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 I’ve already discussed why having a style manual for any blog or website, no matter how small, is so important. This week, let’s look at how to actually create that style manual and add some continuity to your web-copy.
The first option is to buy or download a ready-made style manual. The Chicago or Oxford ones are very good. If you are looking for something a little more individual or your site needs a young, funky style, you’re better off writing your own.
The first thing to think about is the overall tone you want to convey in the text on your site. Think of three key words to describe what you want your ‘voice’ to sound like. For example, the key words for this site would be simple, honest, and trustworthy. Once you have your key words, put them at the top of the page. It’s time to move onto the next step.
The next step is to think about your target audience. Who are they? How do they speak? How are they used to being spoken to? Write a short paragraph explaining who your target audience is and how you intend to speak to them.
Now it’s time for the nuts and bolts stuff. You need to decide how you will write your headings (title case or sentence case), how you are going to use punctuation and how you are going to spell certain words. You may have been taught in school that there is only one correct way to use grammar and punctuation. This isn’t the case. Certain things, such as commas, colons, hyphens and dashes can be used in a variety of different ways and the way in which they are used can have a big visual or stylistic impact on your site.
Spelling can say a lot about you, too. For a more traditional company, you might want to use ‘E-mail’ but if your company is younger and especially if you are in the technology field, you are more likely to use ‘email’. Other decisions like ‘website/web site’ and the capitalisation of the ‘I’ in ‘Internet’ can also have an effect on how your company is perceived.
Write down all your decisions on grammar, spelling, and punctuation in a series of bullet points underneath clear headings. Remember, clarity is key here. There’s no point in having a style manual if nobody other than you can understand it.
If there are any points you are unsure of, use your favourite websites for reference. Choose a site with a style you like and look closely at their use of spelling and grammar. You don’t need to copy it exactly but taking the elements you like and using them for your own site is fine.
Once you have your style manual, print it out or post it somewhere where people writing for your site can access it easily. Some sites make their style manuals public and some large companies, like Microsoft, even sell them.
It takes quite a long time to write a style manual but it’s a really worthwhile investment and will save you a lot of time in the long-run. Especially if you want your site to grow in the future.
Today’s image is by Dimitri Popov.
 I’ve lost count of the amount of times people have asked me how long it takes to run a blog. The truth is, there’s not really an answer to this question. There are so many different kinds of blogs in the world used for different purposes and they all take different amounts of time to maintain.
For people looking to make a living from advertising, affiliate schemes or selling their own e-books and consulting services via their blog, I’d say the absolute minimum time investment would be two-and-a-half hours a day, five days a week.
To establish yourself as a blogger takes a lot of work. You need to great content for your site and post regularly. To see reasonable growth in the first three months, you need to post at least five times a week, it’s OK to pull back a little later on. Especially if you have guest posters to help you out with content.
You also need to market that content by guest posting, commenting, writing articles for free article sites, creating Hubpages hubs or Squidoo lenses, tweeting… the list goes on.
For corporate blogs, though, the story is a little different. New sites will obviously have to do a lot of work to increase their page rank (as any new website needs to) but companies with established websites are likely to already have a decent page rank and be well-optimised for search engines. This mean that if they choose to add a blog to their site later on, a lot of the link-building work will be done already.
Not all corporate blogs are the same, though. Usually, they fall onto one of four types, each taking a different amount of time to run.
1. ‘Update’ blogs. This kind of corporate blog contains updates on the company or their products. It is essentially a glorified ‘news’ section. Update blogs don’t take long to maintain as long as your company actually has a lot of news. If your company has enough news or updates to make this kind of blog worthwhile, the only time it takes is enough time to write the articles.
Update blogs don’t bring in traffic to company websites. They can help inject a bit more of your personality into the site, though, especially with a decent style manual. They can also help with your site’s page rank because Google likes sites that are updated regularly.
2. ‘Authority’ blogs. An authority blog is full of insightful articles related to the industry your company is involved in. It establishes your company as experts within a particular field or niche.
This kind of blog takes longer and involves commenting on other blogs, forums, and guest-posting in order to build effectively. If you’re an efficient writer, already an expert in the area and know the basics of SEO copywriting, it’s possible to establish a blog like this in about two hours a day. Obviously, more time spent will yield better results.
3. ‘Lifestyle’ blogs. This kind of blog is about either a lifestyle your customers can hope to achieve by buying your product or just putting your product or service in a real-life context.
