Yes, I know, every time someone wants to write about writing words they come out with that hokey old 'The joy of text' heading. I've been doing it since 1989; what can I tell you, I'm juvenile.
In this chapter we're going to park the bells and whistles, the video, the multimedia. We're going to look at things you can do with text only – the really, really simple stuff – and how to use it to engage with people. We're going to look not only at the technical side of getting a blog online but also at populating it with interesting and engaging content.
Blogging itself is simple, but this book isn't just about the physical act of doing things online. Before you put finger to keyboard you need to consider: why blog? What is it about your business that is going to give you something to say today, tomorrow, next week? (Hint: make it engaging and interesting. Glad we got that straight.)
Also you need to be a bit ruthless with yourself. Are you, or have you ever been, a good writer? Really? Good, then there's no problem. Or if you're less than confident, then maybe one of your team is excellent at it. Someone has to be. You don't want misunderstandings, you don't want an online row breaking out – you want an engaged community of users who'll go out and act as ambassadors for your brand.
It's important, then, to start with your desired outcome; that's a theme I hope you'll be picking up throughout this book. Your outcome might be more customers, or it might be more purchases from your existing customers.
If it's the latter, the first thing you do is...ask some customers. Do they read blogs? Are they interested in the sort of thing you're likely to have to say to them on your blog? If not, you might be well advised to forget it. You can also forget it if you haven't anything interesting to say.
Many of the bad blogs I've seen suffer from a number of things:
Insufficiently riveting content – and this means in week 50 as well as week 1. So many of them run out of steam.
Inability to write well. I'm a journalist and author, so my professional discipline is going to lead me to be critical of any mistake someone makes in terms of grammar, spelling or punctuation, but a basic error is going to look bad to anyone else too. So watch it. No apostrophes for plurals, no their/there muck-ups and make sure what you write makes sense.
Spam in the comment section – so it looks as though nobody's keeping an eye on it.
If you're after new customers then blogging can be even more tricky. You have to write something worth reading of course, but you also have to write it in such a way that the search engines will find it.
That said, let's step back and look at the basic principles of blogging. A blog can be many things depending on who's writing it; the blogger, in webspeak. Essentially it's a collection of thoughts, pictures and links someone wants to share with the outside world. Some reasons people use blogs include:
To extend their journalism: even senior journalists like Robert Peston and Nick Robinson at the BBC, and Jon Snow at Channel 4 News, have their blogs online to inform people of what's happening and to fill in a little more background depth than is possible in a broadcast.
To air their thoughts: several business and technology analysts use blogs to bypass the journalism 'filter' that might dilute or interpret their comments in a way they don't want. Look also at the box on Alex Bellinger's Smallbizpod, in which podcasting and blogging are his chief means of communication.
Brand extension: look at Innocent Drinks (
http://innocentdrinks.typepad.com). There's a lot about product but it's done in an entertaining, 'we don't take ourselves too seriously' manner that reiterates and expands on the brand's values.
I'm excluding any personal reasons someone might have for launching a blog. This is a business book, after all. Let's assume, then, that you've decided blogging is for you, you have something to say and you're ready to start.
Blogging is really simple once you have the right software, either on your computer or, as is increasingly common, on the web. First, I want to consider solutions that allow you to develop a whole website, rather than just a blog.
Apple's iLife has its own iWeb software, which has a blogging template on it, there are many alternatives such as Sandvox and I use Rapidweaver from Realmac. I'm not going to recommend an individual piece of software to you since preferences are very individual. Instead, I'll talk you through some of the more common options and issues to consider, and refer to some of the packages I've used (and which are still current – I'm still fond of Microsoft Publisher 97 because of the simplicity but it's no longer available).
iWeb has a number of advantages, not least that it's part of the set of software that comes with many Macs, so it's inexpensive. It offers a number of pre-designed templates; you pick the design and the colour scheme and then add whichever pages your site needs. These include photo pages, pages for movies, pages for a podcast and of course a blog (you can embed your video on your own page and upload it to the Internet intact, but I wouldn't bother as long as YouTube is offering to handle the bandwidth and distribution issues free of charge). There is sample text and photography on all of the blog templates; simply highlight the text and type over it, and drag and drop a replacement picture. It's as easy as that.
RapidWeaver works in a similar way: choose a template and add a blog page. Adding blog entries is easy by hitting the 'plus' button on the blog page and then uploading the site to your webspace. RapidWeaver has the advantage of showing you the HTML code, so if you haven't got the right tags in place for SEO purposes you can see that. Unfortunately you can't edit the raw code, but you can put a piece of code into the page and hope it lands in the right place (there would be a good chance of really screwing the page up if they let everyone loose on the raw code).
PC users are far from left out. Have a look at Microsoft's website at http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!D85741BB5E0BE8AA!174.entry – you can download LiveWriter software from there as long as you have Windows 2000 or something more recent, and start designing and updating web pages from the minute you've installed the software. This includes the ability to blog and is aimed at people who don't have the time or inclination to manage their own web space. Microsoft will host the pages for you as well as provide the tools to design them.
