It should be noted that design is more than just the look of the site. The site’s feel, that is how it navigates and the overall theme need to be considered as well. These concepts were discussed by Bob Dunn at BlogWorld under the guise of how to keep from losing subscribers, which should give you an idea of how important design is in relation to your blog’s success.

One of Dunn’s first talking points concerned the blog’s header. Use graphics. Use images. Use pictures. Use something that speaks to your audience and relays the message of what your blog’s trying to accomplish. Most importantly, make your blog header your brand.

Navigation is another aspect to play close attention to. If visitors can’t get around your site in an intuitive manner, they be visiting for very long. Some suggestions include drop down menus, although, don’t make these too convoluted. The longer it takes for a visitor to find what they are looking for, they won’t be a visitor for very long. Use categories in your drop downs, Dunn offers these thoughts, “Catagories are like chapters in a box. Tags are like the index.”

Tag clouds and bottom-page navigation is something to pay attention to as well. Bottom-page navigation, which can include various links for contact pages, return to top commands, categories, and the homepage, just to name a few. Dunn also suggests the bottom-page navigational links are also search engine-friendly.

In regards to sidebar navigation, it’s important to avoid redundancy. Be creative and offer your visitors choices of interest, not just links back to the index page.

RSS feeds and contact pages are additional design elements to keep in consideration. Syndicate your content, which gives your audience an easier way to access it. RSS readers are still an important part of the web user cycle, so don’t ignore it. The same is true for a contact page. While this may seem like common sense, clearly enough people ignore this aspect that Dunn can still discuss it in his session. If you visitors can’t get in touch with you, then they probably won’t visitor much anymore, and it’s a pretty sure bet they won’t spend money on products you offer.

Moderate the blog comments, especially if your trying to attract a diverse audience. Visible spam comments in a good blog post take away from the quality of the content at an exponential degree. Captchas help prevent bots from ripping your comment stream apart, and if you’re using WordPress, the Akismet plugin is an essential accessory if you’re serious about fighting spam comments.

The content of the human comments should be considered as well. If your audience is comfortable with adult language, then you can be a little more liberal. If not, keep the comments at a PG-13, if not PG level.

Don’t forget your About You page either. Give the audience something to go on about their author. Share a little bit about yourself and the goal of your blog and the business its attached to. There’s nothing wrong with a straight forward approach. Your audience will appreciate the honesty.

For 5 years, WebProNews has partnered with BlogWorld and New Media Expo, the world’s first and largest new media conference, in an effort to broadcast how new media can grow your business, brand, and audience. Stay tuned to WebProNews for much more exclusive coverage.

IZEA, of PayPerPost fame, was one company who was forced to pay special attention to these guidelines, simply due to the nature of its business. CEO Ted Murphy seems pretty happy with the whole thing though. 

"It’s been a great thing for the industry," he tells WebProNews. "What the FTC guidelines really did was gave everybody a standardized rulebook to play by. So whether you’re giving people free TVs or hamburgers or you’re compensating them with cash, all marketers are required to do the same types of things in terms of disclosure and transparency."

"I think that’s a great thing, and we follow the – we call it social media sponsorship – kind of that whole space, whether it be cash or product, and it’s just exploding," he says. "I mean…everybody’s just trying to figure out how do they get their piece. I think now that the legal aspects – now that we have some clarification on that – now we can all charge forward and deliver great campaigns for advertisers, and help people that are doing social media finally make some money."

You may have noticed that disclosure, or at least more obvious disclosure seems to be much more prevalent on blogs these days. Though certainly the lack of disclosure will be less obvious anyway. Still, the guidelines would appear to have sunk in with many. 

"I think from the advertisers’ standpoint, they don’t want to get hit by some judgment from the FTC, and if their competitors see them doing things that aren’t on the up and up, you probably run the risk of being reported, so I think that it’s really the advertisers are driving awareness of that."

"But at the same time," Murphy adds. "We did a study just last quarter, and over sixty percent of marketers – people that are PR professionals – have never read the FTC guidelines. So there’s still a lot of room to grow there."

"But we’re getting there," he concludes. "You know, we had to get the rules out, and now it’s all about education."

