Sabrina Dent: Freelance web designer, developer and internet marketer living in Cork, Ireland with one dog and a husband in no particular order.
The Trainers Have Been Trained
I spent the afternoon at the fairly wild and fabulous Cork Airport Hotel (pictures) taking part in Damien Mulley’s very generous Train the Trainers event. This day was interesting in a lot of ways, but for me a very valuable part was listening to and taking part in the back and forth conversations about content. It helped me to formalise some of my thoughts about the process of blogging.
Basically, I think there are two approaches one can take when blogging as part of a business communications strategy, both to engage readers and attract links:
1) Be a Resource
Ice Cream Ireland and Tast.ie are examples of this kind of blog. While both Kieran Murphy and Deb Hadley blog about their businesses and their experiences in ways that help keep the content varied and lively, if asked to sum up either of these sites most people would say “they’re recipe blogs.” They provide a very specific resource that helps them to pull a very specific audience.
Damien made the point that one of the most popular and link-tastic formats for resource posts is the Ten Step How To. People love this stuff; just look at all the inbound links and Twitter chatter on yesterday’s How To Demo Your Startup post at TechCrunch.
But you can’t produce that kind of post every day; it’s tremendously time consuming to create, which is why the successful blogs have that “varied and lively” content. More importantly, however, people take in a massive amount of information from scores of blogs each day. I suspect your average reader can manage maybe one or two “heavy” posts from across all of their sources in a given day. If your blog is always the blog with the big ask for time and attention, you will actually lose rather than win readers with your dense but awesome content.
2) Be Personal
This does not mean you need to share your ovulatory cycle with the internet. Rather, it means putting a lot of your personality, experiences and individuality into your blog posts. The best ways to do this are:
- Be funny.
- If you can’t be funny, be controversial or at least opinionated.
- If you can’t be opinionated, be intimate.
Again, intimate does not mean spilling your sex life online – and unless your profession is among the oldest in the world, this probably isn’t a great topic for a business blog anyway. But being intimate does mean giving readers a way to connect with you.
One of my favourite dislikeable people is Penelope Trunk of The Brazen Careerist. She gives excellent career advice, and if you skim through the entires in her blog, you’ll see that she almost always relates advice to experiences in her own life. Being fired, embellishing resumes, getting divorced – a continual litany of her personal failures peppers her instructions and lends a lot of authenticity to her posts. You learn a lot about managing your career, and a lot about Penelope.
Intimacy in this case is about the reveal, but it doesn’t have to be personal. Companies, and the individuals blogging for them, can tell stories, too – about the company, its employees, its relationships with outside vendors… all kinds of stuff.
Either way, the point is that a business blog is not about press releases, not about products, not about job vacancies. Can you name one blog you regularly read that’s about that stuff?
No, me either.
09 Aug 2008
| In: Ireland + Marketing + Technology |
Hi Sabrina – we’re planning to go live soon with our business blog and it’s nice to get a reminder what it should all be about. We hope our blog will be half funny, half intimate and half opinionated. (a 1.5 blog). I suppose you never know how it will turn out until you launch and post regularly. It may evolve in a completely different direction to what we envisage. That’s the exciting thing about it …
10.08.2008, 11:07 pmHey, thanks for the mention Missus. It was a good day for sure, always good to see you! Talk soon.
11.08.2008, 12:21 pmHey Sabrina
12.08.2008, 11:23 amGood to meet you. I thought it was a really good course also.
Thanks for your tips especially on header graphics
[...] got talking about quality posts at the training event on Saturday and Sabrina talks more about it on her post here. It does seem that blog readers in fact can’t handle an over-abundance of [...]
12.08.2008, 12:40 pmSounds interesting Sabrina – look forward to learning from the collaborating at some time soon…
We hope to launch a blog over the next few months and a course like this could be just the ticket to begin with anyway!!
12.08.2008, 12:45 pmYou make a very interesting point about the risk of having too many in depth and heavy articles. There are a couple of blogs I follow that seem to put huge amounts of effort into creating detailed and probably very valuable posts. It’s a pity I don’t always read them.
I can’t face reading detailed posts all the time and I’m sure I’m not alone. I tend to have a backlog of “good intentions” where I plan to read them someday but never get around to it.
Keith
12.08.2008, 5:58 pmIt’s exciting to see how many businesses in Ireland are looking at launching blogs in the next few months. That’s really cool.
Blogs are evolving things and it can take some time to find your voice and your content, too. The right balance is hard to find and different people have different comfort zones, too.
Vicki, there will be a course, I just need to survive through September and I’ll get there!
[...] who attended the Train the Trainers course in August agreed to offer their own free class in turn, and I’m fulfilling my promise [...]
21.11.2008, 8:09 pm