Blogs are a mainstream vehicle for organizations to get their ideas out into the marketplace. The readers of blogs view the information shared by smart bloggers as one of the few forms of real, authentic communication. Audiences consume advertising with skepticism and consider pronouncements by CEOs to be out of touch with reality. But a good blog written by someone within a large or small company, a nonprofit, a church, or a political campaign commands attention.

Blogging is a great front door for any individual or organization because it is real estate on the web that you can own. If you use a content tool like HubSpot or WordPress and have your own domain URL, your blog is yours. Search engine traffic goes to you. You can create a blog that showcases your brand. Contrast that with social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. All are good, but you will never own your real estate there.

At the same time, the term blog carries a negative connotation with some people who believe the content contained inside is frivolous. The best marketing and PR strategies must include creating your own content. If you are creating valuable information to market your business, don’t let someone’s anxiety with the term blog hold you back. Or maybe its best to not use the “b-word” at all. For more on this discussion about the term blog, please refer back to the section in Chapter 5 called “A Blog (or Not a Blog).”

This chapter sets out the basics of how to establish your own blog. But I recommend that, before you begin to write, you first monitor blogs in your market space, and that you step into the blogosphere by commenting on a few blogs before you write your own. You might want to reread Chapter 5, where I introduced blogs and provided some examples of successful bloggers.

As you begin to comment on other people’s blogs, you’ll develop your own blogging voice and get a sense of what you like to discuss online. That’s great! You’re experimenting on someone else’s blog real estate. If you’re like many people, soon you’ll be itching to write your own blog. But if commenting is a painful chore for you, maybe you’re not cut out to be a blogger. That’s okay—there are many more blog readers than blog writers. This forum isn’t for everybody.

It’s impossible to tell you everything you need to know about blogging in this one chapter. While the case studies and basic information will certainly get you started, the best thing is to experiment to find your voice. Read other blogs and be aware of what you like and dislike about other bloggers’ styles.

What Should You Blog About?

People often struggle to decide what to blog about. This is particularly true for marketing and PR professionals because we have been taught to be slaves to the notion of flogging our products and services with on-message advertising and press releases; but for most organizations, that’s exactly the wrong way to blog. The first thing to ask yourself is: “Whom do I want to reach?” For many people, the answer is a combination of buyers, existing customers, and influencers such as analysts and the media. You need to have a topic that you are passionate about. If you aren’t excited about the topic or if it feels painful to write about it, you’re unlikely to sustain the effort, and if you do manage to keep going, the writing is likely to be forced.

Most first-time bloggers try to cover too much. It is better to start with a narrow subject and leave room to expand. Be authentic. People read blogs because they want to find an honest voice speaking passionately about a subject. You do not have to be harsh or controversial if that is not your style. If you are interesting and provide valuable information, your readership will grow.

Lawrence McGlynn is president of McGlynn, Clinton & Hall Insurance Agencies and maintains the Massachusetts Family Insurance Blog.¹ His posts are inspired by his customers’ questions. Several weeks prior to the big game, he wrote “Super Bowl, Super Party, Super Liability,” in which he talked about the legal issues surrounding hosting a party. “What could go wrong?” he wrote. “I can quickly think of at least three incidents that could happen both on and off your premises. Also, keep in mind that friends can sue friends.” Posts like these generate high search engine rankings and brand McGlynn as an expert.

“Most of my posts come from listening to people’s questions,” he says. “Whether it is in our office or in their office, my clients give me the best ideas.” For many people, insurance is an unfamiliar and intimidating topic. When the time comes to learn about auto, home, or life insurance, they don’t know where to turn. McGlynn realizes this and creates posts to help. “People use the Internet to search for answers to their insurance questions,” McGlynn says. “If I can provide those answers, then people will see me as an expert, and it may lead to them contacting me for both advice and service.”

Another blog that delivers interesting information rather than a sales pitch is published by GrabCAD,² a community where mechanical engineers share and find project designs and ideas. The multimedia blog features projects that members of the GrabCAD community are working on. One video post, “Volocopter Reinvents Flight,” shows how a group of German engineers created a battery-operated machine that lifts off with help from 16 electric-powered rotors. The mechanical engineers in the GrabCAD community love posts like this, and they share the content on their networks.

It has been estimated that there are more than 100 million blogs and that some 100,000 new blogs are created every day, which means that, on average, a new blog is created every second of every day. That’s a heck of a lot of competition, and you might ask yourself if it is worth the effort. But remember back to the long-tail theory we discussed in Chapter 2. If you write a niche blog (e.g., a blog about Massachusetts family insurance), then you’re not competing with 100 million other blogs. You’re writing in a space where there are few (if any) other blogs, and you will no doubt find readers who are interested in what you’re saying. If you have a small niche, you may interest only a few hundred readers. But you’ll reach the right readers—those people who are interested in what you and your organization have to say.

