Favorite this bloggerBlogging Tips and Lessons Learned by Mike Brown
I’ll be blogging on various marketing topics-research, branding, strategic marketing, and communications. While my experience is in B2B services marketing, there’s a slant toward applying B2C approaches in business markets. I’ll also draw from interactions with marketers at the various conferences at which I speak. Posts will be experienced-based and delivered in a lesson format that you can apply to your business situations..
I’ve been blogging a year, with websites on strategy & innovation, life purpose, and even sketchy ties to a corporate humor blog.
Among business acquaintances, I now get frequent blogging questions. There’s no shortage of web articles on it, but here are lessons learned directly from writing one:
Know why you’re going to blog – Before starting, determine your reasons for blogging. Knowing it is for the discipline of writing a book sustains me while slowly building an online audience.
Establish rules for yourself – Guiding principles will simplify decisions and your effort. I knew early on I’d cover general work-related topics without mentioning my employer specifically. Additional guides include the number of words (generally under 300), how often to publish (daily except holidays), and topic categories (limiting content to 20 topic areas).
Write for a month before publishing – After deciding how often to publish, write a month’s worth of posts before putting something online. This provides three advantages:
- You’ll discover how much effort blogging will take and can adjust your frequency to ensure you’ll sustain it.
- It will help refine your writing skills.
- You’ll have a backlog of material for when your creative juices run dry.
Create an editorial calendar – Get a big desk calendar, some small post-it notes, and plan out a few months worth of topics. Knowing where you’re headed is helpful and the flexibility of modifying where you’re headed (by moving the post-its around) is essential. Another hint – after 6 months, throw out any still-unwritten topics to freshen future content.
Capture ideas all the time – Always have something to write down blogging ideas. Never lose a potentially viable idea. Ask yourself daily what happened that might have blog potential. It’s a great relief later to thumb through a notebook of starter idea fragments.
Keep a hidden blog – After setting up your main blog, establish a hidden one where you can experiment with graphics, pre-publish posts to see how they’ll look, and work out bugs as you experiment with blogging.
For more ideas, check out my Brainzooming blog this week for other lessons on writing, graphics, and interaction that have emerged from blogging.
