Building a Business Blogging Strategy Around a Real Voice
A step-by-step plan for launching a company blog in 2006, from choosing who writes it to deciding how often to publish.
By 2006, enough companies had proven that blogging works as a business tool that “should we start one” isn’t the question anymore. The harder question is how to set one up without it turning into an abandoned page six months from now. Here’s a build order that avoids the most common false starts.
Step 1: Decide who writes it
The single biggest predictor of whether a business blog survives is whether a real person, someone with actual knowledge and a distinct voice, is writing it. Robert Scoble’s blog at Microsoft worked because it sounded like him, not like a press release. Before choosing a platform or a publishing schedule, pick the person or small group who will write, and make sure they want to do it. A blog assigned to whoever has spare time rarely lasts.
Step 2: Pick a platform that matches your resources
Six Apart’s Movable Type and TypePad remain solid choices for teams that want more design control, while WordPress, now three years old and maturing quickly, has become a favorite for its lower cost and active community of plugins and themes. Neither choice is wrong. The mistake is spending weeks evaluating platforms instead of picking a reasonable one and starting.
Step 3: Define what the blog is for before you write a single post
A blog aimed at prospective customers researching a purchase reads differently from one aimed at industry peers or press. Decide which audience you’re writing for first, because it shapes tone, topic selection and even how technical the writing can get. Trying to serve every audience at once usually means serving none of them well.
Step 4: Commit to a publishing rhythm you can sustain
GM’s FastLane Blog and Stonyfield Farm’s CE-Yo blog both succeeded in part because they kept showing up. A schedule of one solid post a week, sustained for months, beats a burst of five posts followed by silence. Set a cadence that fits your team’s actual capacity, not an aspirational one.
Step 5: Write toward real questions, not announcements
The posts that get read and linked are usually the ones that answer a specific question a customer or prospect has, not the ones announcing a product update. Keep a running list of questions your sales team, support team or customers ask repeatedly, and let that list drive your topics.
Step 6: Let people respond, and respond back
A blog with comments turned off, or comments that never get a reply from the company, misses most of what makes the format work. Plan for someone to read and respond to comments, including critical ones. That back-and-forth is what separates a blog from a static brochure page.
Step 7: Give it real time before judging results
A new blog rarely shows momentum in the first month. Search engines need time to index and rank new content, and readers need repeated exposure before they start returning on their own. Give a new business blog at least a full quarter of consistent publishing before deciding whether the strategy is working, and judge it on whether the right people are finding and engaging with it, not on raw traffic alone.
Built this way, a business blog becomes less of a marketing campaign and more of a standing asset, one that keeps working for the company long after any individual post was written.
