Chapter 12

Writing for Websites and Blogs

In This Chapter

Finding your voice on websites and blogs

Organizing and building a website

Using online graphics and design to support your words

Creating and growing a blog

The Internet is like a magic door that democratizes communication. It empowers you to reach almost anyone, anywhere, and offers you virtual space to represent your own interests.

The price of entry for online action keeps coming down. You can post comments and images, tweet, connect with people through social media and invest only the time it takes to do the work. But you may also want a more stable presence that you can control, direct and develop: your own website, blog, or both.

This chapter gives you the tools and techniques to plan and write for your online presence whether you want to present your business, hobby, personal passion, or yourself.

Shaping Your Words for Websites and Blogs

In the early days – meaning the last decade of the 20th century – you had to possess (or hire) sophisticated professional skills to create and maintain a website. A first-rate, multi-dimensional site still demands a team of specialists working together to plan, write, design, produce and optimize it as a pivotal marketing tool.

But thanks to online services such as Wordpress, Wix, Typepad and whatever is best and newest, you can now easily create a blog by doing all or most of the work yourself.

The distinctions between blogs and websites are blurring. You can plan a blog that looks like a blog: A page that leads off with a new posting on the subject of your choice with access to previous posts. Or it can look like a website: a multi-page platform representing your business (or you) that leads with a home page and observes some fairly standard conventions. This home page can connect to an array of additional pages, perhaps including a blog.

As do-it-yourself tools grow better, you can more easily build a site to your own satisfaction with little technical facility. Still, don’t underestimate the power of good design sense or HTML know-how to help you engage audiences, appeal to them visually, and interact with them better. (If you relate well to technology, check out HTML, XHTML and CSS For Dummies by Ed Tittel and Jeff Noble.

And never ignore the value of good writing. It’s the heart of every website and every blog. Studies show that while visuals entice and entertain, most visitors value the words far more. Even if your site ultimately uses few words, it must make sense in a way you can express to yourself, at least, in written language.

Working on your writing style for websites and blogs

All the guidelines for online writing I present in Chapter 11 apply to blogs and websites. Use the following strategies to further hone your blog and website writing.

Consciously adapt your writing style

You can write online in a variety of ways, but you need to pick your specific style in order to be successful. Figure out how you relate to your profession and to your audience, and then create the online persona you want to project.

A lawyer or management consultant, for instance, generally wants to be perceived quite differently from a social worker or artist. But you may be a lawyer who works with intellectual property and needs to connect with artists, or a consultant who wants to be seen as creative. Or you may be an artist who wants to be seen as business like. Of course, you want to be ‘yourself,’ but consider how the way you present will affect viewers.

Keep your copy short, pithy, substance-focused, and straightforward

Don’t just get to the point quickly – make your point and move on. Research says that online reading is 25 per cent slower than reading print material. Moreover, it tires the eyes, and your visitors are impatient for hundreds of their own reasons. All powerful reasons to keep text short and lively!

Choose your keywords early on

The Internet has dozens of cost-free ways to help you identify the best words and phrases to include in your site or blog. Google’s searchwords.com and adwords.com tools enable you to pick words and phrases that are most used by searchers looking for what you offer and also identify terms that your competitors use so you can choose those that are less common if you wish.

Use your keywords in headlines, subheads and body copy

Put them to the top and left on a page, and lead with them in headlines and subheads whenever possible. Both readers scanning for what they want and search engines find them more surely that way. Researchers who track eye movement on web pages report that the top left corner is the most read territory, and the average viewer’s attention tapers off as the eyes move down the page. Also, boldface your keywords when appropriate. This practice works well for blogs.

Be sure to use all keywords in fully natural ways. Loading the deck with numerous keywords draws penalties from most search engines. For more advice, see Search Engine Optimization For Dummies by Peter Kent.

Break copy up into small chunks

Short paragraphs – one to three sentences – go a long way toward online readability. But don’t use all one-sentence paragraphs, which also generates unenticing copy. Chop your prose into chunks by:

Adding lots of subheads. They keep you organized and give readers an easy set of stepping stones to follow.

Building in white space. Bullets and numbered lists are effective. But for online copy don’t list more than six or seven items and be sure they have a context that makes them meaningful. (Just beware of listing more than five or six items.)

