How to get started with a company blog

“blog is a web-based journal. A personal (ed – company) website. It's that simple”… quote from LEARNINGNC

I suggest you read their piece as it provides a nice description of blogs and their use.

For a more erudite consideration on the blogging also visit Blogs@Anywhere: High fidelity online communication.

For a very bloggish read consult the Wikipedia entry on blogs where they describe them as:

“A weblog, which is usually shortened to blog, is a website where regular entries are made (such as in a journal or diary) and presented in reverse chronological order. Blogs often offer commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. Most blogs are primarily textual although many focus on photographs, videos or audio”

 Setting up a blog – first considerations

Technically, setting up a blog is very simple these days and a basic blog can be up and running in minutes using some of the commercially hosted solutions such as Typepad. But first things first.  Before you start spend  few minutes to think about the exact purpose of your blog, what you want to achieve, the subjects you want to cover and the audience (current clients and potential clients, key influencer s) you want to address.

Its worth also thinking about who will have access to the blog – all companies employees or only certain key people as the main blog contributors and are there going to be any company policies or rules about what bloggers in your organisation are going to say.  If you decide to moderate your blogs then you may in fact be defeating the very purpose for which you are establishing it in the first place.  

Once you have these issues clear, consider a unique name for your blog and along with this a blog domain name address. Most blog sites generate rather cryptic blog URL addresses and tying your blog name in with your own specific domain name adds punch, clarity and a degree of professionalism to your endeavour.

Setting up the site

There are numerous options for blog hosting such as the free service provided by Google which host the blogger platform to that provided by Typepad. If you want to host your own blog on your own server Typepad also provides Moveable Type or you can use Wordpress.  However I would recommend to get stated in using Typepad.

Setting up the initial blog takes a few minutes and you can opt to pay monthly or yearly. Once this is done redirect your own chosen blog URL to the one provided by Typepad.  The site setup is intuitive so go go ahead and play and create your first blog.

Distributing your blog posts to the world

"RSS brings the Web to you, rather than you having to go out and find things on the Web,"  (see)

Blog readers primarily get their updates to blogs they follow through subscribing to them using the RSS feed on the blog site and a news or blog aggregator. This same technology is used to capture podcasts but more on that in another post. All bogs have built in RSS feeds so people can subscribe. Its a critical component in the technology but you don't have to know too much about it other than to make sure it works.

The next thing to do is to check the RSS feed of your blog. To quote from Wikipedia an RSS feed is:

“RSS is a family of web feed formats, specified in XML and used for Web syndication. RSS is used by (among other things) news websites, weblogs and podcasting. The abbreviation is variously used to refer to the following standards:

  • Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)
  • Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0)
  • RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0)

Web feeds provide web content or summaries of web content together with links to the full versions of the content, and other metadata. RSS, in particular, delivers this information as an XML file called an RSS feed, webfeed, RSS stream, or RSS channel. In addition to facilitating syndication, web feeds allow a website's frequent readers to track updates on the site using an aggregator.”

You can do this by making a sample entry in the blog and then checking your RSS aggregator that the feed has promulgated. An aggregator is:

“An aggregator or news aggregator is a type of software that retrieves syndicated Web content that is supplied in the form of a web feed (RSS, Atom and other XML formats), and that are published by weblogs, podcasts, vlogs, and mainstream mass media websites.” (From Wikipedia).

Aggregators come in various forms, I use FeedDemon but there are many free ones also. Note:

“Aggregator features are gradually being built into portal sites such as My Yahoo! and Google; Web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Opera; e-mail programs like Mozilla Thunderbird; and other applications, including Apple's iTunes, which serves as a podcast aggregator.” (From Wikipedia).

Thats it. You can work on developing and enhancing your blog and when you are ready its time to really promote it on the web but that is for another post.  Happy blogging.

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