People read blogs (okay, we could argue that Google also reads your blog, but let's save that for another time). To that end, present yourself as a human. Write from a first-person perspective (use "I"), and write as if you're telling me something, not a faceless mass.

Also, be attentive to people's attention constraints.

Remember to visit other blogs in the space and comment on stories and posts that appeal to you. Do not be "that guy" or "that girl" and reference yourself and your company in all these comments. Instead, be sure to seem human and comment on things that interest you. Commenting matters, and we know if you're part of our community by how and where you comment.

Your blogging policy shouldn't be any more complex than your e-mail policy. Look over your company's policy documents and see whether you can replace the term e-mail with blog and blogging. If the answer is yes and it makes sense, that's probably fine. It should go without saying that company strategy as well as financial data is not especially good to put on blogs.

If you must have some kind of policy in place whereby more than one set of hands has to touch a blog post, keep it simple. Anything more than two sets of eyes beyond the author, and I believe you've already killed people's interest in blogging.

Remember that your business blog has more requirements than a personal blog. Why did you start it in the first place? What's the goal of the blog? What are you hoping to do with it? Think this through and check your efforts against your goal regularly. If you can set up metrics of any kind, these might help.

For instance, if your goal is engagement, measure number of comments, Web hits, RSS subscribers, inbound links, and a few other criteria. But if your goal is customer service, maybe the blog itself isn't measured so much as overall sentiment in the marketplace.

My point, simply, is to pay attention to the strategy behind why you've bothered blogging in the first place.

But you should consider whether the blogging platform you're using is easy enough to keep it enjoyable, whether it has RSS subscription capabilities, tagging, the ability to add plug-ins and external code, and a few other details that I'm happy to share, if this is a big concern.

We don't want to read only about your company, your product, and you. We want your take on the industry at large, on events that might resonate with us outside of your organization, on other forces that might impact our relationship with you and your products. Try to have that in mind when you write. Yes, it's a blog for your company, but it's also a source of information, and as such has to reflect the world around us.

A blog isn't about the hard sell. Let's accept that. Yes, we'll be suggestive. Yes, we'll be persuasive. We'll give you tastes of what you might receive if you buy the whole deal, but if it's just a place for selling, we're not reading. It's the starting point of a call to action of what you're selling next.

There has to be passion and interest and information flowing through there. Sure, you can help us find where to buy things. But maybe try to mix it up a bit. Don't pretend you're not selling, because that can seem awkward, too, but if you can, consider the last few posts you've written and see whether it's time to sell to us again.

The mood to blog might not always strike you. It might be helpful to keep a notepad file of topics and ideas so that you can tap into these when you have a moment. Also, don't be afraid to write into a text file and then dump it into your blog software when it's all finished. This will enable you to write anywhere, with or without the Web, when you have a moment. (Note: There are plenty of great tools for this as well, including Windows Live Writer for PC and Mars Edit for the Mac.)

Another trick to building a good blogging flow is to have a good blog reading habit. Use a tool like Google Reader and subscribe to sites and relevant searches that will keep you in quality posts.

We pay attention to where you link. If every link in your blog is to your own stuff, we discount you as self-referential. Consider pointing out other great posts in your space, and give adequate links and credit. Don't sell the store, but make sure you're building a healthy linking habit. Otherwise, links will rarely flow inward as well.

If you blog on a monthly basis, your traffic will likely be dismal—unless you're Donald Trump, and then I imagine you'd pull it off. For the rest of us, try to stick to blogging weekly at worst and daily at best. Don't feel frustrated if you can't blog daily right away. Blogging takes practice, and it can sometimes fall to the bottom of our priority list (as it should). But if you build a decent work flow, this effort should become more natural over time.

I wrote recently about blog design,^[127] so I won't reinvent the wheel, but in brief, make sure you have easy-to-use contact information on the blog. Put up a very human "About" page, including information on the blog's author as well as the company you serve. We know it's a company blog. We want to know about you, too. Finally, make sure the blog has all the social sharing tools built into it, such that people can bookmark sites easily, share in popular places, and provide this information easily to others.

How do you build blog posts that last and add value? You encourage conversation. One way that I often do this is by asking questions of the people who read this blog. It's a great way to tap the expertise of the people in your space. No experts in the crowd? Then consider writing your posts in such a way that your most likely audience will have something upon which to comment and add their own value. Making a post too rock-solid is just an invitation to have nothing said about it after the fact.