Minimize scrolling

People really don’t like to scroll. Many popular website home pages seem to continue vertically ad infinitum. I see this approach as highly counter-productive. An established site, or one featuring content that’s updated constantly, can present a cascade of features, but most home pages are not the place for extended introductions or arguments. Instead, strive to develop strong leads that pull scanners to inside pages.

Make every page self-explanatory and self-contained

People don’t typically choose to land on a home page and then read through the site in your preferred sequence. If they’re looking for one among five things you produce, they’ll probably land on that page. So make sure they know where they are in cyberspace wherever they land on your site. On every page use your company name prominently, include clear headlines, and a call to action. Link to other parts of the site as appropriate.

Go for clear (rather than clever) title buttons, icons and links

User expectations trump originality, but you don’t necessarily need to stick to the cookie cutter. Naming your company’s background page ‘growing up’ rather than ‘about us’ is a bad idea. But ‘our story’ can work fine.

Frame everything in you, and we or I

Use these words to personalize what you write. Beyond connecting better with your site’s users, writing in terms of ‘you’ helps you stay focused on reader viewpoint rather than your own. When it’s natural to say ‘I’ or ‘we,’ don’t hesitate. There’s no need to write in an abstract third person mode. You can switch back and forth, too. General Electric says, ‘GE is building the world by…’ and two sentences later, ‘We build appliances, power lighting systems…’

Craft conversational, fast-reading copy

Use all the techniques I cover in Chapters 4 and 5 – contractions, simple sentences with few commas, a rhythm that moves the reader along. Cut all unnecessary adjectives and all empty hype – no grandiose statements, jargon, mystery abbreviations, and acronyms!

Use all the tools of engagement available. Ask questions, invite opinion, offer something irresistible to your audience. And whenever you can, show your passion and commitment to what you do. Nothing is more convincing.

In sum, find fun and value in drilling down to the heart of your own message and deliver it with conviction, tightly.

Building a Traditional Website

Whether you do it yourself or employ production and design support, take website planning seriously. Don’t plunge into your site as a visual exercise or technology challenge. It’s probably your most important business document and deserves careful thought. Whatever you want to accomplish, first frame your site with a cohesive written roadmap. The following sections give you a step-by-step approach to planning a website. It’s writer-centered. If you want to try a media-specific planning approach that’s graphic or flow-chart based, try Web Design For Dummies by Lisa Lopuck.

If you already have a functioning site, it’s smart to review it from the big-picture perspective that I cover in the following subsections. Among the online world’s beauties is its mutability. Moreover, because you can easily make changes, you must. A good site constantly evolves, especially given today’s bevy of analytic tools that tell you what’s working and what’s not. And of course search engines award higher rankings to those sites that update and grow. Change and expansion can reap real results.

Defining your goals

Just as with every piece of writing – as I talk about in Chapter 2 and demonstrate in all the chapters on print communication and email – first think about your website’s goal. What do you want to accomplish with your website, exactly?

Your initial answer may be to sell something or more broadly, to market something you produce or offer. Don’t stop there! Push your brainstorming to specifics, especially if your venture is new and starts with the site. Additionally answer practical questions such as:

How much of your products or services do you want to sell online?

Are you prepared for large quantity orders?

How far can you reach in the real world to satisfy global customers? Can you ship items long distances – or does it make sense to restrict your geographical thrust?

Once you clarify your marketing goals, brainstorm what website content might help accomplish them. Depending on your product or service the website’s goals may include:

Presenting yourself as the go-to problem solver in your field

Establishing thought leadership

Demonstrating your product’s superiority or value

Showcasing your originality

Generating sales partnerships

Supporting your search for financial investors

Refining your audience ideas

Know as much as possible about your primary audience. Who do you want to market your product or service to?

Start by consulting the audience characteristics section of Chapter 2 and pull out all the demographic and psychographic factors that apply to your product or service. Then add all the characteristics relevant to your target market that you can think of.

If you want to reach consumers directly to sell a new tech gadget, for example, your list may include:

Age and gender

Occupation

Hobbies

Degree of technological savvy

Economic status

Buying habits (how they shop for such products, where they go for advice)

Preferences for type and amount of information

Related interests

Problems: what keeps them up at night?

Brainstorm for multiple audiences that may be interested in your gadget, too. If you produce a high-tech wine bottle opener, for example, your research or experience may suggest that male buyers and female buyers don’t value the same benefits – one favors extra efficiency, the other ease of use, for example. Profile every audience individually.

If you want to sell your bottle openers to a business audience, such as wine stores, figure out who in these organizations typically purchases your type of tool and then profile these decision-makers using your knowledge, intuition, and research.

