Say your blog is about real estate in your local community. A typical blog skimming post will read something like this:

I found this great post over in The Real Estate Blog called “When Will Real Estate Values Begin to Appreciate Again?” by Aubrey Clark. Aubrey claims that the current slump is forcing us to return to values held by our parents’ generation. In his opinion the cheap credit of the last decade actually devalued our homes by making it much too easy to get into home ownership.

As he says, “I cannot predict when the real estate market will bounce back, but I can tell you what needs to happen before it does. America needs to reinvest in herself by getting back to solid buying and selling principles.”

In other words, we need to start caring about the value we ourselves have invested in our homes, and less about how much we can make by flipping them.

This sounds like very sound advice to me.

Just make sure to give credit where credit is due. Give a direct link to the posts you are skimming. The other bloggers will very likely return the favor some day. And don’t just lift the content. Include a short summary, a quotation, a link to the original, and then add a comment or two of your own.

There’s no easier way to create really interesting and useful content for your blog.

The pitch was in the form of a blog post and the claim was that if I received less than 1000 visitors a day and 300 subscribers then I obviously needed help. One of the topics was “How to write posts that get comments.”

I had a closer look at the blog and I noticed that the very post that I was reading had only two comments.

So how can this be? If this person is using her own strategy and getting at least 1000 visits to her blog every day; and if she is applying her own strategies for generating comments how could a post have only two comments? Shouldn’t this post have hundreds of comments? It doesn’t make sense, does it?

Well, yes it does. Because she was obviously bending the truth. The 1000 visitors a day was just another figment of the fertile imagination of a “successful” internet marketer.

A blogger who I had come to respect as offering the occasional bit of useful advice and whose recommendations I had followed from time to time, had crossed the line and become just another snake oil salesman.

Be Truthful – The 1st Rule of Blogging

If you are considering creating a personal or corporate blog you should give some thought to developing your own “code of ethics”. I don’t mean to sound overly moralistic about this, but the fact is your blog will (or should) become your voice, your channel, and to a large degree the purveyor and shaper of your identity. So it is important that you think about how you intend to conduct yourself when shaping that identity.

As with all channels of communication your first commitment should be to honesty and sincerity. That means there is very little room for exaggeration and misrepresentation – no matter how badly you want to sell your products.

If you intend to do serious blogging aimed at developing a loyal readership who trust what you say to be an accurate reflection of what you really believe, then resist the temptation to exaggerate or make misleading claims.

But I find it is very easy to lose track of what I’m doing if I don’t have a clear plan. There’s a great temptation to start going off on tangents in response to the hot topic of the moment. Or, just as bad, I can get in a rut and just talk about the same things over and over again.

If you’re blog is about real estate investment, for example, you’ll find yourself tempted to spout the same “Five Rules for Smart Investing” over an over again in different words.

One effective technique for channeling your thoughts and encouraging yourself to cover a range of interesting and relevant material is to use what I call the C & C method – Categorize and Cycle. Here’s what I mean:

First, you choose a series of categories which you will try to write something about on a regular basis. And then you cycle through the categories.

Wordpress and other blogging platforms lend themselves very nicely to the idea of “categories”. In fact they almost force you into that approach. Choosing interesting categories gives you a way of organizing your blog, and organizing your thoughts too.

Let’s say you are a real estate agent. Your categories might be

- Buying Real Estate
- Selling Real Estate
- Real Estate Investing
- Local or Regional Information
- National Real Estate News or Trends

Or say you’re creating a blog about Golf. Your categories might be

- Golf swing tips
- Golf travel destinations
- Golf course reviews
- Golf equipment reviews

This might be too broad. You might want to focus on just one of these areas, say, “Golf Swing Tips”:

- Putting tips
- Driving tips
- Bunker tips
- Short game tips

You may be temtped to go too narrow or too broad. Try to settle on a range of categories that cover what you think your target market will be interested in, and which will reinforce the “brand” identification you have selected.

For example, if you want to be known as the “golf swing tips guy”, then don’t get sidetracked talking about golf travel. Or on the other hand, if you want to become a resource for “golf travel”, then focus on that. And stay focused.

And don’t choose too many categories because you want to use them to help you decide what to write about. You want to write something about each of them on a regular basis. So four or five is probably good for starters.

Once you’ve chosen your categories it’s just a matter of “cycling” through them on a regular basis. Not only does this give you a much clearer idea of what to write about, but it also suggests a practical posting schedule.

For example, if you have five categories then you may want to write something about each of them every week. That would be five posts a week – not an unreasonable schedule if you want your blog to be taken seriously by your readers.

If you think coming up with interesting material to write about every day is way too difficult, then back it off to every other day. But before you draw that conclusion, read the suggestions I make in the next post where I disuss: “What to put in your posts and where to get the ideas.”

It’s not as difficult as you might think.

But it takes commitment to keep a blog going. Unlike a static website that you put up once and then only update from time to time, a blog requires constant attention in order to be effective.

And that requires a strategy. Sorry, but without an explicit strategy your blog will very likely fail. It will not accomplish what you set out to accomplish with it, and you personally will probably lose interest within a month or two.

1. Creating a ‘Brand’ With Your Blog

You need an objective for your blog, and I think the best one is to…

“Define and Enhance Your Corporate Brand”

That is a fancy way of saying use your blog to give your company a distinctive persona – what used to be called your “image”. Think about how you would like your public (customers, contacts, prospects, site visitors, etc.) to think about you.

For example, if you’re a real estate agent do you want people to think of you as

…the friendly guy
…the helpful guy
…the knowledgeable guy
…the smart guy
…the reliable guy
…the experienced guy
etc.

Do you want to reflect your area of specialization in what you do? For example, if you’re an internet marketer or online entrepreneur do you have a clearly defined area of specialization? Are you,

…the blogging girl
…the video girl
…the affiliate sales guru
…the list building expert
…the link building professional
…the SEO guy
…the creative web designer
…the clever copywriter

Whatever you choose, this should always (or almost always) be reflected somehow in all your blog posts. Each of your posts should clearly say “This is the voice of experience speaking when it comes to commercial real estate” or “Our web design is not only creative, but it will give you an edge when it comes to convincing people they should deal with you” or “I will work my tail off to make sure I get the best price for your home.”

Often the decision about the character or persona of your business has already been made for you. It is usually a reflection of your personal character and is simply the way you conduct your business.

But don’t assume your people know this. Make it explicit in how you promote yourself. In other words, turn your persona into a “brand”. Because of the personal nature of blogging, that makes your blog the perfect place to refine your brand.

Next up: Choosing Your Topics and Staying on Message.