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How strict are you when it comes to employee social media use? Have you taken the time to develop a social media policy? Guidelines for staff to follow? 

Deb Schultz, a partner with the Altimeter Group shared some advice on things to consider when crafting such guidelines in a recent interview with WebProNews. 

"One thing that’s really important to keep in mind is that this is all a very new exercise for large businesses or even medium-sized businesses," she tells us. "Companies traditionally deal very much in sort of ‘telling and selling’ and one-directional yelling – one to many. And really what the social web and social media is all about is an ongoing connection/dialogue/conversation. It’s a whole new way for companies to think about the role of the employee, their role in the marketplace, where they want to be, and so it’s very important for companies to think about what kind of connections do they want with their customers  - is it an ongoing one? Is it with all of their customers? Is it customer service-related? Is it product related?"

"Truthfully, at Altimeter, we don’t love to use the word ‘policy’ so much because it sounds very heavy and sort of legislative, and really it has to be about…" she adds. "Charlene [Li - founder of Altimeter Group] loves using the term sandbox covenants – I think about them as experiments, and it has to be fluid, so companies need to understand that the policy isn’t written in stone. It’s something that’s going to change over time."

The lines between personal and professional interactions are often blurred when it comes to social media. Even something as simple as a status update or a photo upload can be considered a representation of the brand, depending on the environment in which it is broadcast. For example, how public it is. 

"It has to be flexible," says Schultz. "It has to come from within the employees themselves and within the company and what works for the company, and it also has to understand that connecting and conversing with customers in a business context is very different than [in] a personal context in some regards because the motivations are different, but in other ways it’s really not. I mean the social web is about our human selves. It’s about being very real and transparent and open."

"It’s important for companies to realize also that since this world today – we’re all networked together – sort of weaving this global network of connections – understanding that…the relationship between company and employee and customer and employee is very porous," she adds. "So I might work for Altimeter and be a partner there, but I’m also Deb, and those walls are not as solid as they used to be, so that’s something that needs to go into it."

Part of being flexible is that there has to be room for growth and change. "The important thing is for them to realize that number one – it’s going to change," says Schultz. "Number two – it’s got to smart small. Number three is that it has to be very simple up front. It can have a lot of complexity behind it, but it has to be written in plain English. It’s got to be something that’s not just put on paper and thrown on the back of the website, but really discussed with employees, and allowed for a period of back and fourth dialogue around the issues, and most importantly – the best way to do a social media policy…is to use examples – case studies. For instance goes a long way."

"I always joke that companies are now in relationships with their customers, and relationships are ongoing, and every relationship is different," she says. "So examples, case studies – what does work – what we think is right – what we think isn’t right…doing this on your Facebook page/on your personal account vs. not. And the truth of the matter is, when I was at SixApart, we used to joke that blogs don’t get people fired. People get people fired. Let’s not blame it on the technology. Just blame it on a good set of standards, practices, and behavior."

If employees are the ones that the policy is constructed for, it makes sense that they should be very familiar with it and, and understand the implications that come with it. For that reason, perhaps they should be heavily involved in the creation of the policy, whether that come from feedback, or a more proactive approach. 

"The one I always love to bring up is IBM because they’re one of the earliest ones who actually asked their employees to write their social media policy for them," notes Schultz. "So it was a blank slate, and they said, ‘Ok guys, what do you want the policy to be?’ and they’re a really large company, so that’s really indicative. If IBM can have an internal process then anybody can." 

"I love the way they do it, and it really depends on the company," she continues. "Zappos is a really personal company, so they allow employees to really be themselves no matter what way, shape or form they are…regulated industries have a whole different issue. If you’re in the pharmaceutical industry or if you’re in the financial services industry, you probably have to be a little more cautious and careful about how you think about the role of employees and going out."

"And you also have to understand the way your company is organized," she adds. "So is it a very top-down company, very decentralized? Those are some of the things that I think about."

What are some of the things you think about? Do you give it enough thought at all? Share your opinions with us. 

Related: How SHOULD Employees Use Social Media?

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Blogging may seem like it’s designed for making easy money, but the truth is, it’s not that easy at all. It requires time and focus, and it takes the right combination and approach to successfully bring in the dollars. 