Your sub-goals may suggest secondary audiences. If you’re marketing a product and also looking for financial support, you should consider investors and their needs. Should you want to align with other suppliers, know who they are and what they’re looking for.

Don’t interpret the advice to consider additional audiences as meaning you must create a website that serves all possible audiences and purposes. If you take this approach, you’re likely to over-promise and not be able to deliver. Rather, invest in making deliberate, thoughtful choices in online content that benefits specific individuals or groups. Aim to work with a niche market and gradually deepen your reach, or carefully extend to new markets over time.

Mountains of marketing knowledge exist in books and blogs. If you establish a new business and start with a website, but have little marketing experience or knowledge, it’s a very good idea to take advantage of these resources. When big companies create or revamp websites they bring whole marketing departments and long experience to bear on the process. Learn to think in marketing terms and your website, and entire venture, will more surely succeed. (Check out Marketing For Dummies by Ruth Mortimer.)

Structuring a basic site

After you’re clear on your own set of goals and the audiences you want to reach, ask the what’s-in-it-for-them question this way:

What does my audience want?

What interests them?

What do they need?

What worries them?

How do I (or can I) help solve their problems?

What will keep them coming back for more?

As an example, consider someone whose goal is to create a social media consulting business. He decides that his primary audience is entrepreneurs who work on their own and are over age 45, and time-challenged small businesses. Focusing on just the solo entrepreneurs, he characterizes them as being practical people in a wide range of businesses who want to promote through social media channels. They probably feel:

Insecure and perhaps uncomfortable with using social media tools and techniques

Short of time and over-burdened with multiple responsibilities and day-to-day operations

Worried about losing to more tech savvy competition

Conscious that they must keep their enterprises growing

Aware they must offer responsive customer service

This rough profile, plus a second one for the small business audience, enables the consultant to position both his business and website more closely. He can start by defining his core value, what he does and his main competitive advantage. I talk about this in depth in Chapter 9. When the social media consultant applies the core value strategy to his website, he can write a statement for his own guidance in down-to-earth terms:

I’m a social media specialist who provides SM planning services, handles the mechanics for busy or fearful clients, educates them on good SM use, and trains those interested to do some of the work themselves.

Based on this premise, the consultant may then frame his website this way:

I need a website that showcases my skills and proves my credibility and expertise. It explains how I help my clients grow their businesses, save time, use social media, and become comfortable with its use.

The next challenge – how to translate this thinking into a website plan and structure – becomes easy to meet. The consultant can plan for the following content chunks:

Describe what I do from the customer perspective (Services page)

Explain who I am and establish my credentials and understanding of their challenges (About Us)

Cite evidence, such as stories about how my services have helped similar clients grow, save time, interact with customers, and so on. (Case Studies)

Offer pieces of useful practical information site visitors can act on quickly and that will draw them back for more (Blog)

Give readers helpful additional materials (Resources)

Provide easy ways to reach and interact with me (Contact)

Give visitors an enticement to get in touch or at least provide contact information (Special Offer)

If you think I took a long way round to end up with a standard-sounding site structure, you’re right! But you need a process to translate your own goals into a framework that serves your purposes. The basic site structure that has evolved over years works in many situations, though of course you can adapt it to your needs.

In most cases, inventing a totally new website architecture is not a good idea. Audiences come to websites with preset expectations and want to explore efficiently. They have no patience for figuring out what you mean or where you put things. Logical organization, clear wording, and easy access to information are essential.

Better to focus your originality on what you say within the framework, how you present it visually, how you engage people, and how you use additional media such as video to deliver your message with impact. See the later section ‘Incorporating Graphics and Other Elements ’ for more detail.

Assembling a home page

Your website home page must instantly tell people they are in the right place for the product, service, information, or whatever else they’re looking for. Even though many viewers land on other pages first or never visit your home page, it must introduce your message effectively.

The following sections touch on the major elements common to smart home pages.

Company names and taglines

Ideally, your company name should tell it all – capsulize what it does. Think of going to a lively trade or craft show: Would you rather exhibitors identify themselves with banners like ‘Main Street Services’ and ‘Cutie Pie Products,’ or ‘Overnight Laptop Repair’ and ‘Toddler Puzzles in Wood’?

