BTZ's insider's guide to Blogging - part 1

Introduction - get blogging!

When I started writing this blog back in October it was triggered by conversations I'd been having with Dennis Howlett, along with the realisation that roughly 80,000 new blogs are created each day, and that Blogs mean Business.  Here is a wave you need to catch!  I firmly believe you should consider starting a blog today, but more importantly you need to understand how this phenomenon is changing the world's of media, marketing and in turn business in general.  For any organisation on a tight marketing budget (which is most!) it can be an asset to your guerrilla marketing plans providing you avoid certain mistakes, get the right advice, and recognise that you are starting something which will need constant and consistent effort to make it successful.

There are plenty of resources you can access or books to read on the topic.  For example, two of blogging's leading lights Robert Scoble and Shel Israel have just written "Naked Conversations : How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers". 

Over the next few days and weeks I intend to be posting a series of articles on the topic, and pointing you towards some of the better resources there are on the web to help you out.  One of the choices you'll need to make is which platform do you start on.  This blog is currently powered by Blogger, which is great free service and as good a place to start as any.  However, if you are serious about blogging, you'll soon outgrow it and want to change to something more powerful.  I'll be journaling my thoughts on this, the decision process I'm just going through on which platform to choose, and then how painful or easy the process of conversion is for me and my site.  I hope to have moved on to a different platform well before the end of January, but we will see.

I know that just talking about this post has already triggered one of my blogging chums to write a piece on the issues around taking on blogging for your company.  One of the beauties of this medium is the way the conversations can interconnect to add value to the message you are trying to communicate.  If you haven't researched this topic already, put some time aside this week to find out more.

Update: For the rest of the series, you'll find them at Part 2 - why and ROI, Part 3 - platform selection, and Part 4 - key lessons and SEO.

Technorati Tags : blogs, blogging, Blogger, Robert Scoble, Shel Israel, AccManPro, marketing, Business 2.0

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