An even more comprehensive package is Serif's WebPlus X2, which comes with a book that starts you thinking properly about web design. It's all too easy to allow a website to grow in an unmanaged way, so Serif recommends you start with a tree diagram telling you where things are going to go, what's a subpage of what and so on. It's a methodical way of putting the pages together.
There is a third way of compiling a website, which is to assemble it all online. This differs from, say, Blogger or Wordpress, which also offer the online assembly of a blog, in that you can put together a complete website rather than just the blog bit. Go to www.moonfruit.com, a UK company that has an online site designer: you choose your template, add the text and it's online all but immediately. The paid-for account even builds in ecommerce through PayPal. Look also at Mr Site's Takeaway Website Pro; this comes either on the web or as packaged software, but the CD that comes in the box is the manual only. The software offers a lot of ecommerce features, including stock control and up to 99 items per page if you're selling stuff online, as well as a PayPal shop, and it'll match your business cards and stationery to the design of your site. It'll even take care of a lot of the SEO issues for you.
Note
PayPal is a way of paying for items online using your credit card, where the merchant simply registers with PayPal rather than with a bank. In this way as a business you can be taking payments online within minutes rather than months of deciding to make your service or goods available online.
There are many ways of getting a blog and a site online and some will suit you better than others. It's worth having a play with them before you start to publicize where people can find you on the web, so that when you do announce it it's permanent.
Remember:
A web-savvy person will recognize a site designed on a template from one of the packages I've described. This may or may not matter to you.
The automatic upload that these pieces of software offer is splendid – until it falls over and you have no way of uploading your site. This has happened to me.
Many of these web design programs have their own bits of stray code attached, so that the software gets a credit deep within your site, for example. This can make transferring your site to another piece of software quite tricky!
On the other hand, there is probably no quicker way for a novice to get a good-looking and functional website up within a few hours.
One thing you need to decide is whether you want to host your own blog or opt for one of the free and easy options. The latter are good because they are (a) free and (b) easy. The former offers you some more flexibility: you can't, for example, put an external advertisement on anything hosted by Wordpress, but you can use the company's software to make a blog and, as long as it's on your own server, you can put what you want on it.
Take the Wordpress system. Wordpress.com is great at first glance (and depending on your objective it might be all you need). You go to the website, set up an account, add a blog entry, hit 'Publish' and it's done. Could anything be better? Well, maybe not better, but take a look at Blogger as well. The screens look very different indeed but the functions are much the same.
You might want to get your blog registered with a memorable domain. Most registration companies will allow you to point your domain at someone else's servers. So if you registered something with 1-2-3-Reg, Easily.net or any of the others, you could have it pointing to your webspace, to someone else's webspace, anywhere.
For example, maybe you decide to get a bang up-to-date view of my social networking blog. You enter www.socialnetworkingblog.co.uk in your browser and as far as you're concerned it's got there. Except it hasn't. It's actually gone to Easily.co.uk, which manages the domain for me. Until April 2009 Easily pointed people at guyclapperton.wordpress.com, where they'd see the rather ornate blog I was running at the time. I realized pretty quickly that Wordpress wasn't going to allow advertising – which, as a self-employed person in a recession, probably mattered to me more than it would matter to many readers – so I opted to host it myself. Rather than book some more webspace I used some I already had; www.socialnetworkingblog.co.uk now points to http://homepage.mac.com/guyclapperton/Personalpage/Socialnetworkingblog/Socialnetworkingblog.html if you please: really simple for you to type in the original, really easy for me to update on Apple's website. I can of course move it again any time I want, and because www.clapperton.co.uk points to the Mac page as well I can point people to the blog from my main site.
There are disadvantages too, however. The new site is nowhere near as easy to track as the old one – finding how many people have visited takes actual work. It was more important to me to try and make a little income out of it; you have to decide what works for you. As with everything to do with social networks, you look at the business case and then decide.
Also be aware of how many permutations there might be of your blog's name. It can cost a fortune if you're registering yourblog.co.uk, yourblog.com, yourblog.net and all the rest. It's up to you how far you go with this. But never forget that if you're successful, someone will try to attract your web traffic away from you and they might well do it dishonestly: they might register a misspelt version of your name so bad spellers end up on their site, or they might look for a region in which you don't own your company's name. How far you go in protecting yourself is up to you.
It's here that we have to look not so much as what you want to achieve by going online – that's relatively easy and you'll probably have had an objective in mind before you picked this book up – as what your online presence is going to say about your company.
A while ago I was speaking at an event at which social media types were raising a number of issues. One of them asked whether when tweeting, blogging, Facebooking and the rest she should be 'herself', or whether she'd be better off acting as company spokes-person only.