If your enterprise is new, coming up with a tight way to say it is worth a lot of thought. As an old advertising adage puts it, ‘Don’t be clever, be clear.’ Take account of keywords (see the earlier section ‘Shaping Your Words for Websites and Blogs’) and keep what’s most important as far to the left as possible (where both people and search engines more often notice it). Thus, you may be better off putting your name later in your tagline. For example, ‘Social Media Support by Jane’ may work better than ‘Jane’s Social Media Support.’

If you’re anchored in a name that doesn’t represent what you do, make up the difference with a good tagline, the phrase or slogan that follows the name. Don’t be surprised if this is a tough task. Copywriters work very hard at this. Aim to be brief, transparent, simple and clear.

Taglines bolster the following less-than-crystal-clear names for two real companies and a non-profit, melding well to tell each story. (These are real organizations and if you look them up online, don’t be surprised if their home pages are substantially different from what I present. Things change fast in the web world!)

PERSUASIVE GAMES (www.persuasivegames.com) We design, build, and distribute videogames for persuasion, instruction, and activism

COURSERA (www.coursera.org) Take the World's Best Courses, Online, For Free

ACUMEN (http://acumen.org) Changing the way the world tackles poverty

The positioning statement

This element of your homepage often follows the organization name and tagline. The positioning statement is where you want to distil the reason your organization exists, who it serves, and ideally, your competitive advantage. You may be lucky enough to have worked out a core value statement for your organization that you can adapt to your website (Chapter 9 shows you how to create one). Or you may be part of an organization that hands you one. Whatever the case, make sure what you use really works.

Your positioning statement is a plain language sentence or a bit more that says exactly who you are, what you do, and who should be interested. This is the heart of your central marketing message. Use it with suitable variations on all your materials – traditional and electronic – to tie them together for brand consistency.

If you work for an organization larger than yourself, resist the use of a pre-existing mission statement if possible. These typically are forged by committees and couched in exactly the kind of language to avoid online – formal, stilted, generic, and hollow. Better to think of your website’s positioning statement as a new opportunity to immediately explain your role and relate to your audience.

Here’s how Persuasive Games introduces itself after title and tagline:

Welcome to Persuasive Games.

Games communicate differently than other media; they not only deliver messages, but also simulate experiences. Our games influence players to take action through gameplay. While often thought to be just a leisure activity, games can also become rhetorical tools.

Here’s how Acumen positions itself.

A bold new way of tackling poverty that’s about dignity, not dependence and choice, not charity.

Acumen is a non-profit that raises charitable donations to invest in companies, leaders, and ideas that are changing the way the world tackles poverty.

When I looked at Coursera’s site a month before writing this section, its approach was chatty and offered more context:

Once upon a time, the only way to take a course taught by a professor employed by a great university was to attend a great university. With Coursera, you don’t have to leave your seat. Instructors from Princeton, Duke, Caltech and 13 other schools conduct online classes on everything from math to music, complete with video lectures, quizzes and homework. You might end up in a course with tens of thousands of classmates all over the world. And the site is free – no scholarship required.

But when I checked more recently, I found that this gabby discourse was gone, replaced by a search box in which the site visitor can enter a subject of interest. These lines appeared under it:

Join 3,879,639 Courserians.

Learn form 388 courses, from our 83 partners.

As I watched, the first figure changed to reflect more ‘Courserians.’ The rest of the home page consists of upcoming course titles with interesting images to represent each. Coursera’s copy shift is a good example of applying the ‘show, don’t tell idea’ to a website – try to say less, show more. Website thinking shares a lot with video in this regard, which I talk about in Chapter 9: When you can use visuals to tell your story, you need fewer words.

Work at your positioning statement, over time if necessary. Yes, you can find sites that skip positioning statements and those that rely solely on images to tell their story. But unless you’re as widely known as Walt Disney, or can use magnetic space images like NASA relying on a photo or news item to explain who you are and what you do is risky.

Here’s one straightforward way our friend who’s setting up a social media consulting business (see ‘Structuring a basic site’) can combine name, tagline and positioning statement to present his business.

SOCIALMEDIA-IN-MOTION CONSULTING

Social Media Planning and Support for Small Businesses and Entrepreneurs

Social media is the way to grow your business – but it takes time, tools and techniques. We handle it all! We’ll show you how to use the right media and take care of the mechanics. Imagine, online power in your hands.

The name, tagline and positioning statement can generally be used in this sequence in descending order of importance – and font size. The name should be largest and preferably rendered as a designed logo, or at least look like a logo, with an interesting typeface. The tagline can nestle below it. Take some creative license with the positioning statement, but using it on the bottom half of the home page often works well, depending on the design.

