Developing and maintaining a great blog is an ongoing task. As an essential component of your website as a whole, a blog can be an avenue for generating ongoing interest in the business or the activity you promote. Not only can you use the blog to complement the information on the rest of your website; you can use it as a space for discussing current issues of interest to clients, customers or target audience.
Here are few basic pointers to help you check if your blog site is fit for purpose or going in a direction that will serve your business or enterprise:
Clarity of purpose
What is your blog for? How does it fit into your overall PR strategy? How can it be used to engage your target audience? What is the focus: providing information and discussions to attract new clients, maintaining the interest and attention of existing ones, or celebrating achievements and activities of your enterprise? These elements are not mutually exclusive. However, the clearer you are about the main purpose of the blog, the easier it would be to decide the issues on which to focus and the range of issues you could write about in blog posts.
Clarity of target audience
Who is the blog for? Is it a specialist audience or a general readership, potential clients or already established contacts, owners of other businesses or individuals who may be interested in the business? Once you have clarity as to who is your target audience, your efforts to generate content for the blog will be more focused and intentional. For some very niche enterprises, it may be better not to define the readership too narrowly or you’re going to get very few visitors!
Relevant topics and issues
What interesting, engaging and timely topics and issues will you cover to ensure that the blog attracts a good number of readers and visitors? It is likely that discussing and enlightening people on various aspects of your core business and activities can provide a string of topics for blogging. The challenge is to make the individual posts interesting and worthy of the attention of your target audience, so that over time they come to value your blog as a site they would want to visit to again and again. Depending on the target audience, you may also want to provide the opportunity for people to make comments and participate in discussions generated by your blog posts.
Giving usable tips
What usable information and tips can you share on your blog, both as a service to your readers as well as an incentive to revisit your site again and again? The perceived value of the information on the blog will be greatly enhanced if readers find information or tips of immediate and future utility. This can help to establish your blog as the place to go for the kind of information in which you specialise. Using our own blog as an example, we have posts which have covered Top Ten PR tips, how to give media interviews, the key ingredients of an e-newsletter and many subjects that people can begin to use immediately or as and when they want help with particular tasks. If you provide usable tips regularly and generously on your blog, over time people will see the archive on your blog as valuable content that they can visit for tips and tools for immediate use as well as a resource base for reference.
Setting the tone of your communications
Finally, what’s going to be the tone of the posts on your blog: serious or light, senatorial or humorous? If your blog is targeted to a particular audience as part of your ongoing PR mix, then the posts of the blog can set the tone for the rest of your communication with your audience. It is always good to keep things in perspective: for some blogs, a great sense of humour in the posts will help lighten things up for the readers and make even serious matters easy to digest; while for others, this may not be very appropriate at all.
(Photo: svilen)
