Starter kit: how to blog for your company

Here are the quick links to my Blogger’s Style Guide. This is the ‘how-to’ that I give to my company bloggers when they start writing posts for their employer’s blog. It acts as a support document for those who know their subject well, but know little about blog writing or publishing in general.

The Blogger’s Style Guide

1. How is blogging different?
2. What readers like / ideas for your posts
3. How to structure long posts
4. Short or long?
5. What does SEO mean for writers?
6. Links are good!
7. Five tips on tone
8. Comments and feedback
9. Writing a good title
10. Don’t fall foul of your boss – or the law!

Blogger’s style guide: Don’t fall foul of your boss – or the law!

Whatever you are writing about – whether it’s offering niche expertise and explanation, an engaging anecdote on something that happened in your business this week, a review of a new product, etc – it is good to be aware that your post is going to be published and archived.

Which means it’s important to be aware of company blogging guidelines – even if you have a blog of your own where you might mention your employer.

Many companies have a Corporate Blogging Employee Policy, where you can read legal guidelines and best practice, so make sure you are given these or ask for a copy of them as they are there to help you blog.

As a quick guide

• be honest and transparent without revealing company secrets
• be accurate and attribute any quoted facts and figures back to the source
• be respectful of others and underline where your post represents your own view

Finally, one quick way to protect yourself and the company is this great advice (I’m not sure who said it first): ‘Never say anything you wouldn’t be happy to say in front of your mother or your bank manager.’

Happy blogging!

[FYI: Last year I wrote a Blogger’s Style Guide to help people in the organisations I was working for start writing posts and publishing them on the company blog. Many had never written anything beyond an email before but they did know their subject far better than I, so they just needed a good briefing in style, tone, structure and so on. This is that starter kit for company bloggers, consisting of  10 mini-posts in all.]