How To Blog Effectively

Once you understand why blogging can be an important leadership tool, you’ll increasingly have more than enough ideas on what you can blog about. But there’s a bit of craft involved in knowing how to blog effectively. In this section, we explain the how.

Tell stories
We all have a knack for telling stories in an informal social setting. “Hey, guess what happened to me today?” we say to our family members and friends. Listen to the conversations at parties and you’ll hear a constant stream of storytelling. So the idea is to use storytelling in your blog in much the same way that you use it in informal social settings – but towards a leadership or management goal.
Link, link, link
Master the art of quickly adding relevant links to your posts. Why?
- It allows your readers to easily go deeper and broader.
- Search engine spiders come back more frequently when they see links in your posts, as their algorithms depend on them.
- Those you link to generally appreciate it and are more likely to link back.
Insert photos
Most of us have a slice of vanity in our emotional makeup and having our photo appear in a civic leader’s blog is a little ego boost. The word-of-mouth factor then comes into play – a blog post with a photo increases the likelihood that its PermaLink will get passed around via email and linked to in other blogs, as well as mentioned verbally, e.g., “Hey, I saw your photo in whatshisname’s blog this week…”

Photos can also be instructional. Use them to illustrate a situation or a problem, with or without people in the shot.
Insert relevant images
The general public is one of the audiences for your civic blog and the media culture they live in is heavily visual. If your blog is 99% text, you’re likely to have trouble getting them to be regular visitors to your site. Print-based newspapers, newsletter, and magazines all have a long history of using page-design, headlines and graphics to draw the attention of readers’ eyes and to make it easier for them to read once they start reading. Weblogs’ simple format tends to encourage a blog author to just write and post, without giving much thought to visual appeal.
Post short and frequent vs. long and infrequent
Long (more than a screenful), text-heavy posts to your blog where you need the space to explain are perfectly appropriate. Use the blog software’s “extended entry” feature, if it has it, to only display the first paragraph or two. This gives people the option to read on if they’re interested and makes skipping to the next post in chronological order easier.
Answer email with a blog
As leaders who blog, you can expect that you’ll increasingly be contacted via email and phone by individual citizens, colleagues, potential collaborators, and of course, detractors. As a novice blogger, you’ll likely appreciate this attention for the most part because it can mean that your blog audience is growing. But there may come a time when the volume of email (and associated phone calls) generated by the interest in your weblog starts to feel more burdensome than exhilarating.Part of the problem is that when people contact you individually (email or phone), the natural expectation is that you’ll respond to them individually. It seems like the polite/professional thing to do.

But your blog gives you an option that you didn’t have before: the ability to respond to an individual so that all your readers can hear/read it. You leverage your response so that it has the potential to benefit the most.
Promote discussion via a blog
While a blog is primarily a publishing tool for you, it can also be used for interaction with your readers. At the most basic level, it means having an email address (a “mailto”) listed on the sidebar of your blog. It’s preferable, however, to have a link to a “contact me” form on a separate web page.

This prevents spam bots from harvesting your email address. And people are more inclined to use a form rather than a “mailto.” You can then include a link to this page in the body of your blog posts occasionally, e.g., “If you have suggestions on this issue, Contact Me.” When you get email responses, resist the temptation to reply via private email and use your blog instead, as described above.
Give notice if you stop blogging
Your readers will likely feel disrespected if you stop blogging without an explanation. If you’re traveling and don’t plan to blog, consider the safety implications on whether you want to reveal that your residence will be unoccupied. But at least let your readers to not expect anything from you for the duration of your absence. Likewise, if you’re expecting to be too busy to devote any time to blogging for an upcoming period of time.