Blogging Ethics and Employee Blogging Guidelines

Some organizations such as IBM³ and the U.S. Air Force have created formal guidelines for employee bloggers and published them online for anyone to access. Your organization should decide for itself whether to create such guidelines, and the decision should be determined based on input from marketing, human resources (HR), and other departments. I think it is much better for an organization to establish a consistent policy about all communications (including verbal communication, email, participation in chat rooms, and the like) rather than focus on just blogs and social media. I feel strongly that a company can and should set specific policies against sexual harassment, disparaging the competition, and revealing company secrets, but there’s no reason to have different policies for different media.

Once the policy is set, employees should be permitted to blog away as long as they follow it. No matter what decisions you make about who should blog and what the rules are, it is always better for the blogger not to pass individual posts through a PR department or legal team. However, if your blog posts must be reviewed by others in your organization before going live, then have your colleagues focus only on the content, not your actual words. Do not let others in your organization turn your authentic and passionate writing into another form of marketing gobbledygook.

Let’s talk about ethics for a moment. All sorts of unethical practices go on in the blogosphere, and you must be certain to hold yourself and your organization accountable for your actions as a blogger. Some organizations have gotten caught using unethical practices on their blogs and have done great harm to their corporate reputations. I’ve included some of the issues you need to pay attention to, as well as an example of each unethical practice. This is not intended to be a comprehensive list, but rather a starting point for you to think about ethics.

• Transparency: You should never pretend to be someone you are not. For example, don’t use another name to submit a comment on any blog (your own or somebody else’s), and don’t create a blog that talks about your company without disclosing that someone from your company is behind it.
• Privacy: Unless you’ve been given permission, don’t blog about something that was disclosed to you. For example, don’t post material from an email someone sent you unless you have permission.
• Disclosure: It is important to disclose anything that people might consider a conflict of interest in a blog post. For example, if I write in my blog about a product from a company that is one of my masterclass clients or one that I am on the advisory board of, I put a sentence at the end disclosing my relationship with the company.
• Truthfulness: Don’t lie. For example, never make up a customer story just because it makes good blog content.
• Credit: You should give credit to bloggers (and other sources) whose material you have used in your blog. For example, don’t read a great post on someone else’s blog, take the idea, change a few words, and publish it as your own. Besides being good ethical practice, links to other bloggers whose ideas you have used help to introduce them to your blog, and they may link to you.

Again, this is not a complete list. The Word of Mouth Marketing Association has created an ethics code. I recommend that you read it and follow the guidelines. But you should also follow your gut. If a post feels funny to you for some reason or makes you uncomfortable, it may be unethical. What would your mother say about that post? If she would tell you it is wrong, it probably is, so don’t send it. Do the right thing.

Blogging Basics: What You Need to Know to Get Started

Unlike websites, which require design and HTML skills to produce, blogs are quick and easy to set up using off-the-shelf software with easy-to-use features. With just a little basic know-how, you can quickly and easily establish and promote your blog. Here are some specific tips to keep in mind:

• Before you begin, think carefully about the name of your blog, which will be indexed by the search engines. It is very difficult to go back and change this information once you have established it.
• Easy-to-use blogging software is available from TypePad, WordPress, Squarespace, and others. Some of the services are free, and others require a small subscription fee. Research the services, and choose wisely based on your needs, because it is difficult to switch to a different service without losing all the content you have already created. And once your blog has been indexed by search engines, and people have subscribed to your RSS feed or bookmarked your URL, a change to different software is really tough.
• You will need to choose a URL for your blog. The blogging services all offer customizable URLs (such as yourblog.typepad.com). You can also map your blog to your company’s domain (www.yourcompany .com/yourblog) or to a custom domain (www.yourblog.com). I recommend that you choose a custom domain because then you can take your blog with you from one blogging platform to another.
• Blogging software makes it easy to choose color, design, and font and to create a simple text-based masthead. You might consider using a custom graphical image as your masthead—these are easy to design and will make your blog more attractive to readers.
• As you begin your blog, tweak your design and tentatively try a few posts. I recommend you use password protection for the first few weeks or so. That way you can share your blog with a few friends and colleagues first and make changes before opening it up to the world.
• The look and feel of the blog could be complementary to your corporate design guidelines, but it should not be identical. For many blogs, it is better to be a bit different from the corporate look to signal to readers that the blog is an independent voice, not corporate-speak.
• Blogging software usually allows you to turn on a comments feature so your visitors can respond to your posts. There are several options for you to consider. Some people prefer their blogs to have no comments from readers at all, and that might be the right choice for you. However, one of the most exciting things about blogging is when your readers comment on what you’ve written.

