The B-plan

Hey guys, I was just wondering...

Do you write some kind of plan written on paper when you first intent to start a blog? Like what subjects, what categories, promotion strategies, what software, what plug-ins etc.

The fact I ask this is because blogs are huge nowadays, especially for business, maybe like a white paper 2.0 with social aspects and user input. I've recently signed myself in for a 5 day email course on white papers and found blogs to be actually very similar.

White papers basicly give a solution for a problem with some small hints leading to the product you sell. A blog to promote or to enhance your business is in fact nothing other than a shitload of very tiny white papers merged with user feedback and maybe stuff like technorati and del.icio.us integration. The users have the solution for their problem BUT you will be remembered as the guy with the solution and thus likely to get recommended if those tiny problems become to big to be handled themselves and results in selling your product, or at least people will refer others to you.

After coming to this conclusion I came to another one, my business NEEDS a blog. But how do you get started? AND keep rolling? You know like 80% of new start up companies quits within 5 years. For new blogs this is probably like 99,999999% who quit after 3 days. I've had 3 of those who fell in that 99,999999%. I believe this was all due improper marking my subjects and my 3rd grade style English. So what what do YOU guys think is the best way to get your blog rolling and keep yourself motivated to write more then 3 posts. Probably setting boundaries for your subjects is huge, but hard as I like 300 kind of things and my business has like 4-5 different divisions as well..should I split it all up into several blogs? I don't know you tell me, please..

Now that I'm thinking this would be a nice blog post. However writing for like 10 active highly targeted forum readers vs the one visitor on my blog will get me better feedback hopefully. That one visitor, by the way, is googlebot. Once a week.

Please all links to resources, advice, suggestions, post them down here.

Tom

[Yaro]

Hey Tom - your white paper to blogging analogy is right in some ways, there are similarities when you talk about business blogging and whitepapers but I think there are more differences than similarities. Your points are quite valid still regarding giving info for free with "hints" of the sales message. Anyway, that's not the point I want to make.

I think when it comes to blog planning it all depends how motivated you are. Some people need a plan, others don't. If you don't have a plan do you find yourself giving up too early? If so try making a plan and see if that works better for you. Personally I have an "inner compass" when it comes to blogging, not any set written down plans.

If you find yourself blogging for a few days and not getting any visitors and then giving up I suggest you look for additional ways to leverage the blog until it gets an audience. The problem is it can take months and months to get an audience especially if you don't write much good content. You need to treat the early days as an investment and if you can diversify that investment, for example use your blog articles for other purposes (whitepaper? Article marketing? e-Course?) then your purpose behind your blogging won't just be about getting an audience, you will also be building resources, which may motivate you more than just purely blogging (since having no one read your blog can be quite demotivational).

I realise I won't get any audience in the early days, which I'm not actually concerned about. My market, Holland, is very sucky when it comes to blogging so any amount of visitors other then 1 would be cool. I probably gonna write out some plan which will work better for me I hope and set some clear boundaries about subjects. Using my articles for other stuff seems to be a good tip to start with. Maybe using other content I write as blog posts would be a good option too. Hopefully my next attempt will last longer then 3 posts

[TimK]

Hi, Tom. I'd approach it like any other business project. Start by knowing what you want to accomplish, how to measure it, and when you'll know whether the project has succeeded.

For example, let's say you want at least 1000 unique visitors per month after 6 months of regular postings, and you want at least 5 new qualified prospects per month. So maybe you post at least once a week for 6 months (about 26 weeks). Each week you examine your logs and improve your content and layout to attract visitors and to get them to subscribe or return regularly. Maybe you discover some particular subject is a popular search target, so you write more on that subject. Or maybe you conclude that you're not providing real value to readers of your articles, so you shift the focus of your writing. Of course, even before you started the project, you allocated the resources to make all this possible. If you can meet your goal, you keep the blog going. Otherwise, you shut it down or at least reevaluate it.

Now, many people blog primarily for the love of it, hoping to make a little money on the side. This kind of a nuts-and-bolts approach won't give them what they want. But if you're really doing it to get more customers, or more business contacts, or whatever, you're using it as a marketing tool, and you should at least measure your results and keep the blog in perspective, comparing it with other marketing alternatives.

What do you think?

-TimK

Tim, thanks for your comment. I think I need to take a more carefull look at my analytics indeed and see how my posts perform before concentrating on quantity over quality.

Also spending some money will probably keep me motivated to not waste all those euro's I've spended on the blog. If you look at signal vs noise from 37signals you can see how well blogging to promote your business can turn out.

[TimK]

Hi, Tom. I know when I spent a little money--not a lot, but some--on my blog, that kept me focused. I started it as a weekly podcast in November 2005. Now, I've better determined what I want of it, and I'm doing two podcasts each week: a 30-minute Monday episode and a 5-minute Thursday episode, each with a different focus. Plus I'm blogging each day, just a short entry, but original and substantive. I'm still seeing only a few dozen full downloads per podcast episode and less than 100 unique visitors per day. But now that I believe I have something marketable, I'm hoping to grow the audience. I want the blog to pay its own third-party expenses by November, and by May I want the projections to show that possibility. Those are my goals.

Of course, even if it doesn't bring in enough money, I may still be able to make use of it, but it would fit in differently.

-TimK

[Yaro]

The important thing is to figure out what motivates you. The biggest problem for a lot of people is a narrow-minded focus based on emotion. Simply put if one bad day or bad "feeling" is enough to kill your blog project then you need to restructure your goals and more important change your mindset.

TimK could have been depressed after working hard to produce podcasts and then seeing only a couple dozen downloads that he decided to throw in the towel. But he didn't because he has long term objectives that he feels he is slowly moving closer to because he's measuring his results.

It's very easy to simply give up when you feel down because no one knows you, you don't make any money and you forget why you are blogging or podcasting in the first place. You can rise above that if you have goals and persistence to work towards those goals.

Ok I've just bought an ibook so I could write some articles in the train on my home to the university or on my way back. I've created a new blog/information site in dutch about ruby on rails. You can currently find it under Developonrails.nl lets see how I handle that