9.2: Blogging

Ford Europe does it. Howard University’s business school does it. So does University of Maryland’s Psychology Department. And Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business. Plus the Washington Post, University of Vermont Larner College of Medicine, Boeing, Jennifer Fulwiler, Kathryn Whitaker, Hartwood Farm, Penske Transportation, Disney Parks and thousands more companies and individuals.

If you’re going to be in public relations, you need to know how to blog. And if you’re an individual, you need to know that blogging can launch your career or become a business.

And I’m going to tell you how.

First, though, I’m going to tell you what skills you absolutely, positively must have to be a successful blogger, whether you’re blogging for a company or for yourself:

• Writing that is grammatically correct and readable
• The ability to write for the web
• The courage to develop a strong point of view
• Willingness to position yourself or your organization as a subject matter expert
• Understanding the basics of search engine optimization
• Using a content management system
• Building and managing an online community

There are many benefits of blogging for business. Here are seven, developed by Hubspot:

• It helps drive people to your website, especially if your blog is part of your website.
• You can repurpose content for social media. Every time you create an article you create content that people can share on social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Pinterest.
• Your blog can generate new leads – new potential customers for your business. Every blog post is indexed by the search engines, and each post is a new opportunity to generate new leads. How? You add a lead-generating call to action to every blog post. Take a look at this home page for Bob Bly, a copywriter.

https://www.bly.com/

Notice in the second line at the bottom it says “just click here for a free estimate….” And in the upper right corner, in the yellow post-it note, “Need Great Copy? Click HERE Now!” Both of those are calls to action.

And take a look at these two religious broadcasters webpages. You’ll see a call to action, usually a free book.

https://www.wordonfire.org/about/bishop-robert-barron/

Joel Osteen Ministries

• It drives long-term results. The best business blogs answer the usual questions readers and customers have.
• Blogging helps with link building. Google considers 200 factors when ranking a site on its search engine result page. Many experts believe backlinks are the third most crucial factor in search engine optimization, and 41% say link building is the most challenging part of search optimization.
• It drives long-term results. An ad on television is gone in 30 seconds or less. So you have to run a lot of them to make an impression on a potential buyer’s mind. Newspapers are thrown away after a day or so, so the smartest newspaper advertisers buy the same position in the paper every day. Magazines last for a month or so. But blog posts can stay around forever. So six months, a year, two years someone may see your post again and choose to act on it.
• Blogging helps you share company news. Hire somebody new? Write a blog post about it. Have a new product? Write a blog post. Are you hosting an event? Get attention for the event through your blog. And link back to those posts through your various social media accounts as well as emails.

Yes, the benefits of having a blog are many for a business. But how about for an individual?

Let me share with you a story which at first blush seems totally unrelated to blogging. I grew up in Indianapolis, Ind. Around 1910, Indianapolis seemed to be about to rival Detroit for leadership in the American automobile industry. It was the home of the Stutz Bearcat, one of the classic car symbols of the 1920s. While the Detroit automakers focused on mass production of cars for the masses, the Indianapolis automakers specialized in hand-crafted machines for the wealthy. When the Great Depression came along, none of the Indianapolis automakers had a market for hand-crafted luxury cars. Many of the upper class were barely hanging on, and those who were doing better than simply hanging on went out of their way to avoid ostentatious displays of wealth.

An individual considering starting a blog would be well advised to find a topic that has broad interest and appeal and which can also produce a number of “evergreen” posts. What’s an evergreen article or post? It’s one that is as valid five or 10 years from now as the post is today.

Abby Lawson was the mother of two toddlers whose house was perpetually in chaos and cluttered. One day she decided to do something about it. So she set about creating systems and habits that helped her family stay organized for good. And she decided to share those tips with others.

That sharing became a blog, “Just a Girl and Her Blog,” and later became known as “Abby Organizes.” In less than half a decade, it has become a full-time job for her and her husband. Not only does it cover organizing, but it also covers going paperless, decorating, and free printable calendar pages, binders, planner pages, goal setting sheets, party printables etc.

You’ll notice that except for fashion and cooking, “Abby Organizes” could just as easily be a women’s magazine. But how, you ask, does she make money? She is part of the Amazon Associates program and by hyperlinking products she mentions to their Amazon product listing she gets a small commission. Her audience is large enough that Amazon gets a lot of hits from products mentioned on her blog. And since her posts are evergreen, something she wrote five years ago might still be generating referrals.

Another way she makes money is through several courses. Her course on going paperless costs $149.

Kathryn Whitaker’s story is somewhat similar. She’s a mom of six, who began her blog in 2007. In 2009 she gave birth to a preemie, Luke. Around that time, she began her blog, Team Whitaker. After writing a book and doing some speaking, she renamed her blog Kathryn Whitaker. It has posts on her kids, party planning, organizing, travel, birthday parties, preemies, hospitality, and her book.

And her blog made her a name and that got her started speaking.

Her blog also provided the foundation for her book, both in terms of content and equally importantly in terms of an audience. It’s a safe bet many of her blog readers bought her book. She too monetizes her blog. Some of her posts are sponsored, and she’s an Etsy affiliate and, I presume, an Amazon affiliate, so you click on a link, buy something and she gets a few pennies. Kathryn Whitaker’s blog is also a Mom blog.

I saved the most dramatic career development story for last. Jennifer Fulwiler’s blog got her a book contract, made her a radio host, and turned her into a standup comic.

Jennifer Fulwiler was raised an atheist in Texas. One night, after she got married and had a baby, she was standing on the balcony of her 28^th floor apartment overlooking the Texas State Capitol and the University of Texas, She looked at her baby, she says, and thought, “It’s all a lie. Everything I’ve been told is a lie. There’s no way this baby is the result of some accidental meeting of a couple of things floating around in the universe.”

And with that she began a desperate search to find out which of the world’s religions was true. Naturally, as an atheist, she knew nothing at all about religion so she had lots of questions, and every day it seemed, there were more questions. So she did what any college-trained computer geek would do – she started a blog. On her blog she would post a question and people sent answers. Over time, she started telling funny stories about her life on that blog, which by now she had named “Conversion Diary.”

Her blog drew more and more readers and she expanded it beyond simply dealing with her conversion. She was asked to give talks about her conversion at parishes in the area. They were pretty good, which led to invitations to give talks at regional meetings, where the meeting planner always assumed she had a fee to come speak. So now she was a professional public speaker.

Those regional talks led to two more things. First, she began to be asked to talk at national conference. And she was invited to be a guest and then hosting while a talk show host on Sirius XM radio took vacation. When that was over, she was offered her own 2-hours-a-day program on Sirius XM. So now she was not only a blogger and professional speaker, but also a professional radio host.

This gave her what is called a “platform.” Book publishers love people with big followings because that almost guarantees a book will have decent sales. So, about the same time that she began giving talks to national meetings with perhaps 17,000 people in attendance, she became a professional author. She since has written two more books.

With five years of broadcasting under her belt, she decided to be a stand-up comic. She wrote her own lines and rehearsed and rehearsed. She quit her job at SiriusXM just as Covid-19 struck the U.S. and her tour was put on hold for a couple of years. So she started a weekly podcast to keep in touch with her fans. When Covid restrictions were lifted, she began her tour. So now, she’s a professional stand-up comic—one of only 296 in the U.S., blogger, book author and speaker.

Quality is Essential

If you’re going to blog, you have to do so regularly – whether you are writing a blog for a corporation or you’re writing one for yourself. Don’t try to be overly ambitious: Plan initially on just one post a month, or every two weeks before you try a weekly or daily schedule. Smart bloggers use a calendar to make sure they have their posts planned several weeks in advance. You should too –regardless of whether you’re writing for yourself or a company.

You have to be original in the thoughts shared and the writing style you use; This is where you speak in your own voice if you’re writing a personal blog. If you’re writing for a corporation, you want to speak in their voice. To put it simply, you don’t write as if you are the New York Times when you blog about hip-hop music.

Know what you intend for a reader to gain from a post. Make sure it is relevant for your readers.

Links. Nearly all blog posts have links. It’s best if you’re linking to coverage you published earlier, but it’s okay to also link to a few outside sources. Why hold back on links to outside sources? You want to keep you reader on your blog for as long as possible.

Photos, graphics or videos should be included if at all possible. Try to avoid using a photo by anyone other than yourself. You should assume everything is copyrighted and the penalty for copyright violations is steep. Don’t be afraid to use the camera in your smartphone.

And follow the editing rules I gave you in Section 2.3