WebProNews recently spoke with Anita Campbell, founder, CEO, and editor of Small Business Trends, who shared some tips for successfully monetizing your blog. 

Be Clear About Your Blog’s Goals

On what people are doing wrong, Campbell tells us, "I think mixing montetization styles and monetization goals is one of the key things that I see…If you were using a blog to generate leads for consulting, it’s probably not wise to plaster a lot of ads onto your blog because it’s going to take away from you and your consulting as being center-place, and that’s what you want to have being in center-place."

"Have a clear idea of what it is that you’re trying to actually sell or promote with a blog from a business perspective," she adds.

While making money with advertising may be your goal (and it is possible), a better option might be to sell some product or service that is an extension of the content that your provide. Brian Clark of Copyblogger recently elaborated on this in an interview with WebPronews. 

"I think it actually is a challenge," says Campbell. "It takes a while to build up traffic to a blog. It takes a while to build up brand recognition and visibility. I think that one of the key things I see is people try too early to monetize. You can’t start a blog and expect that tomorrow you’re going to make a lot of money from a blog. It takes time. It took me a couple of years before things really started to click into place."

Would You Do Better with a Team?

"When it originally started, I was the only one writing on the blog, but as I like to say today, it’s not my blog…I just supply the resources to make it happen…we have over a hundred contributors who have contributed on the blog," she says. "It’s really their platform, and you hear a variety of different voices. What that means is it’s no longer my voice, so therefore it’s not just me talking to the world, but I think it’s richer. It’s a richer vehicle because there are so many people contributing, and not all of the contributors necessarily agree on everything. One might write things one way and another writes things another way."

"But it’s that kind of differing voices and then you hear from the community that they disagree or they agree or they add to it, and it just makes the whole thing so much more powerful I think," she adds.

This is really the kind of thing readers need anyway – differing views. It’s better to have a more balanced picture of any set of information than it is to take one person’s word. It’s similar to why search results are in many cases becoming less effective without a human element or social experience. We discussed that here. Don’t underestimate the power of community. 

Give it Time (and Effort) to Happen

"Forget about being an overnight success," says Campbell. "There is no such thing in business. It takes everyone time, so don’t give up too easily. And you really have to work at getting visibility."

"We had a contribution on the site not too long ago about getting comfortable with self-promotion [by Lisa Barone], and in a way you have to do that, but you have to do it in a way that’s not offensive…that is a way that actually gives back to the community, but you do have to be comfortable with that," she adds. "You have to be comfortable getting out there in social media and reaching out to people and talking, and some people just aren’t naturally, so you’ve got to get over that."

Again…community.

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What is the difference between a blogger and a journalist? Is the guy labeled a journalist automatically more credible because of that label? How can a blogger attain that kind of credibility? 

WebProNews recently sat down with freelance journalist Greg Ferenstein, probably best known for his articles at Mashable. He talked about how to stick out in the crowd of bloggers and the fine line between blogging and journalism.  

Coming Up With Original Content

As you know, if you want readers, you have to have good content, and if you don’t produce really original content, you may have a hard time finding that audience. 

"At least in my case, I found a lot more people read my stuff when I did original investigations, so I was conducting interviews, looking at academic research, talking to people late at night about their new projects, so I could be the source of information all the other bloggers were talking about," Ferenstein told us. 

"As far as finding original sources, the thing that always helped me the most was first just being a networker – going to conferences, meeting people, developing personal relations… because ultimately, bloggers aren’t legacy media," he added. "They don’t have a big name behind them. So all of the people that they ask for things (interviews [and] stuff like that), they have to have a personal relationship with because they can’t guarantee the person who’s doing the interview that they’re going to get a lot of foot traffic."

Accounting for Short Attention Spans

Content is one thing, but it also helps to consider the audience themselves. Sometimes your good content may be lost to poor formatting or just lack of readability. 

"I always assume my reader has acute attention deficit disorder," Ferenstein tells us. "Everyone on the Internet is skimmers. They’re looking at Twitter feeds, Facebook, RSS, and a million different sites plus the 25 odd tabs they have going that they haven’t looked [at] in the past week. So I format my blogs with italics, bolds, pictures…to force the reader into what I think is most important for them. Because your reader is going to skim. They can skim in the way you want or they can skim the way they want. I choose to have the power over that."

