Webifiable

In case you don’t know, I’m currently working on a book that’s tentatively titled Blogify Your Business. The book is a week-by-week guide to a business blogger’s first year of blogging. Whether you’re a business owner, or someone just put you in charge of blogging for your business, this blogging guide shows you weekly topics for your blog. It’s filled with examples, pointers and plenty of blogging topics!

Here’s the guide to week one. Note that this may change slightly before publication time.

Your Introduction

Lucky for you, this first blog post is actually relatively easy. You’ll just be getting your feet wet.

In this first entry, simply introduce yourself. Let your readers know who you are and what you’re all about. Give them some basic background information and how you got into the industry you’re in. But make sure you balance that with information about your company, and the services or products you offer.

If your blog is going to establish your expertise in your field, you’ll want to talk more about your personal background as it relates to your field. If the goal of your blog is instead to educate potential customers, you may want to talk more about how you enjoy helping and educating others. If the goal of your blog is to establish relationships with others, you’ll want to talk about some relationships you’ve already had with professionals.

In other words, you’ll need to know your blog’s goal. Because from this point forward, you need to keep that goal in mind every time you write a blog post.

And don’t fret if your blog has multiple goals. If you’re like most bloggers, you want to establish yourself as an expert and establish relationships with others. And naturally, everyone with a business blog is expecting to, at some point, make money directly or (more likely) indirectly from writing weekly entries.

But every week that you’re writing, remember those goals. And this first week, balance the parts of your introduction as needed to accomplish your goals.

Oh, and make sure you include an illustration of some sort in each blog entry. The best illustrations are unique to your website. You can take photos or create illustrations on the computer yourself, or you can have a photographer in for an hour or so to take a bunch of photos for you.

In cases where that won’t work for some reason or another, you should consider getting stock images. There are inexpensive ones available on sites like istockphoto.com, and even free ones available on websites like www.sxc.hu and www.morguefile.com.

Remember, images you find through search engines are probably copyrighted. Simply pulling an image off Google Image search results is highly risky, legally speaking. And as a business, you’re much more likely to see legal action taken against you than someone using such an image for personal use. So play it safe, and use your own photos or legal stock images.

Since this is your first blog entry, have some other people read it before you post it. Send it out to family, friends and coworkers. Ask them if they can take a look, then answer the following three questions:

1. Do you see any mistakes?
2. Is the blog entry boring? (If so, any suggestions for making it more interesting?)
3. Any advice you can give a new blogger?

Once you do finally post the blog entry, be sure to let all your proof-readers know by sending them a link. You can also feel free to beg them to comment. I wouldn’t suggest begging in the actual blog entry, but since you already trusted these guys enough to get their feedback, feel free to ask them in the email.