According to Roger Burks and NTEN, our identity- and personality-less nonprofit blogs need less brochure speak and more authentic, engaging stories.

He offers these five element of a successful nonprofit blog:

I stumbled across this research (thanks, Heather @ Diosa and Adam at LEWIS PR) giving you four more business cases to be blogging:

71% have greater visibility in their industry
63% said clients purchased products and services

56% stated their company was now regarded as a thought leader
40% have been asked to speak at conferences

These stats, though a couple of years old, create some of the best support for blogs as marketing, expertise-building and networking tools – so, what are you waiting for?

Apparently, yes. Downloading songs for free is destroying the profits of the traditional recording companies. But that doesn’t mean that musicians can no longer make a living creating music. They just have to go about it in a different way.

This week, my favourite podcast, Planet Money (from NPR) did a profile of a successful singer-songwriter (you’ve never heard of) who makes a very comfortable living giving away his music on his blog.

Blogs are great testing grounds for honing our storytelling craft, and should be a place to play with the types of stories we tell and the way they’re delivered.

Once you’ve identified the goals of your blog and figured out who your audience is (Session 1), choose and experiment with your stories from a place that makes use of your values and your value.

Here are a couple of methods to work with:

WordPress.com puts a link to the categories your blog posts are filed under.

This sounds great, but it’s not. People follow these links, expecting to read more posts on the topic on your blog. But you end up sending people to a random page of vaguely related posts by hundreds of other WordPress.com bloggers.

Here are two ways to avoid this problem.

We’ve been running the Blogging for People Who Should workshop for a year now, and have taught a lot of people the basics of spreading the word online about the work they do. Now we’re delivering the first online version of the workshop.

Ever wondered how Google comes up with their search results? Here’s a great documentary from CBC’s Sunday Edition explaining that and much more. Well worth a listen for any blogger.

Whether you’re in the searching, ladder-climbing or sector changing mode, you’ve got a reason to start (or recommit to) your career-focused blog.

A blog is a great way to showcase who you are and what you want to offer. When you begin sharing the story of your work, your unique combination of training, experience and values come together to create a picture of your ideal role and team. Rather than pigeon-holing, this helps focus your job search efforts and helps employers …

Have you ever read a review for an MP3 player that’s not an iPod?  The reviewer is obliged to mention the king of all MP3 players, and compare the new product to it, usually unfavorably (Zune, anyone?)

This leaves the reader to pose the simple question: If I want an MP3 player, why should I buy anything that’s not an iPod? There are reasons why some MP3 players will make you happier than an iPod, but they are specific and rarely …

One of the unexpected joys of running the weeknight workshop series “Blogging for People Who Should” is getting to sample some fun cheeses. On my way to work on workshop days, I walk through Kensington Market and pick up some snacks for the session: fresh organic veggies, dips, olives, cookies, crackers and best of all, cheese.

If you don’t offer some kind of food at workshops that start right after the workday ends, people have to scramble to grab something quick …