Depending on your blogging software, you may opt for open comments (where people can write comments that are not subject to your approval) or for a system where you need to approve each comment before it appears on your blog. Many bloggers use the approval feature to watch for inappropriate comments. But I encourage you to allow comments from people who disagree with you—debate is one of the best indications of a well-read blog.

Unfortunately, the blogosphere is plagued by the problem of comment spam, so to prevent automated comment robots from vandalizing your blog, some comment systems require people to answer a simple question called a captcha⁴ before their comments go live. (I use this approach, and it works very well.) This will not eliminate comment spam but will greatly reduce it because it requires a human to enter the comment. You will want to review every comment as it comes in and either comment back to your readers or manually delete any obvious comment spam right away.

• Pay close attention to the categories you choose for your blog. Most blogging software platforms include an easy-to-use category feature. Besides helping readers find your posts, search engines use this information to index your content.
• Add social networking sharing tools such as a Facebook “Like” button, LinkedIn “Share” button, Pinterest “Pin it” button, and a Twitter “Tweet this” button to each post. Most blog software packages have these tools as a simple application that makes them easy to implement.
• Rich Site Summary (RSS, often called really simple syndication) is a standard delivery format for many of your readers. Make certain that your new blog has RSS capability. Most blogging software services have RSS feeds as a standard feature.
• Provide an “About” page that includes your photo, biography, affiliations, and information about your blog. Often when people visit a blog for the first time, they want to know about the blogger, so it is important to provide background.
• Encourage people to contact you, make it easy for them to reach you online, and be sure to follow up personally on your fan mail. You’ll get a bunch of inquiries, questions, praise, and an occasional detractor if you make it easy for people to contact you. Because of the huge problem with spam, many people don’t want to publish email addresses. But the biggest problem is with automated robots that harvest email addresses, so to thwart them, write your email address so humans can read it but the machines cannot. On websites, for example, I list my email address as “david (at) DavidMeermanScott (dot) com.”
• Don’t write excessively about your company and its products and services. You must resist this urge to blog about what your company offers. Instead, blog about a subject of interest to the people you are trying to reach. What problems do your buyers have that you can write about? How can you create content that informs and educates and entertains?
• Involve other blogs and bloggers by becoming a true participant in the online community. Link to and leave comments on other blogs. Let someone else’s post serve as the starting point for a conversation that you continue on your own blog. You’ll generate much more interest in what you’re doing if you are inclusive.

Bling Out Your Blog

Before my daughter started eighth grade, she spent the entire week blinging out her school binder. All the cool girls do it, transforming standard plastic three-ring binders with photos, stickers, song lyrics, and other bits on the outside. She even had a spot for a quote of the day that she updated each morning. Inside, the binder had page dividers she customized and pocket folders with pens and protractors and whatnot.

I got to thinking that the same is true of good blogs. A blinged out blog shows the blogger’s personality. I’ve blinged out my own blog with lots of cool stuff. On the top is a masthead that I had a friend who is a designer create. In HubSpot (which I use for my blog), you just have someone design an image that is the right number of pixels wide and high and drop it in—the software automatically adds other design elements (such as a border) and replaces the rather plain-looking text masthead with the new design. Other blog software tools also support graphical mastheads, although the specific requirements and implementation methods will be different.

On the right column of my blog, I have my photo and a short bio as well as links to pages on my site and to my other web content. I have easy sign-up links for people who want to view my blog as an RSS subscription, and an email subscription option so people can get each of my blog posts sent to their email inboxes.

One of the downsides of a blog is that the reverse-chronological aspect (most recent post at the top) means that much of your best stuff, which may have been written last month or last year, is hidden away. To offer an alternative navigation, you can also include easy navigation links so people can quickly find the good stuff. For example, you might include “The Best of” with links to a handful of your most popular posts, a scrolling list of recent comments on the blog, and navigation by category of post.

Blinging out your blog is easy. If you devote a few hours to it, you can make a very cool-looking blog that even my daughter would approve of. Sure, the standard templates offered by the blog software providers are great to get started, but once you are fully committed to blogging, it is important to make your blog personality shine through with links, images, a masthead, photos, and other add-ons.