Overcoming Skepticism

The problem with blogging is that there is a lot of skepticism tied to it. There is a good reason for this. Anyone can blog, so you have to earn the trust of the audience. 

"I always like to imagine that my reader doesn’t like me and doesn’t want to believe anything I’m saying," say Ferenstein. "So I have to uncover an enormous amount of evidence to convince anyone I possibly could…you can’t really attain that, but so long as you’re shooting for that, you’re going to develop and use a lot more evidence, and that will build your credibility."

Of course personal bias is always creeping through the blogging shadows. "Psychologically, people have a proclivity for seeing what they want to see, so you’ll see a bunch of facts, but depending on what your ideology is, you’re going to interpret that unknowingly and with the best of intentions, in the way you want to see it," Ferenstein explained. "And because bloggers don’t have editors, they are both judge and jury, so they’re more likely to pick up on the extreme interpretations of fact, and fulfill this heated kind of rhetoric that we see coming out of the online world."

"As bloggers, without an editor, you have to be extremely diligent in not doing that or you’re just going to be a part of the problem," he added.

Blogger? Journalist? What’s the difference?

That’s not to say there isn’t such a problem in traditional media, despite the presence of editors. 

"I think bloggers are the future," said Ferenstein. "I don’t really like the distinction between a blogger and a journalist. There are some horrible journalists, and there are some great bloggers, and they could probably swap positions and we wouldn’t know much of a difference. Good writing is good writing, and as more people come into the space, there’s going to be more opportunity for people outside the people with journalism degrees or with the typical pedigree or connections that used to get them into the legacy media organizations."

Because the landscape is so much broader, there’s going to be a lot more noise, he notes, so "You’re going to have to do something really unique to distinguish yourself."

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For those who are finding the greatest success in social media marketing, social media is just instinctually part of the mix. It’s not an afterthought, and it’s not a completely separate undertaking. It’s just part of how it’s done. 

Making It All Work Together

Few companies have illustrated this better than Ford. WebProNews spoke with the company’s head of social media, Scott Monty recently, who said, "There’s fundamentally much greater impact when we start to think about paid, earned, and owned media all working together." 

"Traditionally, advertising and PR and then social media have kind of stood on their own, and they each do their own function fairly well," Monty explained. "But when used in conjunction, there’s such a much more powerful momentum and aggregator behind that it absolutely makes a difference for us."

Monty talked about some of the things that Ford has specifically done to harness social media, including during the 2011 Ford Explorer reveal (more details in the video). 

"We were building up our online community…and doing it authentically, and we were giving people bits of information along the way, and then on the day of the launch we had an integrated program with online advertising, with broadcast, and social media, and a schedule of events throughout the day so people could choose when and where and how they wanted to engage with the content," said Monty.

"At the end of the day, we had an impact that was greater than a Super Bowl ad," he claimed. "We were the number 2 trend on Google for the day, and that morning, we were the number one trending topic on Twitter."

When Things Go Wrong

One of the many facets of a strong social media presence is the ability to help shape public opinion of your brand, and that means being prepared when things go wrong. 

"You have to have this ‘always on’ mentality," said Monty. "Being there and building credibility, quite frankly, because when a crisis breaks, whether it’s online or offline, there’s going to be chatter about it, and if you have a community of advocates that are out there and able to speak on your behalf (and I know we have lots of Ford fans out there), that helps us get our message out and really address the problem."

"Now at the same time, we still need to be front and center," he added. "And as in traditional crisis communications, make sure we have a plan in place, make sure we have the right team that handles this, because even if it breaks online (on Twitter or wherever), we need the whole team to actually participate, and to help get the message out."

Getting It

Social media’s not a new thing anymore. More companies are starting to understand its power and importance. 

"We’re seeing people starting to understand how it [social media] has to mature into the traditional – PR, advertising, digital advertising and social media all working together…customer service – it’s all coming together, and I wouldn’t be surprised if in a few years, there’s no longer such [a] thing as a standalone social media kind of thing. It’s just part of the way that we do integrated communications," said Monty.