Calling for action

Most web specialists believe that every page should contain at least one call to action, certainly at the page bottom. Actionable activities may include links to other parts of the site or offsite resources.

Use simple declarative statements and hyperlinked words and phrases to tell viewers what to do next. Give thought to which words to make ‘clickable,’ indicated in general by underlining: Call Jane today for your free 15-minute consultation

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Put some imagination into how to involve readers actively, start relationships, and build a mailing list for your future outreach. You may be able to capitalize on materials already on hand, or may decide to take the time to create them.

Check out Web Marketing All-in-One For Dummies by John Arnold, Michael Becker, Marty Dickinson and Ian Lurie for help.

Writing your inside pages

View each section of your site as its own complete cyber world. On every single page, viewers should know exactly where they are and what they’re looking at; how to find the home page and other key parts of the site; and how to follow through on the action you want them to take.

Following are some content ideas for various pages which are part of nearly all well-developed websites.

About Us

This page is your opportunity to tell your story – the personal one, the business one, or a combination of both. You can use third person – he, she, they, it (for an organization) – or first person – I or we.

You can use first person for About Us and third person for the rest of the site if you wish.

Third person has a more formal feeling and you may have a reason for choosing it. But on the whole, telling your story in first person gives it more personality and is more engaging. Writing in first person leads you to think in warmer language, too.

When to use we and us is trickier. If you’re a solo operation and want to give the impression that you have a whole organization behind you, why not? Millions of people say ‘we’ for this reason and in any case, you probably have a set of resources and specialists to call on if needed. So go ahead and talk as ‘we’ and at the same time feature yourself as the prime mover.

Your About Us page allows some creative thinking and expression. Some options:

Tell the story of how you came to build this business and/or your expertise

Cover a notable success that communicates the heart of what you do

Include your key credentials, the ones most meaningful to your audience

Incorporate third-part testimonials from happy clients

Talk about why you love your work, why you feel passionate about the help you offer, or simply why you think it’s important

Keep it brief and readable. This is not the place for a rambling self-indulgent bio. If you feel it necessary to list a lot of specific training or experience, try using a sidebar. For ideas about finding a story that epitomizes your business, see Chapter 9.

Include a good photograph of yourself or your team and give some thought to the emotional qualities you want to project. A female management consultant I know deliberately had a ‘tough’ portrait photo taken to show prospects she was capable of dealing with CEOs while a psychologist friend chose a warm, low-key welcoming look; she even wore unnecessary glasses to look more approachable.

The Services page

This is a good place to exercise your chunking skills (see Chapter 11). Break out your distinct services and use strong subheads to introduce each. If you have a long list, consider a dropdown menu or links at the top to take readers directly to the service of interest.

The social media consultant I used as an example earlier in this chapter might begin with a concise overview of offered services and also include a section titled ‘How we work with you.’ Additional options for his social media consulting services page may include:

Social media custom planning programs

Social media posting services: daily, weekly

Facebook campaigns

LinkedIn campaigns

Social media introductory workshops

Social media coaching and support

The Contact page

Provide complete information for how to reach you by email, telephone, even fax and snail mail, unless you have good reason not to. Especially if your site will be used by an international audience, bear in mind that businesspeople in specific industries and other countries have different communication preferences – a surprising number depend on fax, for example.

Never overlook your viewer’s natural desire for ‘real’ contact information. No one wants just an email address that says ‘info@’ or a company name. Give your audience a live real person to write to or call. See your contact page from the visitor’s angle; she’d have to be really determined to make a call and ask for an anonymous person. An ‘info@’ address makes the reader wonder if anyone reads emails sent that way. If you have different staff members to handle price quotes or answer questions, for example, give a name for each.

If you want to know which phone calls you receive derive from your website, make up a specific contact name. But always answer the call.

The contact page is a good place to collect information about your site visitors. Keep online forms short and simple to use. Assuming you do not intend to share the information with third parties – which in any case is illegal in some countries without permission – build in a brief, matter-of-fact statement saying you will only use the information to communicate with the person, and will not pass it on to anyone else.

Testimonials

All the research says that testimonials are among the most-read parts of websites. We’re predisposed to trust third-party endorsements by people who are like us. Testimonials enable you to say things about yourself that would be hard to write about yourself. What’s more, testimonials add life to a site because they are written in different voices.

