Blogs are both great in number and extremely powerful. With Technorati reporting well over 175 000 new blogs being started daily, companies and consumers have a voice like never before. Unfortunately, there’s a bit more to it than that. According to Sifry’s State of the Blogosphere report in 2006, only 55% of blogs survive the first three months.
If your corporate blog is to fulfil its purpose and serve as a tool to communicate with the community, you’re going to need to ensure that it falls into the more successful 45%. Much of this success can be attributed to the design and planning that goes into the development of your blog. With that in mind, here are some tips to make designing your corporate blog a little bit easier.
1). Begin with the end in mind
When it comes to corporate blogging, knowing what you hope to achieve with your blog and how you plan to achieve it is integral to its long term success. Things that you need to take into account include the strategy and guidelines for writing posts as well as how you plan to market your blog. There are many, easy ways to promote your blog: listing it in blog directories is useful as is making use of blog aggregators like Amatomu, Technorati and Afrigator. For more information on tools and methods to promote your blog, please check out the Social Media chapter in our eMarketing textbook.
2). Remember that usability is key
When it comes to design, whether for a website or a blog, usability is the most important factor up for consideration. The use of your blog should not require any thought on the part of your readers – it should come naturally. There are several ways to ensure that this is the case. Make sure that you use standard conventions – the familiarity of this will enable users to know what they are looking at. Accessibility is another fundamental element of usability. To ensure that your blog is accessible to readers, you will need to:
- Build a working search function into the site.
- Make sure that your blog is not only available to high bandwidth readers, but that your blog will load even for users with slow connections.
- Ensure compatibility across all browsers.
- Take into account people with disabilities and try to make your site as accessible as possible for them.
3). Take advantage of Search Engine Optimisation techniques
When it comes to design, search engine visibility is second only to usability. Fortunately, blogs are naturally Search Engine friendly because by nature, they are regularly updated which encourages search engine spiders to visit in search of new content more frequently. However, unless your business area is very niche, there are likely to be other corporate blogs focused around the same topics as yours. Without a solid key phrase strategy, these blogs will compete with yours on the SERPs and more than likely win the race to the top position. It isn’t always easy to write relevant content around specific keywords but the payoffs will be worth it in the end. It is not only in the posts that SEO is important. There are several factors that need to be taken into account when building blogging software that will ensure that those lovable little spiders keep coming back for more. Examples of this are ensuring that each post has its own meta data, assigning each post a unique page and tagging posts with relevant keywords.
4). Look and feel is important
Aesthetics is often the forgotten sibling of usability and search engine visibility. Once the primary focus of design, look and feel is now considered secondary to its more technical brothers. It is however still integrally important. Fact: if your blog is an assault on the eyes, people will not read it and the goal of your blog is obviously, to be read - you do the math. The look of your blog should be focused on building credibility with your readers. Good ways to build credibility include featuring testimonials as well as displaying the logos of awards you may have won or associations to which you belong. The look of your blog also needs to be in keeping with your brand strategy, while still being informative and personal; it is crucial that your readers see human faces behind your blog. Another thing to bear in mind is spelling and grammar (errors are highly unprofessional).
With careful planning, you build a corporate blog that will do your company and brand proud, while providing you with a successful platform through which to communicate and engage with your staff, prospective clients, journalists and even your competitors. The key to this is getting it right from the word go; it all begins with design…
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