Building an Audience for Your New Blog

When you put up your first few blog posts, you are likely to hear a deafening silence. You’ll be waiting for comments, but none will come. You’ll check your site statistics and be disappointed by the tiny number of visitors. Don’t get discouraged—that’s normal! It takes time to build an audience for your blog. When you’re just getting started, make sure people know it is there and can find it. Create links to your blog from your homepage, product pages, or online media room. Mention your blog in your email or offline newsletters, and create links to your blog as part of your email signature and those of other people in your organization. Tweet your posts and include links on your social networks.

The good news is that blogs that are regularly updated generate high search engine rankings because the algorithms that are used by Google and the other search engines reward sites (and blogs) that update frequently. It is likely that you will get significant search engine traffic once you’ve been consistently blogging for a while. I typically post one or two times a week to my blog, and most days my blog generates several hundred visitors via search engines, which is good because these are people who do not know me (yet). To ensure that your new blog is found by your buyers as they search for what you have to offer, be certain to post on topics of interest and to use the important phrases that people are searching on. (See Chapter 10 if you want to review how to identify the words and phrases that your buyers use.) Smart bloggers understand search engines and use their blogs to reach audiences directly.

Commenting on other people’s blogs (and including a link to your blog) is a good way to build an audience. If you comment on blogs in the same market category as yours, you might be surprised at how quickly you will get visitors to your new blog. A curious thing about blogging etiquette is that bloggers who are competitive for business offline are usually very cooperative online, with links back and forth from their blogs. It’s a bit like all the auto dealers in town congregating on the same street—proximity is good for everyone, so people work together.

Your customers, potential customers, investors, employees, and the media are all reading blogs, and there is no doubt that blogs are a terrific way for marketers to tell authentic stories to their buyers. But building an audience for a blog takes time. Most blog services provide tools for measuring traffic. Use these data to learn which posts are attracting the most attention. You can also learn what sites people are coming from when they visit your blog and what search terms they used to find you. Use this information to continually improve your blog. Once again, think like a publisher.

Tag, and Your Buyer Is It

With the total number of existing blogs now in the hundreds of millions and with the availability of niche blogs on virtually any topic, it is easy to get lost in the blogosphere. The simple truth is that it isn’t always easy for people to find a blog post on their subjects of interest. Recently, a colleague of mine needed new tires for his car. Instead of just heading to the local retailer to be at the mercy of a salesperson or poking around tire manufacturer websites, he went to one of the blog search engines to see what people were writing about tires. He entered the keyword tires, and sure enough, within a few clicks he reached several blogs that had useful information about purchasing tires. But he also faced a heck of a lot of useless noise with the word tires in the results—things like analysis of tires used in a recent NASCAR race, rants about the garbage on the sides of freeways (which includes discarded tires), and even posts about “spare tires” on middle-aged men.

It is precisely this problem—the false hits in word and phrase searches, not middle-aged men’s lack of exercise—that led to tagging features in blog software that let bloggers categorize what their posts are about. To use this feature, a blogger simply creates a set of metatags for each blog post. This aids how the search engines find and index your content.

From the blogger’s perspective, the benefits of adding tags to create increased precision about the post’s content, whereby each post reaches more people, are worth the extra effort. For example, I assign each post that I write to multiple appropriate categories, such as marketing, public relations, and advertising. New visitors reach my blog every day as a result of searching on the tags that I had added to blog posts.

Cities That Blog

While many U.S. cities and towns have dabbled in social media, typically setting up a basic Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter presence, most local government employees and elected officials are averse to blogging. They assume that it’s too risky, that it could create legal liability or become a source of primarily negative comments. Contrary to the vast majority of cities, College Station, Texas, has had a blog for years. Jay G. Socol, director of public communications for the City of College Station, maintains the blog, which has been working out very well for his community. According to a message on the homepage,⁵ the purpose of the blog is “to be a two-way conversation between College Station residents and their government officials. We hope it allows us to get to know one another a little better in the process, while having genuine and transparent exchanges of ideas.”

Socol sometimes tackles difficult topics through the blog. For example, he wrote about how the shooting death of a city law enforcement officer (which generated worldwide attention) brought the community closer together. But he also shows the lighter side of the city, with posts like “Treasure found in a drainage ditch.” This story told how city maintenance crews through the years have found objects of value in muddy trenches: jewelry, wallets, purses, car keys, credit cards, and even wads of cash.

“I firmly believe strong, relevant content has helped shift community sentiment toward College Station,” Socol says. “It’s reduced rumors running rampant and mitigated media-grabbing false stories and angles from anonymous chat forums. Blogging also has driven positive news content and given more texture to some of our biggest public announcements. We don’t receive a ton of comments (because we require real names to be used), but the results tell me it’s working in the ways we need it to. Sentiment and trust have increased, and those are the main wins for us.”

