Glasgow Business . 57
www.glasgowchamberofcommerce.com BIG TALKS Suzanne Fairbairn Senior Digital Account Manager, The BIG Partnership
Blogging: what you need to know to get started
» Suzanne Fairbairn gives her essential guide to becoming a blogger T
he term blog gets bandied around quite a bit, and I still get asked the question: “What is a blog?” It’s a contraction of the words
‘web log’ which, in simple terms, is a personal website for recording opinions, sharing information and linking to other sites on a regular basis. It stores each entry (blog post) in an
archive for visitors to browse through as and when they like. Anyone can become a blogger, from a
multinational corporation set ing up a company blog on its website, providing quick reaction and opinion pieces on industry
“If you’re thinking of creating a blog, whether business or personal, I recommend you subscribe to a spread of other people’s blogs”
developments, to a student on a gap year, posting updates of their travels for friends and family to access. T ere seems to be a blog for just about
anything these days, from weddings and motherhood, to golf, gardening and growing old gracefully. However, content really is king when it comes to blogging, so you must have something worthwhile to say. Posts can be as long or as short as you like,
and there’s no right or wrong on how oſt en you should update. I suggest having a rough guideline in place, whether once a week, once a fortnight or once a month, to allow you to plan posts accordingly. T ere are numerous blogging platforms to
choose from. WordPress is the most common platform
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and I’d recommend it, especially for company blogs, to ensure your design and navigation is consistent with your website. Oh, and there’s a never-ending list of features and plug-ins that you can install to improve the look of your blog and its usability. Mashable and TechCrunch blogs have been built on WordPress, which gives you more of an idea of the themes and features available, including social sharing but ons, trending topics and a listing of upcoming events. Tumblr is a platform that’s creeping its way
into the growing list of a mainstream social media channels, and it is more suitable for visually impactful blogs, e.g. if you plan to have a portfolio-style blog, or if you have plenty of images and video content up your sleeve. You can customise Tumblr blogs and adapt themes so you’re not too restricted on design. Topshop’s Tumblr blog, which is among one of my favourites, has fully embraced the beauty of Tumblr with a magazine-style layout for displaying street-style fashion shots and the latest trends. Blogger is another platform worth
mentioning. Its intuitive interface makes it the more popular choice among less tech-savvy individuals for quickly set ing up basic personal blogs which are easy to update. If you’re thinking of creating a blog,
whether business or personal, I recommend you start by subscribing to a spread of other people’s blogs, considering which blogging platform is right for you and having a think about how you plan to feed and water your own blog once it’s live. T en all that’s leſt is for
you to start creating your blog by playing around with templates, themes and features. Keep in mind that the good thing
about a blog is that you can save all your posts in draſt format until you’re happy to click on the ‘publish’ but on.
Suzanne Fairbairn is senior digital account manager at The BIG Partnership, ranked as one of the UK’s Top 30 females under 30 and The Herald’s offi cial digital blogger.
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