This article is the second in a 6 part series.  Part one was written November 4, 2005.

Business blogging is completely different than the conversational, journal-style blogging common on personal and political sites.  Just like in print it is important to think before you write and publish work, you must be careful what you say online.  Your work online could, and hopefully will, remain online for many, many years.  Be sure to take your business blog seriously and don’t be haphazard in what you put on it.
Keep Your Style Consistent.  As I said on Friday, because of the potential permanence of online work, we must pay close attention to how what we write affects our brand.

Voice and Content:

While everyone’s online voice should be at least marginally conversational, take care to remain professional.  There should be no cursing or politics on a business blog.  Consistency is the key here though.  What you said in 1998 may not be true, taking into account differing economies and business practices, but your goals should be fairly the same.  In other words, if your customer service was seen as highly important in 1998, it needs to have a top focus now.

Ethics:

Take care when promoting others or aligning yourself with businesses online.  Research anyone you don’t know before you begin linking to them.  If they are bad business people, you will be grouped with them for years to come. 

What you write today will be spidered by the search engines and will remain online for as long as you host your site.  Do a search for your company’s name to see what I mean.  In fact, since Alexa introduced the Way Back Machine, your company’s website may outlive itself. 

If you take nothing from this article except this one part, please understand that it does your company no good to just throw content onto your site, if it’s not well-written.  Online business marketing and content, like offline business marketing and content, take preparation and strategy.