Blogging Used for Public Relations

How the Media Uses Blogs

The study mentioned above noted that three-quarters of journalist surveyed said they look at blogs for story ideas and for insight into the tone they should take with a story.

About 70 percent of reporters said they check a list of blogs on a regular basis, and almost 21 percent said they spend more than an hour a day reading blogs. A full 57 percent said they read blogs at least two or three times a week.

More than 61 percent of journalists surveyed said they thought blogs had an impact on the tone of the media, and 51 percent said blogs influenced the editorial direction of news reporting.

This means that your blogging used for public relations, if viewed by the right people, can bring your ideas and products to a much wider audience.

How to Start Blogging Used for Public Relations

The first key to success in using your blog for public relations is that, of course, you need a blog. If you don't already have one, you can get one set up in a matter of minutes.

Blogging for public relations is slightly different than blogging for friends and family, where you might just be sharing what is going on in your life or your personal opinions about the news.

While a blog runs with the idea of getting you more business and public relations attention can be somewhat personal (and, indeed, needs to show of your personality to gain fans) it should focus much more on providing good information to your readers.

Blogging used for public relations is really all about establishing yourself as an expert in your field. The more you write about whatever topic your business is related to, the higher your site will rank on the search engines and the more likely a member of the media looking to write a story about your topic will be to contact you as a source.

Tips for PR Blogging

When you are blogging for public relations, the idea is that you need to build a good and steady source of traffic to your blog. The way to do this is to post information that is keyword rich, valuable, unique and frequent.

Let's look at each of those aspects individually so we can see how they fit together.

• Keyword rich: Think about the words that people would type into a search engine if they were looking for a Web site like yours. For instance if your blog is about gardening in the shade, people might type in shade gardening, shade garden, low-light gardening and so on. You want to use these search terms liberally (but not too excessively) on your site.
• Valuable: Your content must be valuable to the reader in order for him or her to keep coming back. Don't just tell part of the story; give them everything they need to know.
• Unique: This of course ties into being valuable—you need to provide content that's not like everything else that's out there on the web. If we go back to shade gardening, for instance, most people who are interested in this topic know ferns and hostas are popular shady choices. Add to the discussion by taking your site in a different direction, such as writing about shade gardens in a certain region of the country or shade gardening in low-water areas.
• Frequent: Post something every day if you can. If not, try for every other day. You definitely don't want to go longer than a week between postings. People won't remember to check your site for updates if they get used to not seeing anything new, and you'll rank higher on the search engines if you post frequently.

Combining these four ideals will give you a great blog used for public relations that will get you more attention and establish you as an expert in your field.