I was recently approached by my former employer and friend for some tips on writing the first blog post for a corporate blog. This company blog is written by members of the team and announced to a mailing list of previous and current clients, prospects and business partners so the first post really needed to set the stage for why the company has ventured into blogging, what topics will be covered and an introduction to the blog authors.

I asked a few experts in the blogging world to share their thoughts on what makes a good first blog post:

Jeff Quipp from Search Engine People

• Tell a little about each of the people who will be blogging: a brief profile, what their expertise is, pictures, etc. You want readers to connect with the bloggers.

• Talk about the breadth of subjects that will be covered along with reasons why they should read your blog. How is your blog different from all the rest? What benefits can they expect from reading it?
• Begin to set expectations about frequency of posts and themes (Friday Funnies posts, Monday Modelling etc).
• Explain how they can subscribe in feed readers or via email.
• Build anticipation by including a list of upcoming posts to pique interest and get them coming back.
• Ideally your first post will also discuss something truly new within the industry to kick-start subscribership.

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Corporate Blogging: Tips for Writing Your First Blog Post »

SEO guru Stephan Spencer contributed a great overview on tagging and its virtues for usability and SEO to Search Engine Land last week. Do check out Stephan’s entire article if you’re new to the concept of tagging, tag clouds and folksonomy.

Tags help describe various content. Basically, you can tag a blog post, product or photo with relevant keywords. When you want to check out all the posts, photos or products related to a certain keyword, you can click on the “tag” and voila! Usability-wise, visitors can navigate visually through a “tag cloud” (see the bottom of our page for an example) and even discover tags, whereas in a traditional dropdown menu or even faceted navigation this could get out of hand. Tags are great for SEO too, because your tags generate their own URLs, and each tag is a keyword-rich internal link to that page, reinforced by the tagged items themselves and the sitewide tag cloud, if you have one.

I took a peek at blogs from our list of 75+ blogs from top online retailers to “look who’s tagging” and as I expected, I can easily count them all on one hand. What’s worse, the ones that do are doing it WRONG!

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Effective Tagging Strategies for Ecommerce Blogs »