If there’s one big thing I have learned this year it is that blogs can have an enormous impact – or they can be a flop. It all depends on how the blog is written.

What my colleagues and I have been doing is writing a series of blogs in different ways, and then measuring the number of readers we get. To add to the test we invented the rule that we would not do any promotion for the blogs at all – people would have to find them by searching through Google and the like.

In the most simple terms the finding we have is this: it is possible to get very high audiences for blogs, without any advertising, if the blog itself covers the selected topic in a way that is different from most other web sites. The blog also has to be regular – in an ideal world daily, but certainly never less than once a week.

To go on from there, the blog has to be lively, and slightly out of the norm – if you have a fear of not saying something because someone might get upset, then quite probably blogs are not for you.

For our experiment we set up blogs in four different fields: teaching, popular music, administration and football. Our aim was to see if we could find underlying rules which applied to those four categories. Ultimately we did – although it has taken a lot of experimentation to do this. (I should add that the blog you are reading is not part of the experiment – and indeed doesn’t obey the rules we have discovered. There is debate going on in our own company as to how we now change this blog to reflect the findings!)

The football blog
www.blog.emiratesstadium.info – for Arsenal fans. There are thousands of blogs world-wide on Arsenal FC. Many of them are incredibly professional-looking, with photographs, effects, shading and every other twist and turn that modern blog programs give.

After much experimentation we found that the appearance was by an large irrelevant, so long as people could read the site. What affected the readership was the uniqueness of the over-riding theme, and the personality of the writer. So in this regard we adopted the approach that the manager of the club (Arsène Wenger) was always right. We also developed an interest in the finances of football in general, and over time evolved a series of nicknames for other clubs – nicknames that were unique to this blog.

The current readership is 50,000-60,000 unique readers a month – a figure that is on a par with the most popular websites in the field – and that achieved in a six month burst where the style and approach of the writing was changed to a constant support for the management.

The administrators’ blog

www.blog.admin.org.uk – for school administrators. We started this by delivering serious news items to school administrators, but with modest success. In April 2008 we changed this to the Diary of an Administrator – a daily account of life in the school office. This started out with a wicked sense of humour and ended up being surreal. The diary appears six days a week (the weekend combined into one entry) reflecting the working life of the writer. The school in which she works is mythical, but has elements that reflect what many administrators find (a headteacher who is more often out than in, teachers who request work be done always at the last moment etc) Currently 9,000 readers a month – which is high considering that there are only 29,000 schools.

The music blog

www.bob-dylan.org.uk The Arsenal blog suggested that even in a market that is saturated with comment one could gain an audience from a standing start if the slant of the articles was different from that published elsewhere. To verify this we have recently started the Bob Dylan blog which does nothing other than analyse Dylan songs from the perspective of the music and lyrics (as opposed to relating them to who played on the record and what happened in Dylan’s life at the time). There has been no advertising, no promotion – not even a mention in other Dylan blogs – we’ve simply written the blog about 3 or 4 times a week for the last five or six weeks. After two months we are running at around 750 readers a month. Rather interestingly, some of our articles are already appearing high up the google rankings – again rather unexpectedly given the billions of pages there are on Bob Dylan.

The schools blog

www.blog.schools.co.uk – for teachers in general. This had been sitting at around 2,000 readers a month, when it was delivering occasional pieces about school life in general. We then experimented with a much harder hitting approach in which we have highlighted the problems facing schools which are caused by government agencies with whom the school has to interact. The new theme is “the teachers are doing great things, but are let down by government agencies”. The thought was that if the findings of the other blogs are correct, this strong line would lead to a rise in readership – and indeed within a month readership doubled.

If you are interested in blogs do take a look at what we have done. If you would like to discuss the development of a blog for your company, do get in touch – we’re always happy to talk. Call me on 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood