Below are some blogging best practices to adhere to when creating and managing an online blog:

Establish a Strategy – A business blog needs to begin with a strategy, which does not happen in isolation. Every company should have a marketing plan, or at least a targeted list of customers and prospects. Your blog needs to be part of that strategy with a specific target audience, whether it is for brand building, increasing sales, or communicating with employees, customers, prospects or vendors. A blog without a strategy will not survive. Do not create a blog just to create content for search engine optimization purposes. It will wither and die, as many have.

Define an Editorial Policy – Once you know what you are trying to accomplish through your company blog, you need to determine what kinds of articles you will post. If you have regular press releases (and quarterly statements for public companies) posted in a news section on your web site, and you should, there is no reason to re-post them on your blog, unless you are commenting or adding more information to the release. You need to decide whether to blog about employee activities, client projects, internal processes and other things that reveal the human side of your company. This is generally a good thing, but the information on your blog must be relevant to your target audience.

Find a Voice – Your blog should have some personality and not sound like it was written by a committee. This can be conveyed through the voice of a blog, which is the way you speak to your target audience. There is a tendency to write blog posts in a more informal, breezy style that can be skimmed easily. This definitely is driven by your content and your readers. If your blog is about complex technical solutions and you are writing for engineers, snarky copy written with broad strokes is not the way to communicate with them.

Reinforce the Company’s Core Values – Use your blog to reflect your company’s inner soul: its mission, goals and direction. A blog is just another medium by which you interact with your customers and employees. It’s another part of the brand experience. It should be consistent with the impression the company wants to make.

Create Compelling Content – A blog is not just an exercise in creating content and tossing it over the wall at your readers. The content must be compelling, informative and relevant to your audience. Think about your blog from the point of view of your target and decide if your latest article provides any value. If you are using your blog to find prospective customers, you can blog about industry topics, or conduct interviews with industry leaders. After your readers find your blog, you want them to return. Or better yet, subscribe to your feed (ours is in the upper right), so they don’t miss one word of your compelling content.

Use Keywords – One of the jobs a blog can do is help improve the search results. You do this by making sure your post titles and posts contain the keywords that your customers and prospects search. Search engine dynamics and algorithms are constantly changing, so you can think of this as relevance to your readers. If you will be writing for an audience outside of your company and customer lists, your blog and site must be found. Writing about topics relevant to this audience will naturally contain appropriate keywords, but you should make sure your titles are keyword rich.

Keep It Fresh – Blogs are usually judged by their amount of new content. Easy to add on to, they are designed to be updated constantly. To keep your readers coming back, make your content relevant and timely. Don’t forget, content can include anything from product releases to job openings, recent news to thoughts from the CEO. It’s practically impossible to run out of material.

Show Author Pictures – One reason to create a blog is to create a human face within the company. The best way to show a human face is to show a human’s face. If the blog is written by one person, a photo in the header or about section is fine. Multi-author blogs should have author photos with each post. This allows readers to easily scan posts for authors writing about topics they follow.

Link from Home Page – Since a blog is a very different kind of content on most corporate web sites, unless your site visitors can find, you cannot achieve your goals. All the strategy in the world goes out the window if no one reads your blog. If you cannot get approval to link from the home page, find a logical place to provide a prominent link. Some common options are from the Company page or the About page, but it still needs to be obvious. How can you engage with your audience if they can’t find your content?

Engage with Readers – Since one of the goals of any blog is to engage with your readers, you need to make sure you do that. You write compelling content that brings your audience back for more. They leave comments. They link to your blog from their blog or social networking sites. And you need to continue these conversations in the comments. Every real comment should get a real response. This is something that we try to do on this site. And it really makes a difference to readers to see the post authors responding in the comments. And when you find your content shared by your readers elsewhere, thank them and continue the discussion over there. Being appreciative of comments goes a long way.

Spread Your Content – If you can spread and encourage the spreading of your content to your target audience, you will reach a much larger audience. Leveraging your blog to gain more readers is a great way to make sure your content gets in front of a large number of people.

Fine Print – Blogging can lead to legal issues. Companies should have real concerns about liability, exclusions and limitations, and indemnity. Although there are laws that protect against libel, misappropriations and other injuries suffered as a result of posts on the Web, companies can still be held “vicariously” responsible for statements made by employees that are harmful to others. Since there are so many legal issues surrounding blogs, it is imperative that the site has some sort of disclaimer and limitation of liability.

Know What You Are Doing – Senior management should be educated by the corporate communications and legal department about what blogs are and how they might affect business. That way, they can be contributing members of the blog, further improving employee relations. Their support and participation is often what makes a blog more effective.

Create Blogging Policies – In any medium where an employee is sharing information, there is the possibility of leaking trade secrets or financial information. Blogging also has a tendency to become personal. A company should have a list of policies regarding blogging to ensure that trade secrets are kept secret and personal lives do not become public. Policies may include keeping financial information from being posted, as well as severe consequences for anyone using the blog for negative publicity.

Aviod the Marketing Blog – Making blog into a blatant marketing campaign is a bad idea. Customers are looking for real answers and honest opinions. They will pick up on insincerity instantly. Use the blog for what it’s for, transparency. This is an opportunity to make a real connection with your customers. Don’t ruin it by filling it with empty advertising.

Encourage Employees to Use the Blog – Create an atmosphere where they are comfortable asserting their opinions and concerns. You’ll be surprised how the quietest employees will speak up when given such an opportunity. With all communication, blogging can become negative, so remind employees of the public nature of the blogs and the ramifications for their actions.