The New “Business & Blogging” Manifesto

Okay, gather ’round kiddies. Let’s define what we believe to be true about blogging for business. This is not a comprehensive list, but I believe it covers the basics and gives us a solid starting point for the journey we’re about to embark upon. So, without further ado…

1. Have something worth saying.
Above all, your blog is a conversation. If you don’t have something worth saying that will engage your readers, you aren’t likely to develop much of an audience. The number of blogs out there competing for attention topped 100 million back in July. What you’re saying better matter to someone, or you’re simply blogging for your own benefit. And that doesn’t make good business sense.

2. A blog is versatile…except when it’s not.
The swiss army knife is an incredible tool. Some of them have more than 100 different functions, all of which work with the fabled Swiss precision. Still, you can’t use the knife, screwdriver, corkscrew and can opener all at the same time. At best, it will get unweildy. At worst, someone’s going to get hurt.

Likewise, your a blog can serve dozens of different functions, from internal communications to lead generation to online sales. But not all at once. Pick a function for your blog and stick with it. If you have another function, start a new blog.

3. Your blog is a beacon, not a spotlight.
This is a point I feel I’ll cover a great deal here: No one cares about you. Not to hurt your self esteem or anything, but people are too busy putting out their own fires to concern themselves with what you think or feel or want to sell them. So, your blog better not be about you.

It should be about them. Their problems, their hopes, their concerns, their input. And then you can ease yourself in as the solution they’re looking for.

4. Know your audience, and act like it.
If you’re writing for an audience, it helps to know something about it. What do they want, need, fear, expect? And don’t bother writing posts about you created to SOUND like it’s about them. They’ll see through it and you won’t realize they’re gone until it’s too late. Know them, understand what drives them, and give them useful solid info the help them with their problems whenever it makes sense.

5. The best promotion is word of mouth.
Be unique, engaging and genuine, and you’ll resonate with someone. And they’ll tell someone else about it and word will spread that you have a blog worth reading. So the single most important thing you can do to promote your blog is to create content that is worth sharing with others. A large part of this blog will be devoted to doing this while still serving the needs of your business.

6. #5 notwithstanding…make your blog easy to find.
Once you have great content, you can shift your focus to making that content easy to find. And you do that by building backlinks to your blog. Blog comments. Guest posts. Dig and Technorati. Article PR. Traditional PR. Squidoo lenses. Maybe even PPC ads, if it makes sense for you. On second thought, don’t make your blog easy to find. Make it hard to miss.

7. Choose the platform that best suits your needs.
It could be that something simple like Blogger will suit you needs. If you need a little more control, go with WordPress via Typepad or Wordpress.com. If you’re a power user, a hosted WordPress platform that you can customize to ridiculously minute degrees might be in order. Or, if you need a total e-commerce and CMS solution, maybe you need something like Drupal or Joomla.

Figure out what you need before you start and you’ll save yourself quite a few headaches down the road.

8. If it’s not essential, it’s clutter.
It’s easy to get seduced by the variety of widgets and plug-ins and other add-ons possible with your blog. But each item you add is going to be a distraction from the main point of your blog: the conversation. Keep it simple. If an item isn’t essential to improving the conversation at the heart of your blog, leave it off.

9. Do whatever it takes to get it right.
In a perfect world, you’ll write every post, respond to every comment and answer every email. But the world being what it is, if you’re blog takes off, that could take up all of your free time. And there’s the possibility that maybe you’re not the best writer, or the most engaging conversationalist.

Under such circumstances, your best bet is to delegate some or all of these responsibilities to someone who is willing and able to get it done and get it done right. There’s no shame in bringing in outside help. You don’t repair your own heat pump. You don’t make your own office supplies. If it makes sense to let someone else blog for you, then do it.

10. You can start the conversation, but you can’t control it.
The most frightening thing for most businesses about blogs is the fact that a conversation requires at least two people. And you can only control one of those people. What will all those other people say???

But the benefits outweigh the risks nine times out of ten. Most of the time, you’ll get comments and questions that will lead you to better products or processes or marketing angles. And in those instances when the feedback isn’t so great…maybe you need to listen to them the most. Because for every one person who complains, there are five or ten or a hundred who simply gave up on you.

Well, there you have it. The B&B Manifesto v1.0. Am I wrong? Did I forget anything important?