, Unique Blog Designs, Revolution and ThemeShaper and many other themes that you may browse at Wordpress Extend. Many themes are free and paid themes cost from US$20 to US$200.

   

Design and implementation service providers

  A number of service providers can help. Some of the blogging set-up specialists especially those who specialise in Wordpress are:  

• Content Robot
• Debbie Weil  
• Done in Style
• Findable Blogs

  A few of these bloggers not only implement your requirements and features but also actively help in conceptualising your blog. So, you may be well-advised to involve them from an initial stage.    

Marketing your blog

    The good news is that a blogging platform takes care of a number of SEO factors as it has a pre-formatted layout, content schema and templates for categories and posts. All-in-One SEO plug-in for Wordpress allows you to enter custom title, description and keywords for each post. Ensure that search engines are notified every time you update your blog and has a new post. Besides the submission features provided by blog platform, services such as Feedsubmitter and Pingoat can help. Claim your blog on Technorati, submit it to all major blog directories and search engines such as Blogpulse http://www.blogpulse.com) and Blogstreet (http://www.blogstreet.com) (in India). Read this article on how to launch a blog successfully. Some other articles are in Problogger, Top Rank Blog, How To Launch A Successful Blog In The First 90 Days’ and 30 steps to build a great business blog.  

Would you like to share any other resource, software, platform, tool, provider or tips. Please let me and others know via comments.

   

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Posted in categories: Web business and marketing strategies   Social media optimization  

Tags: blog business corporate blogging business blogging corporate blogging blog themes blog design blog usability blog marketing corporate blog blog platform

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