Here’s another example of a city using blog content to educate and inform (it also proves that cops can have a sense of humor): On Election Day, 2012, the people of Washington State passed Initiative 502, making it legal for adults over 21 years old to possess up to an ounce of marijuana for personal use (or 16 ounces of solid marijuana-infused product, like cookies, or 72 ounces of infused liquid, like oil). So, Washington residents wondered, what does that actually mean for me? To answer that question, the Seattle Police published on their SPD Blotter blog: “Marijwhatnow? A Guide to Legal Marijuana Use in Seattle.” The post provides a practical guide for what the Seattle Police Department believes Initiative 502 means.

The “Marijwhatnow?” post uses a Q&A format. Here’s one example: “Q: Can I legally carry around an ounce of marijuana? A: According to the recently passed initiative, beginning December 6th, adults over the age of 21 will be able to carry up to an ounce of marijuana for personal use. Please note that the initiative says it ‘is unlawful to open a package containing marijuana . . . in view of the general public,’ so there’s that. Also, you probably shouldn’t bring pot with you to the federal courthouse (or any other federal property).”

Many of the Q&A exchanges are quite funny: “Q: What happens if I get pulled over and I’m sober, but an officer or his K9 buddy smells the ounce of Super Skunk I’ve got in my trunk? A: Under state law, officers have to develop probable cause to search a closed or locked container. Each case stands on its own, but the smell of pot alone will not be reason to search a vehicle. If officers have information that you’re trafficking, producing, or delivering marijuana in violation of state law, they can get a warrant to search your vehicle.”

I love the fact that the blog provides valuable information about the new law, but in an approachable way.

The SPD Blotter began in 2008 and is maintained by the staff of the Seattle Police Department’s Public Affairs Office. The “Marijwhatnow?” post was written by Jonah Spangenthal-Lee, a journalist who, as he says in his bio, covered “the always-exciting cops and crime beat at Seattlecrime.com, PubliCola, KIRO Television, and The Stranger.” Spangenthal-Lee joined the Seattle Police Department in March 2012 to tell those same stories on the department’s SPD Blotter blog and publish real-time information on breaking news through the SPD’s @SeattlePD Twitter feed.

If College Station, Texas, and the Seattle Police Department can blog, so can you.

Blogging outside North America

People often ask me about blogging in other countries. They want to know if the marketing approaches I outline work elsewhere. Specifically, many people ask if blogs are a good way to do marketing and PR in Europe and Asia. While I cannot comment on every single country, I can say that blogging is a global phenomenon in countries with widespread web access and that many bloggers from other countries are active in the global blogging community. I’ve received links to my blog from bloggers in something like 50 different countries. It’s so cool when a comment or a link comes into my blog from someone in, say, Bulgaria or Finland or Thailand.

There is other clear evidence that blogging is alive and well outside of North America. My wife, Yukari Watanabe Scott,⁶ a commentator on the Japanese book business, maintains a blog to reach her readers in Japan. This technique is especially important because her readers there are halfway around the world from where we live, near Boston.

For a true international blogging success story, consider the example of Linas Simonis, a marketing consultant from Lithuania who established one of the first business blogs in that country. The reaction from the Lithuanian business community was almost immediate. “People didn’t know what RSS was in Lithuania at that time, so I created an email subscription to my blog,” Simonis says. “By the end of the first year, I had 400 subscribers, and you must remember that less than three and a half million people live in Lithuania, so the equivalent would be something like 40,000 subscribers in the United States.”

But what’s really remarkable about Simonis’s story is the new business that he generated via his blog. “Three months after I started the blog, my company stopped needing to make cold calls to solicit new business,” he says. “The blog and the company website generated so many requests that we didn’t need to actively seek new clients—they come to us. Soon after I started blogging, I was even hired by conference organizers to deliver speeches and seminars, and I had calls from universities to speak to students.” Simonis now consults for corporate clients in Lithuania that wish to establish blogs, and he publishes an English-language blog as a forum to write about positioning strategy.

What Are You Waiting For?

Everybody I’ve spoken with about starting a blog has said the same thing (but in slightly different ways). They were all a bit uncomfortable when they started a blog. They felt a little dorky because they didn’t know all the unwritten rules. They were even a little scared to push the button on that first post. We’ve all been there.

To get comfortable before you take the plunge, remember back to Chapter 5: You should follow a bunch of blogs in your industry first. What things do you like about those blogs? What’s annoying? What would you do differently? Then, before you jump into the water by creating your own blog, you can stick your toe in by leaving comments on other people’s blogs. Test out your blog voice. Finally, when it feels right, start your own blog. And when you do get going, please send me your URL so I can check it out.