Lifestyle blogs are journalistic in style and often presented like a magazine, a little like ‘advertorials’ would be. Six hours a week would be enough to fill a blog like this with interesting content and start getting some links back in.
4. ‘Feeder’ blogs. Feeder blogs are separate from the main company website and usually have a different kind of branding but contain links back to the company and sometimes a ‘Powered by (insert name here)’ badge.
It’s easier to build up a steady readership for these blogs as people don’t tend to see them as commercial websites. It does, however, take longer to build them in the first place because you can’t borrow the existing page rank and search engine optimisation of an established website.
This kind of blog takes the longest to build because it’s essentially like building an independent blog. I’d estimate a minimum of 2 hours a day for blogging, commenting and getting/writing guest posts then another hour or more using social media like Twitter, Facebook etc, to drive traffic to the blog.
5. ‘Make a million dollars in three seconds’ blogs. Some people make serious money through internet marketing, Google adwords and affiliate schemes. Many of these people will offer to share their ’secrets’ with you in their $800 courses and workbooks.
The truth is, the biggest secret for making a lot of money in the affiliate game is that you have to put in a huge time investment. I heard someone say, once, that these guys work 16 hours a day so they can make money while they sleep. If you are trying to optimise your company blog to compete with these people, you need to put a lot of time and effort into it.
Sometimes, in this case, having a lower-maintenance update or lifestyle blog on your website and buying Google Adwords to generate the keyword traffic you want can be a more cost-effective solution for small businesses.
As I said at the beginning, asking how long it takes to run a blog is like asking how long a piece of string is. If you know exactly what kind of string you are talking about and how it will be used, you’re in a better position to make an estimate.
Image: Antonio Jiménez Alonso
In honour of Ada Lovelace day, I thought I’d put together a ‘top 10′ list of female bloggers. Then, I realised – I hate ‘top 10′ lists of bloggers. It’s always so hard to justify how to place people and whether the list should be based on traffic, influence, or a list of 100 other variables one could rate a blog on.
To avoid this problem, I decided to put together a list of my favourite female bloggers. This list is completely biased towards my own personal taste in blogs but I think there is a lot that any blogger can learn from each of the bloggers in this list.
10. Tina Roth Eisenberg – Swiss Miss. Minimal words but fantastic taste when it comes to design.
9. Skellie – Skelliewag. Maximal words and advice on on blogging, entrepreneurship, web content, social media, happiness in work, creativity, learning, expertise and business. The thing I love about Skellie’s blog is the amount of detail and care she puts into each post and that she doesn’t plaster her site with adverts for ‘miracle launch products’ as other bloggers in her niche tend to.
8. James Chartrand – Men with Pens. No, I’ve not gone mad. This still is a list of female bloggers. For anyone who doesn’t already know James’ story, it really makes great reading. If you’re interested in writing, you need to have Men with Pens in your RSS reader. It’s just plain great!
7. Gala Darling – gala darling. Fantastic fashion blogger who I believe also writes for Cosmopolitan. Gala’s blog proves that you injecting your own personality into your blog is every bit as important as writing in short sentences, using bullet points, SEOing everything, blah blah blah.
6. Cyan Ta’eed – Freelance Switch. Cyan’s blog helped me become a freelancer so I guess I am a bit biased here. If you want to break out of the cubicle, Freelance Switch is full of valuable, realistic advice the cartoons on the blog are hilarious.
5. Karen Cheng – Snippets of Life. Karen’s lifestyle blog has won awards all over the place. The thing I like most about it, though is the food photography adn really simple recipes.
4.Xeni Jardin – Boing Boing. Xeni Jardin is the co-editor of Boing Boing and her articles regularly appear in major magazines and newspapers. She is also a keen language learner and has studied more than a dozen languages.
3. Naomi Dunford – IttyBiz. If a friend asks me questions about marketing, blogging or anything related to running a small business, I tell them to go straight to IttyBiz, sign up for all the e-mail courses and spend as much time as they have free reading through the site. It’s just the most sensible, entertaining and valuable advice out there.
2. Ariana Huffington – The Huffington Post. The Huffington post is huge and tops the major newspapers as a go-to source for political news in the US for lot of people. I think this blog proves the political influence blogs can have nowadays.
1. Gina Trapani – Lifehacker. As the founding editor of Lifehacker, Gina is responsible for one of my absolute favourite blogs of all time. Lifehacker teaches you how to do everything in the world, and should be compulsory reading for everyone in the universe.