This isn't as simple to answer as you might think. On the one hand, if you're acting on behalf of an organization you might want to consider being pretty straight about that. But who's going to read company posts only? Holding people's interest on, say, Twitter or your blog can be really tricky if you're only going to make company announcements. On the other hand, if you're too personal about things then you start to affect the company's image because you're so well known as part of the organization; it becomes your business, not you, that's associated with 'hangover every morning'. That's an extreme example, but it's worth considering: are you in danger of associating your personal traits too much with your business?
Let's look at this from the other side. A short while ago someone on Twitter put a note up asking PR people not to send press releases to his work email address because they weren't relevant – he was a blogger, he said, not a journalist, so press releases weren't relevant anyway. I won't enter the debate about bloggers becoming journalists; the issue here was that he perceived his work email as entirely separate from his social networking email, and this was presumably different again from his personal email. Many people will be familiar with the idea of a separate email for work and personal use, much as they are with phone numbers; social networks add a different dimension. It's worth considering just how personal you want your tweets in particular to appear. Try following @whatleydude for an idea of how it's done really well: until he left in August 09 he was known to be part of Spinvox and represented the brand well whilst retaining his personal voice.
You could try following me as @guyclapperton – but remember that the rules are slightly different for freelances, in that we are literally our own business, so we don't have to take anyone else's views or sensibilities into account.
In the last chapter we started talking about search engine optimization (SEO). This is how you maximize the text on your website – including that on your blog – to make sure it gets picked up by the search engines.
As I said there, the search engines don't actually tell anyone how they pick the websites up and select them. What we do know is that Google uses some of the following criteria:
How many sites are linking to yours and how old they are. I registered
www.clapperton.co.ukin the mid-1990s, so when I set up my media training site atwww.mediatrainer.bizand linked to it, the search engines picked that up as 'likely to be legit' pretty quickly. Starting up in isolation is more difficult.Tags: these are little subject headers you can add in separately from your message. Make them relevant!
Keywords: your site will be searched for important words to make sure they appear in the right places. Make keywords you think will be searched for prominent in the headline and the body text, and don't worry too much about a little repetition (although if it gets silly the search engines will ignore you, and nobody's saying where exactly the dividing line is).
If all that sounds a little intimidating then don't forget, it's basically the same sort of marketing writing technique you'll have been using already: targeted, succinct, and with the right keywords.
There's a trick question in there waiting to be sprung. Many people assume they 'know' what sort of keywords their customers will look for on the Internet. Some of them may even be right, but here's an experiment: go to https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal (if they've changed it don't worry, do a Google search for Google Ads Keyword Tool), then put in the keyword you think your customers will search for. Enter the text it asks for as well and hit 'Enter' – you'll get not only information on how many people are searching for the keyword you asked for, but keywords like it. For example, I worked quite hard to make sure people searching for 'media trainer' would find me. Only when I checked the Google Adwords facility did I find that in the previous month 170 people had searched for 'media trainer' while 12,100 searched for 'media training'. You can imagine that elements of my site were rewritten pretty quickly after that!
Note
Traffic is the number of people who come to your website.
As for a website, you need to check that your software posts entries as text rather than images or anything else the search engines won't be able to see. Too many graphics, loads of animation and your message will be drowned out.
If you can bear all the above in mind for your blog, which might change as often as daily, then you should start to see traffic pick up on your site.
Monitor your blog regularly. One of the lessons you'll learn very early on is that not all of your customers are interested in commenting and making your blog engaging, but some of them may be a little too voluble for your liking. A magazine found this – no names, no pack drill – it invited readers to comment on their articles (not quite a blog but similar) and found the same two commentators making exactly the same nihilistic comments to everything. Nobody else bothered. It's up to you to stimulate the debate.
Likewise, when I first started running my small business website in the 1990s I tried asking questions to promote a response. I was pretty disheartened when nobody answered – and believe me, nothing looks more ridiculous on your website than a solicitation for a conversation in which it's obvious from the silence that nobody wants to take part. Again, it's up to you to do something about it, but above all to read your customers and prospects right in the first place.
Oh, and do have a look at the legal note in the box.
Essentially, if it's on your blog, you own it and are responsible for it. This means not only offering value to your customers and prospects, but taking responsibility for anything anyone else puts up there, whether they are colleagues, customers, spammers, competitors or simple troublemakers. Don't be put off – a few minutes a day might well take care of this – but build it into your business plan.
It's worth looking at Twitter again in this chapter. Twitter is probably the de facto text-only social network, even if it does carry a picture of the sender next to each message. As we established in Chapter 3, a tweet is 140 characters including spaces, but there are a few things it's not and yet people still treat it this way:
It's not an open invitation to tell everyone what you had for breakfast.
Private conversations carried out in response to a message can be constructive as long as you don't exclude other people; take it to direct messages if you want to go really private, or take it to email, phone, visits, it doesn't have to be on Twitter!
At the same time, everything doesn't have to be about selling – your value on Twitter is more than just as a sales pitch merchant.
It can be worth rereading the section on your online identity in relation to what you do on Twitter. It's not an easy concept and it needs to be dealt with.