Blog Strategy, Step 1

Today I spoke with my company’s Marketing Director to talk through our blog strategy. He had some good ideas. His primary concerns were:

• How we could link strategically to “high value” organizations, which would then raise the value of our blog.
• How the blog could lead people back to our Web site.

We decided to focus on finding blogs that we think our primary customers will be reading. To start, we’ll follow those blogs and leave comments. That will give us a good background to begin building our own “high value” blog.

In a couple of days, I will have the same conversation with the rector and adult studies director at my church. As I think through these blog strategies, here are the questions I am asking:

• What is the purpose of this blog? What will it do for the organization?
• Who is the audience for this blog? And what will they see as its benefits? What will keep them coming back?
• Should this be a public or private blog?
• How often should posts be published?
• Who should be responsible for publishing posts? Should we have a single author for a consistent voice? Or multiple authors?
• What topics will we focus on?
• What will be the sources for our content?
• What are our editorial guidelines?
• What is the “personality” of our blog?
• Based on the “personality,” what should our blog look like?
• What other tools do we want to provide to our visitors (polls, links, gadgets)?
• How will we describe our blog to visitors?

I’ve begun to answer these questions for both my company and my church. And the answers are very different–which tells me I’m probably on the right track of honing in on what’s important in designing a blog strategy.