Blogging was originally a term devised to describe a ‘personal log’ online – ‘State of the nation’, ‘what I am working on today’ and opinion pieces, for example. However, it has now become a generic term of online articles that are broadcast out to people who are interested in what you do.

The key word here is ‘broadcast’. In other words, articles don’t just sit on your website – you broadcast via an RSS reader (stands for really simple syndication) and to your Twitter, Facebook and Linked In accounts, plus any other social networks you are part of professionally.

This is important for a number of reasons...

Firstly, don’t be so egotistic to assume that people will always come to you to find out what you are up to or your thoughts on key topics. You need to go to where your audience is and thee days that means RSS readers and social networking platforms

And not just on their laptops – the huge uptake of the iPhone has transformed the blogging world. Sitting on the train, in a traffic jam, over breakfast or coffee, many people use this ‘lost time’ as a perfect opportunity to catch up with key people linked to their world. All the major platforms run iPhone apps making access to Twitter, or Linked In something you can achieve in seconds – without being at your desk.

Setting up a broadcast RSS feed

And in order to broadcast, you need an RSS feed attached to your blog – it’s the term used for the technology that allows your articles to be seen outside of your website. However, you may need to get some technical support to get an RSS feed connected to your site.  Getting this set up is probably the hardest part of the process, so try not to be put off – once it’s done, it’s done!

Simply…

• If you have a flat ‘html’ site – ie. you can’t normally do your own web updates – you’ll probably need a blogging platform added to the site to allow you to broadcast (e.g. Wordpress)
• However, if you have a content managed site (CMS) such as the Joomla-driven sites that we build, these will usually already support blogging and you simply have to set up the RSS feed.

If you have trouble sorting this out, you can always contact me here at CProject and we can point you in the right direction. We can also talk to you about using multiplatform software to get your blog linked to all your social networks instantly from a single source. Perfect for saving valuable time!

So the question is – do you want to sit there wondering where people find the time to come up with all this content they are broadcasting? Or do you want to be one of those broadcasters that people are wondering about?

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