Welcome to the Blogosphere

The 5 Most Important Things from “Blogging to your Buyers”

1) Your blog should be ethical. I think this is was one of the biggest points from the chapter because it can ruin the reputation of yourself and your company if you don’t oblige by the “ethical guidelines”. According to the book, the ethical guideline includes the following: transparency, privacy, disclosure, truthfulness, and credit. When maintaining a blog, it’s important to be honest about whom you are and the things you write. One of the most troubling things you can do is take work that isn’t yours and claim it under your blog. In order for people to take you and your blog seriously, you must build and maintain an honest reputation. The blog will act as a depiction of who you are and what your company does.

One example of a business not taking these ethical standards into consideration was Walmart in 2006. Walmart hired bloggers to burnish the company’s bad reputation. The idea was called “Wal-Marting Across America” and featured two people traveling around the United States to conduct “real interviews” with people who work for the multi-billion dollar company. Because Walmart had such a bad reputation for treating their workers poorly, they wanted to revamp their image. They paid these two bloggers to go out and write an “honest” depiction of Walmart. No one knew these two people were paid by Walmart until a few months into the project. The plan clearly backfired and people across the “blogosphere” were furious. Here is the link to the story: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15319926/ns/business-bloomberg_businessweek/

2) Give an honest effort to think out and plan what your blog will be about. In order for people to read your blog, individuals must have an incentive to be there, whether you’re giving relationship advice or “how to’s” on cooking, you must give people a reason to read your posts. Be dedicated to your blog’s personality. Keep the “About” page up-to-date, pay close attention to categories, involve other bloggers and encourage others to give you feedback

3) Make your blog appealing to look at. Though the content of the blog is important, a good appearance is just as vital. A blog should be easy to navigate and include links, borders, pictures, videos, etc. Your blog should have its own personality, as it should differentiate itself from every other blog out there. According to the book, over 100,000 new blogs are created every day. It makes it all the more important to make your blog stick out (in a good way) from the rest. The following link is from NY Magazine. The article talks about 5 “must-see” blogs: http://nymag.com/news/media/15969/

If you look at each of the blogs, they all may seem different, but they all have a personality. Most importantly, they are easy to navigate and appealing to look at.

4) Make your blog findable and start building an audience. In order for this to happen, you must create links to your blog and promote it through different forms of social media. If you have a facebook or twitter account, it probably wouldn’t hurt to direct traffic into your blog using different social media sites. In order to build an audience for your blog, you must be able to cause awareness and get people’s attention. Be sure to use certain phrases or SEO in your blog to help promote your blog to top results via search engines. Another way to gather audience is to seek out other blogs and comment on them while attaching links to your blog. This has the potential to gather new and unique audiences.

5) Create meta-tags for blog posts. When people search blog websites for a particular subject, it is often hard for people to find what they are looking for because many blogs forget to add a meta-tag. The meta-tag allows bloggers to categorize what they write about. You are making your blog easier to find and give people the chance to seek you out. When people search for tags from your blog posts, your blog will be able to show up according to relevancy.