Several years ago I had an important email on a dull subject that my team needed to read. I put ‘Free Beer’ in the title line and everyone opened it.  First rule of effective blogging – the eye catching or intriguing headline.

Blogging is all about being noticed, so strong headlines and openings are essential.

Blogging is also about enlightening your audience.  To do this you must be writing about something they are interested in, and do so in an informal and engaging way.  Subjects should be relevant to what you do as a business – but look at them from an angle that is interesting and useful for your target audience, rather than yourself.

Why have a blog?

The point of blogging is to maintain contact with your network; building your reputation as being knowledgeable and helpful, and not necessarily somebody who is trying to sell something every time they hear from you.  But if you write about things that people don’t find helpful, or things which bear no relation to what you do, people will not see the point of it.

Good blog posts tend to be brief and focused.  Don’t try to introduce too many topics into a single post – one is usually plenty.  If you find you are writing a post that is getting long and complicated, think about whether it should be two separate posts.  This will help you with the next point: post frequently.

Effective blogging relies on regularity.  One post per week is much more effective than publishing four together at the end of the month.  Publishing a single post every few weeks is not likely to help you, or your network, very much at all.

How will people find your blog?

OK, so now you’ve written a fantastically entertaining and relevant blog post – how are people going to find it?  However good a blogger you are, people are not going to access your posts unless prompted.  Make full use of your social media channels such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to alert your network to the fact that you have published something new.

To build effective social media channels you need to… Oh, that’s a subject for another blog post.  A monthly email rounding up your most recent posts with hyper-links to them is an effective way to keep in touch with your network and keep you in their minds.

So for effective blogging remember to be Brief, Engaging, Enlightening and Regular. BEER, see – clever eh.

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