Blog Tips

Selfhosting a blog is like building your own house

In a previous post I touched on the subject of selfhosting in a series about selecting the blog platform suited for your needs. The subject is important enough to elaborate a bit more.

When you start a blog, you have the choice of either using your blogservice to host your blog, or to rent server space yourself. Of the popular blog softwares, WordPress.org and Movable Type allow you to use your own server. Others, WordPress.com, Tumblr, Blogger and Typepad don’t give you that option, and will run your blog on their servers.

Intuitively, organisations, and the more “independent minded” bloggers would be inclined to choose for selfhosting, but the choice often is made uninformed. Let me share some of my personal experiences.

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You created your blog, and write posts, write posts, write posts… Gradually, your audience grows. You get comments, get other bloggers linking to you,… Your blog has a lift-off. But how much of a lift-off? Are you flying in orbit, or are you barely clearing the tree tops? How do you measure your blog’s performance. How do you keep track of it?

Success is in the eye of the beholder

What means “success” to you? Are you writing for a selective public? Then reaching those handful would mean accomplishment for you. Are your goals accomplished having created a small working community around your project blog? Good for you. Or are you already happy just to have a medium where you can post stuff, and can refer to if you get questions about your organisation? Ride on!

But.. if you are a main stream blogger, you will need more than that. You will want more than just a handful of visitors per day. You will want more than one comment per week. What tools are around to keep track of how well you are doing?

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OK, you did it, you created a new blog! You post a few entries on which you sweat for days, give it the best of your best. But what’s next?

Here are five basic steps I follow for every new blog I create:

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OK, the decision is made in your non-profit organisation: the powers-to-be have given you the green light to start a blog. Or you made up your mind and you will start blogging no matter what anyone says.

1. Either think about it or just do it.

There are two schools of thought: “Jump” or “Think and then jump”. That is an easy choice. Or not?

You can not blog about everything under the sky. Somewhere, you have to define your topic as the starting point. The art is not to be too restrictive, but also not too broad. Broad topic blogs are not very successful in creating a loyal readership. Too specific topic might lack a critical mass of those interested in it.

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1. A blog as an addition to your existing web presence
Have you ever defined the goals for your organisation’s web presence? What do you want to achieve? How do you measure that?

For a typical non-profit, I would assume you want:

• advocacy: interest people for your cause.
  Metrics: amount of visitors, amount of returning visitors, depth of visit (amount of pages they read)
• activism: rally people behind your cause
  Metrics: amount of participants in your online actions
• fundraising: something every non-profit needs
  Metric: amount of funds donated via the website, or how many of your donors got to know your organisation via your site. How many use your website as a resource.
• knowledge base: “educate” your audience through a document and research repository
  Metric: amount of documents and amount of readers

Have you also thought about how you want to achieve those goals? Sure enough, part of this is technical. You want a site that is attractive, downloads fast, that has a high use-ability where people can find information easily and quickly.

Most of all the key factor is ‘traffic’ and returning ‘traffic’, visitors and visitor loyalty. Integrating a blog into your corporate website or “connecting” it to your corporate website (with regular links to your site), can drive traffic onto it, helping you achieve your corporate web-goals.

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