Blogging Panel Discussion - more questions

Here's a few more potential questions (and answers) from the New England Direct Marketing Association Dinner on Jan 19th (tonight!) in Waltham Mass. Everyone is invited. Hope to see several of you there, and I'm sure I'll have some surprise questions too!

How can an organization build an audience for its blog?

There are lots of techniques and I’ll only mention a few:

• Write great material – this should be obvious! You want visitors to become regular readers.
• Don’t hide your blog. Have a prominent link from the Website, include it in your email signature, add it to your letterhead and business cards, etc.
• Make your blog search engines friendly – they send blogs a lot of traffic. The most important thing is to have post titles that are descriptive and contain lots of keywords. For example, if you’re writing about Saturn and Mars, use “Saturn” and “Mars” in your title. Don’t use a cute title like “Round things that circle the Sun.”

How much time and money does it take to blog? What skill sets are required?

It doesn’t take any money to blog as there are free solutions available like Blogger.com and inexpensive solutions like Typepad. One of the most popular blogging packages, WordPress, is even open source.

It doesn’t have to take much time as information a blogger is researching anyway can be used for a blog post and lots of material that’s being already written can be slightly rewritten and recycled, for example emails, reports, newletters, training material, presentations, etc. Conversely a lot of blog posts can be reused themselves. Blogging can be addictive though, and can take a lot of time.

Skills? You should know how to write well in an informal and personal style. No need to worry, the best practice is blogging. I've gotten MUCH better over the past year.

How do you think blogs will be used in the future?

The term blog will go away. It’ll be considered an anachronism like “power tie” or “Internet year.”

Web sites are starting to take on some features of blogs and blogs are starting to take on some features of Web sites. There won’t be a clear cut distinction between Web site and blog in the future.

Many blog readers don’t know or care if they are reading a blog or not, so why should anyone else?