CEO Blogging (and any kind of blogging)

CEO blogging has become a new phenomenon. Many CEOs have been blogging for years, but this still tends to be a rarity. I have been searching for other nonprofit CEOs who are blogging and will start posting links to their blogs as I find them. I have been blogging since January of 2007. I was encouraged to do so by our lead Technology team member and our Director of Communications. I set up a short blog on www.blogspot.com, a blogging tool owned by Google. I looked at several other blogging websites that host blogs and settled on Blogspot since I like the available templates for graphics and ease of use. Recently I have been asked to move my blogs from blogger.com to wordpress.com and am finding wordpress to be a delight. Its worth looking at!

Here are a few key things I have learned in the last year or so of blogging:

1. BE PATIENT
There is a definite learning curve with this stuff. Its can be like a new language. Its different than Microsoft window or publisher. Fortunately with a website like blogger it has become easier and simpler to set up a blog than even a year or so ago. You get to use templates that guide you through the process.

2. KEEP IT SIMPLE
I often get carried away and blogging can consume you if you’re not careful. The templates keep things fairly simple but the options and add-ons are growing by the day. Writing posts for your blog are the most important thing you need to do. All the cool features you can add on are very tempting, but they can suck your time and energy very quickly. I often spend hours an evening just playing with all the new options and seeing what other people are doing on their blogs.



2. READ ABOUT BLOGS
One of the best things I did early on was start reading some good books from my local book stores about blogging. This has helped immensely. I recommend the following:

Publishing a Blog with Blogger: Visual QuickProject Guide

Clear Blogging: How People Blogging Are Changing the World and How You Can Join Them

Clear Blogging: How People Blogging Are Changing the World and How You Can Join Them

3. STICK WITH THE TEMPLATES
Blogs are actually written in HTML and CSS. A programing language of its own. If you don’t know this code, you could spend a lifetime learning it so you can write it. For some of us, like me, its tempting. I like a challenge. But you have to ask yourself, where is the best place to put your limited time. If you use the templates you can do almost all you need to do without writing code. There are many amazing add-ons that you can copy and paste without knowing these languages, but again, where should you be putting your effort and time. I say its writing content for you blog.

4. DON’T GET HUNG UP ON YOUR AUDIENCE
My first few blog posts were painful. I couldn’t figure out who I should be writing to. Is it our team members (staff), the board of directors, our donors, the general public? It almost caused me to get writers block before I even wrote my first blog. START WRITING. As you write each new post you will start figuring out who you want to write to. And you may decided to create another blog or blogs for these different audiences, but don’t worry about it at first. WRITE!!

4. RELAX ABOUT THE GRAMMAR (and typos)
I hated hitting the “POST” button on my first new blogs. It was worse than sending an email to a bunch of people. It was going out into cyberspace and I had little or no control over where it went. It was like launching a missile without knowing where it was headed and what type of damage it was going to do. I made my own rule ,that I reread each post 4 times before I send it. If you look at other people’s blogs you will see that some use no grammar at all: lower case, no punctuation, and practically follow no grammar rules. Write the best you can, and post it. Even after reading my posts 4 times, I almost always find one typo after I post it. I always read a new post at least once to find potential typos.

5. WOULD AN EMAIL (newsletter or zine) WORK BETTER THAN A BLOG
I just had to ask this. I have been asked by several nonprofit leaders about if they should blog after they hear that I have been blogging for some time. In this case I would ask myself, do I have an audience that would read a blog or do they even read blogs? For example, a good friend of mine serves a very good size church. He has managed to collect the email addresses for most of his members. They read emails, they don’t read blogs in this case. I would suggest creating a really nice email template and writing in the text box and sending it as a email. The features of a blog may not be needed or appropriate. You could use something I use like Constant Contact that is actually a very powerful email manager that fairly easily creates amazingly vivid, graphic emails/enewsletters for small and huge lists of email recipients. They can even subscribe or unsubscribe to your email on each email page you send. An email would be very sufficient in a lot of cases. And it would be a lot easier and less time consuming to do it this way. Some people, like me, do both. I create a post in my blog, and I have created a template in Constant Contact that looks very similar to my blog post. I send this post via email with Constant Contact that also contains a link to my blog. There is even a subscription to email option on the top left page of my blog.

The best part about all this blogging stuff it that its fluid. Write is such a way that people can respond, reply, comment, and add to your posts.

Anybody have any points they would like to add?