"We’re starting to see our team think about social media early on in the process now, so it’s not just the ‘rubber stamp’ at the end of a process," he added. "We’ve got teams actually thinking about how we integrate social media into a real world event or how to integrate it into our next advertising campaign."

Granted, you probably don’t have Ford’s budget, but you can certainly learn from their practices. Your efforts don’t have to be on such a large scale to be effective. You’re only as big as your audience.

For more on how to orchestrate a mix of earned, paid, and owned media to increase clickthroughs and conversions, read this.

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"’Free is not a business model’. That was one of the seven "harsh realities" discussed in a recent keynote from CopyBlogger‘s Brian Clark, ProBlogger‘s Darren Rowse and Remarkable Communication‘s Sonia Simone. This was an hour-long discussion about what it takes to make money blogging and using social media. 

WebProNews spoke with Clark about this one "reality" in more detail. "These misconceptions get in the way of what is actually kind of simple," he says. "It’s not always easy, but it’s not that complicated. I think we get in our own way if we have this misunderstanding, so the first thing is, yes, you have to give away free content, but you have to understand why. You’re basically attracting people to you, and then you’re building kind of a relationship with them over time by giving them information, so they trust you, and they think you’re a smart person, and they like you most importantly. We like to do business with people we like."

"So, you have to ultimately have a way to make money beyond building those crucial things," he adds. "They’re crucial, but then you go, ok, so now I take that and I’m either going to be selling advertising, which can be harder than it looks because you need a lot of traffic. With smaller traffic you can sell services, consulting, products, software, even other information if you package it up right."

Things don’t always work out with the popular Silicon Valley "make money later" approach. "Some people are spurred forth by the success stories, and they don’t realize how many people crash and burn – fail totally. For every Twitter, there’s 4-5 thousand just broken-hearted losers. I mean that in the nicest way, but a better shot at things…if you want to make the next Twitter, and you want to take VC money, go for it. Great. But if you’re just trying to kind of make money…promote your business online, use content, use blogging…you have to know what you’re trying to accomplish, and just kind of be very strategic about it, and the strategy really comes down to ‘how can I give people something that they want that solves a problem – that makes them happy – that’s related to something else that I can ultimately sell."

"You just have to connect the dots, and it’s better to do that at earlier rather than later," he adds. "You don’t have to know exactly what you’re gonna do, but have a general idea of the ballpark of things these people are interested in."

But using social media to "sell" is tacky isn’t it? Yes, if you act like a salesman. 

"What you need to do is, again, use content to get people to like you first, not pitch them on Twitter," says Clark. "That’s not something you put up with at a cocktail party. This is social media so you shouldn’t do it there either. It’s about various stages. You get people interested in your content, you’re helping them out on a day-to-day basis…eventually, you say, ‘hey, I’ve been helping you this way. I can help you with this too. Yes, this thing costs money, but hey, not everything’s free,’ and I think most people understand that."

A large part of getting people to like you is simply being authentic, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you should show ALL of your true colors ALL the time. 

"A lot of people get online, and to be authentic, it’s just a reason to cater to their own ego," says Clark. "The number one rule is, it’s what they think is authentic. Not what you think is authentic. The authentic ‘you’ might be totally unlikable, and no one’s gonna dig you. Sometimes we pay attention to people that are unlikable because we like watching a train wreck, but we’re not gonna do business with them. You know, there’s a big difference there between attention and monetization."

"Seth Godin put it the best – basically said authenticity is telling people a story they want to hear, and that doesn’t mean you’re lying or you’re fake," he explains. "It just means that you understand what they want, and that aspect of your personality comes out to serve them instead of serving your own ego."

"Find the unique aspect of your personality that fits your lifestyle and what makes you happy and go with that," Clark suggests. "Don’t try to emulate…Find what’s unique about you, and how does that relate to the people that you’re trying to talk to and hopefully do business with."

If you’re lucky, some part of you will appeal to your audience. If not, maybe it’s time to consider a different direction.

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There are plenty of opinions out there about what makes a blog good and what it takes to have a successful one. At the recent BlogWorld & New Media Expo, that was obviously a consistent theme. WebProNews interviewed a lot of people at that show, and several gave their advice on this matter. Here is a discussion with ProBlogger’s Darren Rowse.

Bloggers Chris Garrett and Scott Hanselman (who happens to be Principal Program Manager at Microsoft) shared some further advice. 

Content and Focus

"The key thing is to know what you want out of it, fist of all, and know what your audience wants out of it," says Garrett. "If you really, really tap into what your audience is passionate about, then you’re going to be successful."

"There’s so many people that start out, and they don’t really know what they’re doing, which is fine, but if you’re meandering around to different topics, you don’t really have a focus, you’ll never attract a proper target audience…you’re not really going to get anywhere," he adds. 

That is one point of view. Hanselman seems to have a slightly different take on things. He agrees that it requires focus, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t discuss various topics. 

"A lot of people have a sense that their blog sucks…They have low blog self esteem, and they look at all the professional bloggers…and they say, ‘wow, their blogs are so amazing.’ I think the thing I want to get across to people is that what those blogs have (that perhaps your blog might not) is a sense of focus. Why am I blogging?" says Hanselman. "Is it a diary? Who is my audience? Am I just talking and hoping people will show up? It’s not a matter of if you blog it they will come. That’s not how it works. Maybe for Perez Hilton, but for no one else does that work."

"It requires focus," he reiterates. "It requires a true, authentic voice. I work for Microsoft, and I use my personal blog to indirectly promote Microsoft things, but I also have, you know, square foot gardening, my kids, and diabetes and other things that I’m passionate about. And while that might seem to have a bit of a scattered focus, there is a focus there. It’s a focus on those things that I’m passionate about. Even though it’s not just a tech blog or just a diabetes blog, I do blog consciously. I blog with focus. I don’t put anything up there without thinking about it, and I think that if you’re doing that then you’re doing better than a lot of people."

Community and Tempo

You probably don’t have to be told that a good blog requires good content. What you may not be giving as much attention to, however, is the community aspect. "Content is the product you’re delivering, but…people say ‘content is king’ and I say a king is just a guy in a funny hat," says Garrett. "Without his army behind him – without all his ministers and his public saying he’s the king, all he is is a guy in a funny hat with some ego issues."

"I actually say the customer is king," he adds. "The reader is king. You’ve got to serve an audience…you can get some stuff back, but you’ve got to be generous to an audience…you’ve got to give them exactly what they want in a way that that they’re really engaged with, and that’s got to be content, but it’s got to be content about their needs rather than your needs."

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That may include giving them something when they need it. "Don’t say every day, because no one does anything every day," says Hanselman. "If you say ‘I will dedicate myself to blogging every day,’ and blogging is not your job, you will fail. So set a reasonable goal. You work out three times a week? Blog three times a week."

This is not bad advice, but you also want to consider whether or not you have anything interesting to say. You probably don’t want to blog just because of a schedule. You need to have something interesting or useful to say. Hopefully though, you can come up with three interesting conversation pieces in a week’s time. Otherwise, blogging is probably not going to be your strong suit. 

Community also means keeping a clean discussion. I don’t mean free of profanity, but free of junk, because that will not only turn readers off, it will impede the logical progression of the conversation, and blogging isn’t a one way street. It’s a discussion. It’s a discussion that you started, but a discussion nonetheless. 

Hanselman likens blog comment spam to the "broken window theory" – "the idea that if you park a car on the street (a beautiful car…maybe it’s in a bad neighborhood), it will sit there for weeks," he explains. "Break one window and that car will be flipped over and on fire in a few days. The same thing applies with blogs and blog spam. Nothing is sadder than going and finding a garden that’s filled with weeds. Tackling comment spam is really important…trackback spam – making sure you’re using Akismet or one of the WordPress plugins for spam. Even if you don’t have a WordPress blog you can do that."

Making the blog itself presentable also helps. "Make it look tidy. Make it look fine. There’s a host of themes out there…make it look clean, make it look fresh, keep it updated, says Hanselman. Design is only one aspect of making it presentable though. A lack of updates is not very presentable. "I would say the number one thing that people don’t do on a blog is they don’t keep a tempo," he says. "Nothing is sadder than showing up at someone’s blog and having the last post that they wrote say, ‘I’m rededicating myself to blogging.’ [from] October 2009. Stay focused. Pick a tempo."

