Tasha Harrison

When writing a business blog, you are creating a resource of information related to your industry. This should be a mixture of your own expertise and sharing information from other valuable sources.

Bearing that in mind, here are my top tips:

1. Link text to articles that will be useful further reading.
2. Use articles from other industry related blogs as a basis for your post. Continue a discussion by giving an opinion and remember to always link back to the article.
3. Include a ‘Further reading’ section at the bottom of the post.
4. Where possible, link to any of your blog posts that may be relevant.
5. Present your post in an easy to read format, dividing it with headers where appropriate.
6. Use simple language and sentence structures. That’s not to say that you should dumb down your writing, but long flowery sentences can be off-putting.
7. Remember, it is very easy for someone to click away from your site if they begin to get bored, so be concise and try not to ramble.
8. Encourage people, where possible, to leave comments. Asking questions and giving strong opinions are a good starting point.

Further Reading:

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2005/12/30/tens-tips-for-writing-a-blog-post/
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/10-blogging-tips/

While the newspaper industry continues to debate the pros and cons of paywalls, Stewart Kirkpatrick, former editor of scotsman.com, has launched the first ever web-only daily. Named after Scotland’s oldest newspaper, The Caledonian Mercury, caledonianmercury.com challenges the perception that the internet will spell the death of the newspaper. By offering high quality journalism, it hopes to attract readers and advertisers through the quality of its content.

There has been much debate about whether such a venture can succeed given the damage the internet has done to the industry. With sites like the BBC and Sky News continuing to offer free news will there be a place for niche news sites? I think the problem that the Caledonian Mercury is going to have is that it is competing against many other niche news sites that won’t have the same overheads – the Scottish publication is going to be paying journalists, including many former staff from the Scotsman.

There are also question marks over the professionalism of the design. Built in WordPress, the site doesn’t exude the same professionalism as the majority of its competitors. Simplicity is always a good starting point, but the curious logo and tag clouds give it more the image of a blog. Perhaps this is what they had planned, but in the longterm it is a concern that they just come across as another blog.

It’s a great idea, but I’m worried that their approach may just prove that blogs will replace newspapers for well written and thoughtful commentary.

Before Twitter all of our thoughts where focussed into our blog and discussions took place on both our own blogs and other people’s blogs.  You referred to other’s blogs in your own posts and continued the conversation that way.

Now we see a blog post that we find interesting, Tweet it and then continue the conversation on Twitter.  Obviously conversations do still continue on the blog post as it is easier to comment and follow the discussion within that format, but has Twitter diluted the discussion and caused us to blog less?  Instead of sharing our ideas in a well thought out blog post do we simply quickly write them out in 140 characters, possibly losing the essence of what we mean?

As Twitter is evolving I am finding that my blog is still the best place to publish my main ideas, but I’m not sure that this is the case for everyone. It will be interesting to see how blogs evolve and whether micro-blogging is sustainable within the whirlwind of spam that is currently afflicting it.

Last week Rupert Murdoch announced that his newspapers would start charging for online content.  One of the main challenges News Corp will face is that the majority of their competition is offering the same product for free.  All of the big UK newspapers have free content, so the only hope that Murdoch has of making money is that either people are willing to pay for his content, or that his competitors start charging as well.  His belief may be that eventually other newspapers will realise that they have to charge in order to make any money and that his decision will save the industry.

The big problem facing newspapers is that people can read news online for free.  They no longer have to buy a newspaper to find out what’s happening in the world.  The online news is more up to date, sometimes instant.  The way people receive news is changing, the internet offers real time information.  Blogging and micro-blogging are creating a whole new type of journalism, where anyone can report an event almost instantaneously.  Blogs give us the opinions of not only a selected few journalists, but of regular people, not influenced by editors who need stories that sell.

In his book, Flat Earth News, Nick Davies explains how Fleet Street has become increasingly corrupted by the need to make money.  Fewer journalists covering less space has led to a greater reliance on news and PR agencies, which has led to the rapid deterioration of the quality of our news.

The internet has simply highlighted the plight of an industry already struggling.  The same news stories are repeated across all the major news outlets, usually taken from the same copy written by a single journalist at the associated press.  Many people now receive their news through a Google newsfeed on their iGoogle homepage or from a real time micro-blogging feed such as Twitter.  With sites such as the BBC able to offer free news as a public service, online newspapers don’t really stand much of a chance in the longterm. But far from being the fault of the internet, it is simply their inability to react to a fast changing world.

Read “Is Murdoch’s Plan to Charge for Online News Doomed?” for an excellent insight into how the subscription system could work.