Group testimonials as a separate page of their own (called Testimonials, What Clients Say, or some other name) or scatter them around the site in a sidebar area. Or do both if you can collect a good number.

Don’t try to write testimonials yourself! These always sound like you did. Ask clients with whom you have good relationships to write recommendations or endorsements. Help them by providing a few simple questions:

What do you most value about the service (or product) I provide?

How has it helped you?

How has it changed how you handle X?

What would you say in recommending me to a colleague?

What do you like most about working with me?

Alternatively – and a better option in many cases – is to ask the person questions like these by phone and take notes or record the conversation (with permission, of course). Gathering testimonials in this way lets you explore more freely and ask follow-up questions. You probably come up with better answers than your prepared questions elicit. After your conversation, draft a good statement that retains the individuality and any interesting detail. Always ask the person to review and approve your version. See Chapter 9 for how to gather testimonials as part of a larger goal, developing a core value statement.

Needless to say, keep your ears open for constructive criticism and ideas for improving your performance as you collect testimonials.

Incorporating Graphics and Other Elements

Graphic design is beyond the scope of this book but is so important to the way in which your words are read – and whether they’re read at all – that I offer my viewpoint and some tips.

For online media, design and words are inextricably linked. But despite the way that art directors and web producers handle website creation, typically ‘adding’ the words last, the writing is what really drives a website. Your words deliver your message – or fail to. Graphics and design support the copy, make the site readable, entice and compel. They should help lure people in, please their eyes, highlight what’s most important and show them how to find what they want. Ideally they embody the central idea of the site and make it visual.

This premise carries a number of implications that you need to consider when writing your copy:

Leave out the expensive glitzy animated intros. Most only annoy people. Especially leave out the music or other sound that accompanies viewers through the whole site; they quickly tune out and click off. If you must include either the intro or music, provide a clear opt-out button.

Make the text easy to read. This means a large enough type in a classic face: Arial and similar typefaces are favored. Printed material reads best in serif faces (‘feet’ on the letters), but onscreen, the clean look of sans-serif reads well and looks contemporary.

Avoid everything that can possibly interfere with easy reading. Go with dark fonts against light backgrounds, and a simple color palette with no more than two or three main colors. Avoid or minimize dropout type (white against a dark background), copy in all capitals, and an over-variety of typefaces.

Avoid busy, overly complicated design. A complex layout confuses the eye and provides no logical path to follow. Especially on the home page, keep the look simple and highlight the elements that are important to visitors. If you work with a designer, be sure he knows which components merit the most attention.

Never present long dense text blocks. Break up anything longer than a few sentences with visuals, subheads, bullets, and lists. Build in plenty of white space.

Use good, relevant visuals. Research, again, says that people don’t like visual material that’s not related to the site or message. Don’t cheapen your message with crummy clip art or generic photos of happy smiling diverse groups of people. Use photos of real people with whom readers may have contact. Or invest some creative thinking in how to interpret aspects of your message into interesting visuals and find free or cheap image sources online.

Use video if and when possible. People love the extra dimension that video offers and it can show off your personality, demonstrate your expertise or offer a sample lesson in how to do something. See Chapter 9 for more on video. (For more on incorporating video into your website, check out Video Marketing For Dummies by Kevin Daum, Bettina Hein, Matt Scott and Andreas Goeldi.)

Unless you have strong confidence in a specific video, don’t make it play automatically right off the home page. Viewers hate that.

Find ways to avoid forcing readers to scroll. First defense to endless scrolling is brevity. Another is to break pages into separate subsections – for example, give each different service its own page. Or, at least give people a way to choose what they want to look at with clear drop-down menus or links.

And finally, proof, proof, and then proof some more. Online mistakes undermine your credibility and may even kill your entire message. Proofreading online is notoriously difficult, so take the trouble to print out the pages for editing and proofing. Then ask a trustworthy person with a sharp eye to do it. Chapters 4 and 5 offer a wealth of editing and proofing insights.

To find out what’s working and what’s not, do your own usability research. Ask a few colleagues or friends to review your site from a user’s viewpoint and watch them navigate the various pages. Pay attention to how they move around each page and between pages. Listen to their comments carefully and ask some questions. Did anything confuse or frustrate them? Did they stop reading at a certain point? Did they linger anywhere? Skip or speed past a section? Frown or smile?