Promotion

You’ve got to have people to keep that tempo for. Chances are, you won’t have too many if you don’t do some promoting. "You’ve got to promote it," says Garrett. "As important as content is, on its own , it’s nothing." The biggest way to fuel this, as Garrett presents it, is just networking. While that means utilizing forums and the social networks, it also means networking with people in the physical world – face to face conversation. Go to conferences and other events. "You can’t force it," he says. "You just have to give yourself the opportunity for things to come along, and you just try to do your best to be awesome."

That brings to mind some advice from Unmarketing’s Scott Stratten, who says, "People spread awesome. People spread great stuff. Nobody looks at a post and goes, ‘that was a pretty bad post, but it was really keyword rich, so let me pass it along." 

"People usually start gaining traction when they’ve got a thousand regular subscribers, but they start making decent money when they have five thousand or above," says Garrett. I usually suggest you have six months of income put away before you give up the day job, but it could be that you just have to put away that ‘Plan B.’" That means just making a decision and focusing on blogging.

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Businesses face a lot of pressure when trying to craft their blogging and social media strategies. There are so many tools and approaches that it can be quite overwhelming. While keeping up with the latest trends and technologies is one thing, another factor is just the approach you take at the personality level, which in the end, is much more critical to your brand.

WebProNews recently sat down with Scott Stratten of Unmarketing to talk about his philosophy on blogging, social media, and marketing, which he shared with an audience during a keynote at BlogWorld last month. "At the end of the day, it’s not really that difficult," Stratten says of blogging. "To me it’s ‘awesome’. ‘Awesome’ makes a great blog, and to me, blogging started a long time ago when people talked about…passion…something they were passionate about, angry about, it doesn’t matter. It was about emotion, and somewhere along the way, we forgot that, and it’s all about clickthroughs and ad placement and keyword stuffing for SEO…"

"People spread awesome," he adds. "People spread great stuff. Nobody looks at a post and goes, ‘that was a pretty bad post, but it was really keyword rich, so let me pass it along."

"So we gotta get out of our little shell a bit and realize…let’s write some good stuff," he says.

One point that really needs to be hit home for all businesses is that no matter what venue you and your staff are in, whether that be Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or a physical location in the real world, your brand is being represented all the time by your actions. If the public knows who you are you are or what company you represent, and they can see you (virtually or physically), you can easily shape their opinion about you and/or the company. 

"People think marketing’s left up to marketing departments, like the director of marketing has to approve things," Stratten tells us. "You’re marketing every single time you have an exposure or potential engagement point with anybody out there. Not just your market, but anybody, which means that anytime you engage with somebody, you’re either heightening or lessening the reputation of your company."

"If you’re throwing up at the curb at 3AM in Vegas, you’re branding and you’re marketing, and not in a good way," he adds.

"Social media doesn’t change anything," continues Stratten. "Social media only amplifies things. Like if your product’s terrible…your service is terrible…it’s gonna be worse on social media. It doesn’t fix things. It only makes it louder."

"If you’re great – you care about your customers, it makes it more amplified, but the core is you’re still good at what you do," he says. "It doesn’t change the fundamental of your business, so let’s focus first on making yourself a better business, and then focus on the social media strategy, like being out there, because…there’s nothing worse than someone who hates people and hates engagement, being on Twitter or Facebook. It’s a bad recipe. A bad recipe."

Again, it’s not about the tools. The tools can be very useful, but only if they make sense to your business and help you accomplish your goals. Just because everybody else is using one thing, it doesn’t necessarily mean you have to use it to (although there’s a good chance if that many people are using it, there are potential customers there). 

"I used to be the guy (a year and a half ago)…’Everybody’s gotta be on Twitter. Everybody’s gotta be there,’ says Stratten. "And I realized if you hate people, it’s not a good place, but to me, if your market’s people, they’re there. So whether or not you choose to be in social media is irrelevant. It’s already there. The conversation’s happening…You just have to decide if you want to be a part of it."

"I just think companies would rather be part of the conversation than ignore it, but it surprises me that most still don’t want to be there," he concludes.

