I'm Bob Artner for TechRepublic and today we're going totalk about effective professional blogging, and to be an effective professionalblogger, you have to avoid the mistakes of too many personal bloggers. What arethose mistakes? Well they bloviate. They're loud. They get into fights. They'reobnoxious. They call each other names or they try to be too cute and they gab.So that works in a personal blog, but in a professional blog, you're trying todo something more important. You're trying to put your best face forward and toexplain things and topics that you care about and have a certain expertiseabout.
So how can you be an effective professional blogger? Well,here's an acronym; think of candy, taffy and I think this will help. First ofall, have the right tone. A professional blog presumes a certain amount ofprofessionalism, so don't insult your audience and again the audience is thesecond part there. Who are you writing for? Too many bloggers, both personaland professional bloggers put too many of their posts involved with endlesslinks to other bloggers about topics that are relatively trivial. You want abroad audience who cares about the things that you care about, so remember thatyou have a broader audience in mind and not just your three or four buddiesthat also have blogs. That comes to the most important part I think which isfocus. You know, you can blog about anything, but the most effectiveprofessional blogs are concerned with the area of competence or expertise thatthe blogger has. If I'm at public relations, I should do a blog about my job inpublic relations and some of the clients I work with and some of the campaignsI've been involved with. People aren't coming to hear about my vacation or thefact that my daughter was sick although they might be interested about that.They are coming because of my insights into my professional career, so rememberyour focus.
What else? Frequency. A blog by its very nature impliesregular contributions. This doesn't mean you have to post 10 or 12 times a day.Quite frankly, I don't see how people who do that can actually do their jobs,but it does mean you're posting more than once a month. If you're posting oncea month you're not writing a blog, you're running a website that's just notupdated very frequently.
And what about this last one? Well, be yourself, and I knowI said earlier on the personal side that you want to not bloviate or be loud orobnoxious or gabby. It's all true, but you do want to be yourself. You do wantsome of your personalities to shine through. More importantly, you don't wantto appear artificial because that's death to an effective blog.