Creating Your Own Blog

Whether your goal is to support a business, build a platform to support a book or consultancy, stake a place in the virtual universe, make friends or influence people, the blog may be your medium of choice. Like all the media you use, a blog works best if you plan it and co-ordinate it with all your other communication channels.

Blogs can take many forms. Collect your own favorites and analyze what you like about them. Be aware of content choices, style, tone, length and all the other factors. Getting to know others people’s blogs enables you to create your own guidelines for how you want yours to look and sound.

Comprehensive help is available from Blogging For Dummies by Susannah Gardner and Shane Birley. Here I present my own take on how to plan and write blogs.

The following sections give you a framework to think within as you develop your blog, as well as some ideas to try out.

Planning your blog

If you want to use your blog for any purpose beyond the joy of self-publishing your own writing, invest some thought first. Some elements to consider and questions to ask:

What are my goals? How can it support what I want to accomplish in my personal and/or business life?

How much time is this worth – or, how much time do I want to spend on the blog? How often can I post?

What should I write about?

Who do I want to reach?

How do I handle the mechanics of getting posts up?

How do I promote my blog and let people know when I have new postings?

What does success look like? How do I know my blog is helping me achieve the goals I set?

Decide beforehand how much time you want to give a blog project and use this decision to frame your commitment and frequency of publishing new material. While there’s no set rule for how often to blog, it seems sensible to assume that less than once every two weeks makes it hard to sustain audience interest. You can also decide whether to focus on short posts of a few paragraphs or longer, in-depth material.

Blogging is an unparalleled tool for marketing, especially when integrated with all your other marketing activities. Today content is king. And blogging is the main way to offer content that draws people to you (a process known as inbound marketing).

Write a plan for your blog, using a process similar to the one I recommend for websites earlier in ‘Building a Traditional Website.’ Think through your goals thoroughly and your target audiences. What do the readers you want need? What problems must they solve? What interests them?

Analyze what your intended audience is already reading and talking about. Research existing blogs that are similar in nature to discover specifics about the audience and pick up the conversational tone. Study the content of leading bloggers over time and see if you can identify some niche areas that aren’t now covered. You may want to begin by posting comments on other blogs or actively build relationships with established bloggers who share your interests and who you like.

Choosing a subject

As part of a recent writing workshop for communication professionals, I asked participants to create a plan for a personal blog and compile a list of 10 subjects they intended to cover. Some chose subjects with a deliberately limited audience – for example, an immigrant planned a blog about life in New York to update her large extended family on her activities and bring them into her world. Some chose a cause, such as eating nutritiously with prepared foods or high fashion dressing for overweight women. Each subject suggests its own niche and promotional strategies.

Another participant wanted to write a blog about his personal impressions of new films, books, restaurants and ‘whatever.’ That presents more challenge: Who will want to read it? Can the writer be so entertaining that readers will care about his opinions? How can you build an audience beyond the writer’s immediate circles for something so amorphous?

Conversation about this blogger’s interests soon revealed that he’d had a passionate hobby since his early teens; he was a part-time disc jockey and had educated himself in the tools and techniques used by professionals. Asked whether he could think of suitable DJ-related topics to write about, his eyes lit up and he enthusiastically came up with a long list of ideas on the spot.

The lesson: an ideal choice for your blog subject may be something you care about because it fascinates you, excites you, prompts your curiosity, or just seems important. Like the amateur DJ, you may have existing expertise on a particular subject and a lot to share beyond your personal opinion. Psychological research indicates that people tend to under-value what they know (and over-stress what they don’t know or think they aren’t good at). Great blogs stem from a focused passion of almost any kind, mated to knowledgability.

Another prime area to explore for blogging is any subject that inspires you to genuinely help people and for which you are equipped. How-to blogs are endlessly attractive and successful for many audiences. Ideally, you can provide something new, or at least a new angle on the topic, but people also appreciate round-up pieces that gather good ideas and information for them. Give credit as due by acknowledging the source, and linking to it.

When you’re blogging to support the organization you work for or your own enterprise, use the same criteria to identify topics. Explore subject possibilities such as:

The part of the work or service you care about most

Things you have special insights about or access to

Inside tips and behind the scenes glimpses into organizations (particularly effective if the business or non-profit boasts a fan base)

Highly specialized information

Announcement/analysis of new product

Stories and examples of how customers have used or been helped by the product or service

Writing for blogs

I offer general guidelines for online writing earlier in ‘Shaping Your Words for Websites and Blogs,’ but the following writing tips apply specifically to blogs.