 All large websites have a style manual with information on how the text should written. A style manual contains information on the ‘tone’ of the writing, the general style, and specific points on punctuation.
A lot of people assume that there’s one correct form of grammar or punctuation – usually the one they were taught at school. This isn’t the case. As anyone who has wondered whether to use an Oxford (or Harvard) comma or how to spell email (or e-mail) can testify, the English language is very flexible and many choices that supposed ‘grammarians’ would deem ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’, are, in fact, a matter of personal or stylistic preference.
So, if the English language is so flexible, why do big sites and companies need style manuals to tell people how to write?
1. Consistency. If, for example, you choose to use single rather than double quotation marks for direct references, you need to do this throughout the site. If you don’t, it won’t look like a clear, stylistic choice. It will just look like you don’t know how to use punctuation.
2. Consistency. A lot of choices you make in your style manual will be to reflect your brand’s identity. Whether you you use ‘email’ or ‘e-mail’ can be used to show if you are modern and relaxed or more formal and traditional. These choices will only be effective, though, if they are consistent throughout your site.
3. Consistency. Your style manual doesn’t just apply to your web content. It will also apply to correspondence, presentation materials and anything else you need to write. This is particularly useful for reinforcing your brand when it is different to your actual personality.
4. Future-proofing. Even if your blog or website is small at the moment, you’ll grow as time goes on. Waiting until you have hundreds of pages of content before you create your style manual will mean you need to go back and edit each of those pages one by one for continuity. Writing a style manual before you start will make editing easier and save you a lot of work in the long-run.
5. Collaboration. I was going to write ‘consistency’ again, but I think you get the idea. When collaborating with other people or employing a freelance writer to work on your site, having a style manual will save a lot of questions and ensure (you guessed it) consistency in your site.
6. Branding. This relates to point two but I’d like to expand on it a bit further. Many people like to use an existing style manual like the Chicago or Oxford style manuals. This is fine to help with accuracy but limits you somewhat in using the copy on your site to express your brand. If you want your site written in the style of a newspaper, using a style manual is ideal. If you are running a ‘Web 2.0′ site about third-tribe marketing, though, injecting your own personality into the copy on the site is essential.
Before you write your own style manual, take a look at some others and compare them with the brands they represent. Although style manuals are generally quite complicated-looking documents, it doesn’t take too long to write a basic style guide and you can add to it as you come across new stylistic choices in your writing.
Next week, I’ll show you an easy way to write your own style guide and make sure the copy on your site really reflects your brand.
Image: Lavinia Marin
 Leo Babauta, Seth Godin, Darren Rowse, Jeremy Schoemaker. If you’re a blogger, you’ll already know these names. If not, you’ll probably recognise their heads. They all have two things in common. Firstly, they’re great bloggers. Secondly, they’re all bald.
These guys are just the tip of the bald blogger iceberg. What is it that links blogging and head-shaving so inextricably, though?
Before we move on, I have an admission to make. I also shave my head. I first started doing it when I was researching an essay on minimalist music and art at university. It seemed to fit well with what I was doing and I was convinced that I wanted to be a minimalist.
That leads on rather nicely to the first of our bald bloggers. Leo Babauta, one of the blogosphere’s superstars and a personal hero of mine (anyone who can achieve what he has and take care of 6 kids deserves instant hero status). Leo’s shaven head fits perfectly with his minimalist ethos and I’m sure it has inspired many time-pressed blogger dads to follow his lead.
The next on our list and probably the most famous of all, Seth Godin, makes a feature of his baldness on his site where readers are encouraged to click his head to get to more of his links. Although the reason for his baldness isn’t clear, it’s a distinctive look and even part of his branding
Darren Rowse, the man behind Problogger and Digital Photography School recently wrote about shaven-headedness being part of his life-changing experience on a road trip he took with his friends. The photo of him that Chitika uses on their ads also emphasises the undecorated nature of his scalp to good effect.
Jeremy Schoemaker (Shoemoney.com), gets asked about it so much that he even made a video on the topic.
Anyway, all this got me thinking – does baldness have an effect on blogging prowess? My initial thought on how to test this was to try growing my hair. That would take too long, though, and I’m afraid it might affect my blogging ability. I can’t risk that, so I’m looking for a volunteer. If you are feeling like your blog is going nowhere or you want to boost your traffic and are prepared to shave your head, get in touch and we’ll feature you on the Webia Massa blog.
Today’s image is by Cecilia Picco.
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