Transcript: Effective Professional Blogging

Description: TechRepublic VP Bob Artner explains what it takes to be an effective professional blogger. He advises avoiding the mistakes of many personal blogs, which he says Bloviate and are Loud, Obnoxious and Gabby.

I'm Bob Artner for TechRepublic and today we're going to talk about effective professional blogging, and to be an effective professional blogger, you have to avoid the mistakes of too many personal bloggers. What are those mistakes? Well they bloviate. They're loud. They get into fights. They're obnoxious. 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 to do something more important. You're trying to put your best face forward and to explain things and topics that you care about and have a certain expertise about.

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 of all, have the right tone. A professional blog presumes a certain amount of professionalism, so don't insult your audience and again the audience is the second part there. Who are you writing for? Too many bloggers, both personal and professional bloggers put too many of their posts involved with endless links to other bloggers about topics that are relatively trivial. You want a broad audience who cares about the things that you care about, so remember that you have a broader audience in mind and not just your three or four buddies that also have blogs. That comes to the most important part I think which is focus. You know, you can blog about anything, but the most effective professional blogs are concerned with the area of competence or expertise that the blogger has. If I'm at public relations, I should do a blog about my job in public relations and some of the clients I work with and some of the campaigns I've been involved with. People aren't coming to hear about my vacation or the fact that my daughter was sick although they might be interested about that. They are coming because of my insights into my professional career, so remember your focus.

What else? Frequency. A blog by its very nature implies regular 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 once a month you're not writing a blog, you're running a website that's just not updated very frequently.

And what about this last one? Well, be yourself, and I know I said earlier on the personal side that you want to not bloviate or be loud or obnoxious or gabby. It's all true, but you do want to be yourself. You do want some of your personalities to shine through. More importantly, you don't want to appear artificial because that's death to an effective blog.

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