Once your Corporate stakeholders have understood why Web 2.0 is more than a fad and why its marketing could benefit from it (Read our 15 golden rules for Web 2.0) and once they have established how their 2.0 strategy should be articulated (Refer to our interactivity matrix and 10 steps to 2.0 interactivity nirvana), quite a few questions remain: How to create a professional looking blog and how to promote it? How long does it take every day and how many visitors may I expect? Where should my blog reside, should it be hosted or should I put it on my corporate server? What should I do so that it is well indexed by Google and other search engines? What are the do's and don'ts of Corporate blogging? What are the risks?... These are some of the questions that we come across most of the time with regard to corporate blogging. In this article, we will spell out the steps which can lead to proficient Corporate Blogging and we'll try and address the above questions.
This can actually be used as corporate blogging guidelines for the perusal of your corporate blogging experts and your corporate blog managers. You can even use this as a charter (namely the do's and don'ts chapter in part three) with which you would like them in their regular blogging exercise and also get them to agree to the rules of efficient and responsible corporate blogging. A lot of the material enclosed in this article, is drawn from the experience of experience bloggers and Internet writers including myself who have been working in and around the Internet for many years (13 years in my case).
A few facts and figures:
Before you delve into the particulars of this methodology and blogging guidelines, we urge you to read the following lines which will serve as an explanation for the rest of the document:
- About 90% of blogs (90 not being the actual number but a ballpark figure) attract less than 50 visitors per day. Don't raise your expectations too high mainly if your content is not up to scratch.
- User generated content is the era of empowered users who go on to the Internet hook up to a website and create a blog for free. Because you're a corporation doesn't mean that you own the best experts in the world on the subject that you want to deal with. Expect a lot from other bloggers who will have already started commenting on the subject. What about starting a journey by reading what has already been done?
- Blogging success is established in the long term: It can take a few years before you reach the top 10 of your category. As a consequence, forget about these people who will tell you that blogging is easy and that collaboration is effortless. This is just not true.
- Your expertise might be really good, but it doesn't necessarily follow that your blog could attract hordes of visitors. A small crowd of enthusiasts is worth a million passive users.
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