It’s like former Kodak CMO Jeff Hayzlett said at ad:tech: "You tell me what the return on ignoring is, I’ll tell you what the return on investment is."

How much information is too much for a soldier in the United States Army to divulge through blogging and social media? Anything that puts other soldiers’ lives at risk. According to the Army’s Chief of Strategic Communications, Lt. Col. André Dean, that’s about it.

WebProNews recently sat down with Dean to talk about the social media use of soldiers. “We have since 2007…jumped into social media with determination to be here and stay here, and it’s just taken off like gangbusters since,” says Dean. “We’re just trying to find out where the Marines are. Where are those Marines?”

“Restrictions are almost non-existent,” he explains. “Like any blogging community, you establish some rules of slander or libel or just basic good conduct on the Internet. That’s all that we have with the exception being United States Military in time of war, what we call “operational security,” which means if a soldier talks about a mission that’s upcoming, the enemy is listening always to what we say and do, and if a soldier talks about something that could cost a soldier his or her life, that is operational security violation.”

“But soldiers are trained to do that,” he continues. “They’re trained to do that continuously. So we just have them be reminded of…and they’re getting an operational security briefing before they start to blog, and we ask them to honor and respect that, and that’s really the only unusual piece, because of the nature of what we do. We have to put something in place, and soldiers…I mean, nobody argues that piece, because that’s their life protected. The whole community has to rally around and understand that piece, and they do immediately. I mean that’s how we watch each others’ back…by good operational security procedures.”

“So, we stress that as a part of blogging, and we say ‘Cut loose. Fire. Go. Tell the Army story.’ And these great young soldiers do.”

Obviously, the Army wants to encourage young people to sign up, and a big part of that encouragement these days comes from the soldiers themselves, showing what their lives are like.

“If you’re a soldier, you can talk any part of your soldier thoughts, views, pastimes, current times, hobbies, interests, life…it’s a wide open gambit,” says Dean. “What we’re trying to do is let the soldier say, ‘I have a life. I have a great life. I do fun, interesting, challenging, dynamic, boring things, because I have a great life as a soldier,’ and I think that’s part of the greatness of this effort right now…it let’s soldiers take it in whichever direction they want to go, and say ‘Here’s my Army story.’ And people go, ‘Wow, they’re doing that in the Army?’ or ‘He can do that?’ or ‘She can do that? I thought there was a drill sergeant yelling at you all the time.’ You know, that stereotypical Hollywood kind of an ‘Oh my gosh, I’d never want to go do that, because, you know, they beat me up every day with Pugil sticks and the drill sergeant screams at me and gets me out of bed every morning.’”

“Oh, well yeah, for 8 weeks, and then after that, you’re a trained soldier and you go and execute your mission, and then you have 48 days of vacation a year, and it’s 30 plus these four-day holidays that we kind of slide in there for operational morale, to pick up the morale, and you find out you get a chance to travel around the world, depending on what your next assignment’s going to be…chances to grow, educational development, and then on it goes…” Dean explains.

“We’re finding that as we get the story out there, and more and more soldiers tell their story, the more people say, ‘Wow, why are we afraid of social media?’…in the other branches of service, and ‘Why wouldn’t we want to tell our story and why wouldn’t we want to have all of our Marines or all of our Sailors, or all of our Air Men and Women telling their story too?’ Because it’s a great story to tell.”

“So, a little bit of risk, good operational briefing securities…” he reiterates. “Be careful guys, and think about what you’re doing…we trust you with your buddy’s life. We trust you to point your weapon down range. We trust you with all those weapon systems we placed in your hand, and you guys do a home run every time we give you important missions. Do a home run. Hit that home run with social media also. Tell the story, unafraid. If you have a critique or a criticism, tell the criticism, but be straightforward and honest about what you say and do, and then don’t jeopardize your buddy’s life on operational security stuff’…It’s constantly a part of our lives,’ so just reminders, especially for 18, 19, 20 year-olds. Sometimes they just need good reminders, but when they hear it, and they’re thinking about their buddy, left and right, and their team, they get the message and they’re right on track.”

“A lot of what we’re doing in the marketing of the United States army, is we want people to have the comfort level that says, ‘I can do that.’