Blog frequently and on a regular schedule, if possible. Post as frequently as necessary to tell your story effectively, but don’t distract your customers with meaningless posts. A good rule of thumb is at least one blog post a week—consider a team blog so you can share the workload.

Identify subject areas to blog about in advance and develop a schedule. This is especially important for a team blog. This will help you establish a blogging routine and provide more structure for you and your readers. For example, you might want to introduce a subject in an initial post and advance the subject further in subsequent posts. By planning this in advance, you can quickly prepare for each post. It also lets you inform your readers in advance that the post is one in a series.

Tone should be friendly and informal—be yourself! Apply the same common sense and guidelines to blogging that you would to any interaction or communications with customers, partners, and the press. That is, always bear in mind that what you write or say reflects you and the company. For more information, see Chapter 1.

Respond promptly to customer comments. Comments and your responses can be as important as the blog post itself because it fosters an image of transparency and responsiveness, it can create meaningful dialog with important customers, and it can drive feedback to your product team.

If you plan to archive your blog posts, you might consider adding a disclaimer to old content along these lines: “To the best of my [our] knowledge, the information in this blog post was accurate at the time of publication, but it might not be accurate now. If you’re reading something here that was published a while ago, I [we] recommend that you search the web for a more recent source.”

If possible, tag each blog entry with keywords to help your readers find related entries or entries on topics of interest to them.

Support your blog by using other social media tools, such as Twitter and Facebook, to raise awareness about it. For more information, see Social Media Optimization (SMO), later in this chapter.