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Top ten tips for blogging and podcasting

By Paul Caplan, New Media Trainer for Media Trust

Blogging and podcasting are useful ways voluntary organisations can interact with their audiences. This article provides tips for success.

Blogs:                         

Top ten tips for effective Blogging

1. Write like a human being not like a spin doctor or a computer
2. Imagine you are talking with someone not talking to them or worse, at them
3. Tell stories. Make them real, local, personal and passionate.
4. Link to other Blogs and stories, become part of the community not above it.
5. Tag or add keywords to your Blog stories so people can find them and link to them.
6. Read as well as write: use Technorati to find out what other Bloggers are saying about issues important to you and your audience and comment on them.
7. Don’t think Blog singular, think Blogs. Set up Blogs for your stakeholders and service users to use. Help them to tell their stories.
8. Don’t worry if you haven’t got a large audience. Look to develop an active one.
9. Blog regularly, keep the conversation going.
10. Just do it. If you haven’t got a Blog on your site, set one up on a service like Blogger and link to it.

Podcasts:

Podcasts are audio blogs you can subscribe to, listen to on your computer or download to your MP3 player. As sound media they are accessible, direct and potentially very powerful ways of telling stories. They can also be boring, self-indulgent and top-down.

Top ten tips for effective Podcasting

1. Think stories. Structure the podcast with a beginning, middle and end.
2. Think content not messages. You’re involved in a relationship with people, you’re not delivering a  message to a niche.
3. Use a human voice. Your delivery doesn’t have to be perfect but it does have to sound like you mean it.
4. Use different voices. Get your service users or stakeholders to add their stories.
5. If you’re trying to talk to young people, don’t sound as if you’re trying to talk to young people! Don’t pretend you’re 16, get a 16 year-old to do it.
6. Be creative. Use music, sound collages, recordings to vary the story.
7. Use talent. If you know young people who make music commission an intro or a soundtrack and give them a full credit.
8. Make it regular. People subscribe to podcasts give them regular programmes.
9. Invite conversations. Use a Blog to get your listeners discussing the podcast and contributing ideas and content.
10. Just do it. If you can’t host your own podcast, use a service like Clickcaster or Loudblog.