Ways to Use A Business Blog

Virtual Handshake recently participated in the Beyond Blogs and Social Networks conference. Recent entries on their blog are filled with notes from the meetings. Readers will find many examples of businesses that have successfully embraced blogs. Business owners of all sizes should read their blog with great interest.

However, as I looked over their notes, there was one thing that I felt the speakers did not explicitly address: Blog as a Service (A Blog that Serves its Readers). With this small little blog of mine I have struggled with its purpose and function. What should I post? How should I post? How should I manage the feed? Should I display full posts or just snippets in my feed?

Since my site is a resource site, I decided that the blog would first, serve my readers and second, serve the rest of my website. I have wondered sometimes if businesses often focus on the second and fail on the first. So in the best interest of my readers I made the following desicions about my feed:

• The feed would include up to 25 posts, instead of the typical 10 on a lot of sites. I don’t want readers to miss anything. Especially for blogs that have a heavy amount of posting, a larger feed size may be necessary.
• The entire post would be displayed in the feed, not just a snippet. Snippets are intended to lure readers back to the website. There may be legitimate reasons: get them to click more, expose them to ads, expose them to offers. I have found the the feeds which simply display snippets don’t last long in my aggregator. I find it annoying I have to click another link to get to content (actually, it is VERY annoying). Often the snippet doesn’t even catch my attention to warrant another click (poor headline and first sentence writing). Offering the entire post within a feed makes it easier for readers.

Then how does one get them back to the website? My site has a blog and separate content articles. The content articles are not accessible via the feed. I have begun to incorporate links back to those content articles within blog posts. Example:

Found this cool link, etc. Want to know more about other cool links such as these? Check out my article on x and y.

Where x and y are links back to content on the website.

Some of the more savvy marketers may disagree with my approach. How one can go wrong with serving readers first? The feed will remain in their aggregator. They will read it. And as long as one is careful to refer back to additional content on the website (even previous posts), then readers can still get exposed to the rest of the website via the feed.

Realize there are two audiences, surfers and feed readers. Write for both. Write so that surfers want to add the feed. Write so that feed readers get back to the website on a regular basis.