A blog shouldn’t cost the earth!

I was interested to read on Cybersoc.com and Iain Dale about the cost of public sector blogs! For example, David Miliband’s blog apparently costs over £40,000 a year.

The Welfare Reform and Child Poverty blog costs £1,500 a month to run, at a cost of £2 a visitor, which is a shocking amount to spend on a PR and marketing output that should cost significantly less than advertising or traditional PR.

The fact of the matter is that blogs, by their very nature, are an extremely effective way of getting your message across in terms of cost and (in theory) time. PRBristol.co.uk cost a few hundred pounds to design (using off-the-shelf software from WordPress), host and get off the ground and nothing in-house to produce, but we have access to PRs and journalists! In other words, if you are spending the kind of sums above on blogging, you are being ripped off!

I know that I am going to rile certain members of the Bristol blogging community by saying this, as a PR myself, but rather than tying up employees’ time, who are not necessarily trained or proficient at writing, why not outsource this work? