Using your imaginary companies from last week, talk about how you would incorporate a blog, adapting the Three-Step Process for Successful Blogging

The three-step writing process is easy to adapt to blogging tasks. The planning step is particularly important if you’re considering starting a blog, because you’re planning an entire communication channel, not just a single message. Pay close attention to your audience, your purpose, and your scope:

Audience Except with team blogs and other efforts that have an obvious and well-defined audience, defining the target audience for a blog can be challenging. You want an audience large enough to justify the time you’ll be investing but narrow enough that you can provide a clear focus. For instance, if you work for a firm that develops computer games, would you focus your blog on “hardcore” players, the types who spend thousands of dollars on super-fast PCs optimized for video games, or would you broaden the reach to include all video games? The decision often comes down to business strategy.

Before you launch a blog, make sure you have a clear understanding of your target audience, the purpose of your blog, and the scope of subjects you plan to cover.

A business blog needs to have a business-related purpose that is important to your company and to your chosen audience. Moreover, the purpose has to “have legs”—that is, it needs to be something that can drive the blog’s content for months or years.

Defining the scope of your blog can be a bit tricky. You want to cover a subject area that is broad enough to offer discussion possibilities for months or years but narrow enough to have an identifiable focus. With a clear purpose in mind, you’ll have a better idea of how wide or narrow your subject can be.

Use a comfortable, personal writing style. Blog audiences don’t want to hear from your company; they want to hear from you. Bear in mind, though, that comfortable does not mean careless. Sloppy writing damages your credibility. Successful blog content also needs to be interesting, valuable to readers, and as brief as possible.49 In addition, although audiences expect you to be knowledgeable in the subject area your blog covers, you don’t need to know everything about a topic. If you don’t have all the information yourself, provide links to other blogs and websites that supply relevant information.

Write blog postings in a comfortable—but not careless—style.

Make sure you understand your employer’s blogging guidelines. IBM, for example, gives its employees 12 specific social computing guidelines, such as identifying their role as IBM employees if they are discussing matters related to the company and respecting intellectual property laws.

As with email subject lines, compelling headlines for blog posts are an essential tool to draw in readers. A headline needs to grab the reader’s attention in a split second by promising something useful, surprising, challenging, or otherwise different from what the reader already knows. Headlines should be as short as possible and suggest that the information in the post will be easy to read and use. “List” headlines that cut right to the heart of something readers care about, such as “Ten Reasons You Didn’t Get That Promotion” or “Seven Ways to Save Money with Your Smartphone,” is particularly popular among bloggers.

Completing messages for your blog is usually quite easy. Evaluate the content and readability of your message, proofread to correct any errors, and post using your blogging system’s tools. Be sure to include one or more newsfeed options (often called RSS newsfeeds) so that your audience can automatically receive headlines and summaries of new blog posts. Whatever blogging system you are using can provide guidance on setting up newsfeeds.

Finally, make your material easier to find by tagging it with descriptive words. Your readers can then click on these “content labels” to find additional posts on those topics. Tags are usually displayed with each post, and they can also be grouped in a tag cloud display, which shows all the tags in use on your blog.