If you’re writing for your own blog, feel free to take liberties. Experiment. Be creative. Ignore the following guidelines at will and monitor what happens. If the blog’s purpose is to support your enterprise, however, avoid jeopardizing its reputation and relationships. And don’t forget that if you write a company blog, or you’re blogging about company matters in your own time, more is at stake than how others perceive you. Criticizing the company you work for or its leadership can be career suicide. A blog is, after all, a public forum.

Structure and organization

While a website can present pieces of information as separate chunks that don’t necessarily relate to each other, and can use grammatically incomplete sentences for effect, a blog needs to be more cohesive and sequential. You’re typically presenting directions, opinions or arguments. So your narrative in each posting needs to flow and be held together by good transitions.

Tone

Aim for writing that’s simple, straightforward and conversational.

Choose the tone most appropriate to audience and subject (see Chapter 2 for much more on crafting your tone). If you’re writing about headstones, obviously a flippant tone may be taken badly. Lawyers and accountants have not yet lightened up noticeably as a group, so they probably require a more formal tone than soccer fans.

If you choose to limit your audience to those who are already knowledgeable or enthusiastic, like sports fans, is it okay to use jargon and terminology understood only by insiders? Yes, if you’re sure you don’t want to expand your readership to newbies.

Always be positive and upbeat when blogging – even if you’re writing critical reviews of a film, book, product or idea. Be wary of criticizing anything or anyone personally, or at least be prepared for repercussions. And NEVER attack or slur anyone personally. Doing so is bad manners and hurts you every time. And you run an increasing risk of being sued.

Length

The ideal length of a blog or blog post varies widely and depends on the subject, audience, and what you’re willing to put in. Many e-media gurus recommend quick-read posts of a few paragraphs. But this keeps the material superficial and many readers find these limits frustrating.

As a rule of thumb, to contribute something solid, I say plan for 500 to 700 words. But if it’s a quick tip or idea that doesn’t call for elaboration, do a couple of paragraphs. If you write for a technical audience that thrives on detail, go longer.

Varying the length of your posts each time is absolutely fine – even preferred by many audiences.

Headlines

Headlines are critical to getting your post noticed by readers and search engines alike (see ‘Shaping Your Words for Websites and Blogs’ for more). They’re also critical for attracting readers to older postings, which you may choose to list alongside the new blog.

Start out with how the information benefits the reader: Will they find out how to do something faster, better, cheaper? Improve their lives in some way?

Free is always a great promise:

All-purpose business writing template to make you a star – FREE!

Sharing secrets is great:

What nobody knows about X and why it can kill you!

Saving money is appealing:

Buy monthly supplies of your favorite soft drink at 40% off

A promise to teach readers how to do something is tempting:

Teach yourself to play the piano like a soloist in 6 weeks

A question can be compelling:

Do you know what your girlfriend watches when you’re not there?

And headlines with numbers are always grabbers, which is why you see them so often:

9 ways to save a fortune on your health insurance

Watch for the 7 signs of extreme dandruff before you’re humiliated

Three easy arguments to get a raise

Of course, a headline needs to be honest. Don’t promise anything you can’t deliver. And the rest of the blog post must back up your headline.

Subheads

Subheads help you easily organize your own ideas, improve visual impact by adding white space, pull in readers, and keep them going. What’s not to like? Even a short blog benefits from subheads. Make them active and informational rather than just labels:

Rather than,

The new numbers

Write

New numbers show upward leap

If you’re using a numbered list as in the last set of headlines I cite above, bold the first phrase or sentence of each item to produce a subhead-like effect. This simple treatment makes your blog look easy to read and get through – important assets when you’re competing for attention with such a wide virtual world.

Writing good subheads is also covered in Chapter 8.

Categories and tagging

To help people find your blog posts, it helps to identify them with at least one category and at least one tag. A category is the larger descriptor – if you write about food, ‘cooking,’ ‘appetizers’ and ‘desserts’ are category options. A tag is a more specific label. If you’re presenting a cheesecake recipe, categories could include ‘dessert’ and ‘baking,’ while tags might be ‘cake,’ ‘cheesecake,’ ‘cheese,’ ‘low-calorie cheesecake,’ and so on as appropriate.

The process is the same as for thinking of keywords and search terms: you figure out how members of your intended audience will look for what you’re writing. You can tag internally, within the content itself; and/or externally, which relies on services like Technorati and Flickr.