Blogs have been around for quite some time. It is fast becoming the other alternative for receiving news. It has evolved from being a place to rant on a topic or share personal matters to a tool used by companies to share information with employees or customers to replace newsletters.
If you are considering a blog for internal company communications, think about what you want the blog to represent and the type of information you want to share. Plan your blog before researching the tools that will be used for it or assigning someone to maintain it. Otherwise, you can select the wrong tool and cause the maintenance person to spend too much time on a “part-time” assignment. Also, if the blog is going to replace a current print or email company newsletter, you’d better conduct a survey to make sure employees are willing to check the web rather than having paper they can read at the break. or have it delivered directly to your desktop via Email. If no one is willing to go to the blog to get the information, it is a waste of time and money to create a blog.
If you are considering a blog for external communication, usually for existing or potential clients, but could also include vendors, then you need to consider the information to be shared, as well as its presentation. Should the blog look consistent with your other branding and marketing tools? Should it be part of your website or separate from it? Is it primarily a marketing tool, a training program, information sharing, or some combination? Who will provide the articles / blog posts and how often? If you plan to use the blog to replace a newsletter, how will current readers know when the blog is updated? Will you email them to notify them of updates or just inform them of the planned posting frequency so they can check for themselves? Will you use Twitter or another social network to communicate your blog as part of your marketing campaign?
If you are a small business or an independent consultant considering a blog, do you really need one? Perhaps it would be better to partner with another consultant or company to share responsibility for a blog that would benefit both of you. If you want to write primarily to share information, but don’t want to create your own blog, consider guest posting to a separate blog that already exists that provides posts with the type of information you want to share. You can check the candidate’s blog to see if they have more than one person writing. If so, find a contact and send an email suggesting your topic and asking if they would like a guest article or post made by you. This saves you time when creating a blog and searching for an audience. This will increase your confidence in your ability to provide data for the blog in case you later decide that you need your own blog, and then you are ready for the hardest part of blogging.
Before creating a blog, ask the questions above for the type of blog you are considering. Then decide if your business really needs a blog.