MORE AND MORE HIGHER ED institutions have started using blogs to engage prospective students or alums; inform current students, faculty, and staff ; promote events, and even communicate with project stakeholders. Blogs can be powerful channels for institutions, but it's not always the case.
There is a big problem with blogs: They are too easy to create. It takes only 30 seconds to set up a blog using Google's blogging platform, Blogger. No more is necessary to launch a blog with the free, hosted solution of the popular blogging software WordPress. No technical skills required.
Thanks to the user-friendliness of these applications, it has never been easier to set up a basic interactive website for geeks and nongeeks alike. That's also a problem. When you are going to spend countless hours on designing, programming, and setting up a web presence, having a well-thought plan isn't an option. When the whole process is shrunk to a few clicks, it's tempting to implement the technical solution first and then define the strategy.
That's why it's also so easy to miss what makes a great blog. While good blogs are made of many things-from original and frequently updated content to RSS feeds, among others-all great blogs share a single characteristic. They are reader-friendly. Readers are what make a great blog. This 10-step plan will help in designing, writing, and maintaining your first (or next) blog with that in mind.
1. GET STRATEGIC WITH TOPIC, AUDIENCE, AND GOALS.
Whether you have been charged to create and maintain a blog for your admissions office, your own team, or as a special project, adopt a basic strategic approach. Just take a piece of paper and write down the topic(s) of your blog, identify its main target audience(s), and define its goal(s). Do this before anything else. The choices you'll make at this stage will inform all your future decisions for your blog.
Put your blog on automatic pilot for search engine optimization.
2. GET TACTICAL WITH TONE, FREQUENCY, AND LENGTH.
Once you have defined the blog's strategic backbone, wait a bit more before playing with the available blogging platforms. Visitors might be impressed by the blog's design or widgets, but they won't become readers unless you offer engaging content. Now is the best time to define basic rules of engagement for your blog by answering the following questions: What will be the tone, the voice, of your blog? How often will you post? How long will your posts be?
3. SELECT YOUR BLOGGING PLATFORM WISELY.
Now it's time to play with the cool toys-the blogging applications. As the poster child of the Web 2.0 era, blogging software is user-friendly by design. However, it's wise to weigh in a few criteria before choosing a platform for your blog. First, talk to the professionals in charge of web servers on campus. The most popular blogging applications require a web server supporting PHP (a programming language) and MySQL (a database system). If the institution is a Windows shop, the free hosted solutions offered by Blogger, TypePad, and WordPress could be the way to go unless you choose to pay for a license of .NET based Community Server solution. Other important criteria include the available anti-spam features and the template customization options offered by the platform.
4. HELP READERS FIND POSTS EASILY.
If you build it, they will come, right? Not automatically, unless you make sure readers can find your content easily in search engines. Put your blog on automatic pilot, so it handles most of the search engine optimization work for you. By making the most out of the following built-in SEO elements of your blogging platform, you can ensure higher ranks in search engine results for your content: keyword-rich web address structure based on post titles for post permanent links-usually called permalinks; topical tags or categories; and internal search engine and category archives lists. If set properly, all these will help search engines crawl, index, and rank your content for its associated keywords.
Depending on your topics and goals, once the initial setup is completed, just focus on what you write, pick meaningful keyword-rich post titles, and assign the right categories. Your blogging platform will automatically take care of the rest.
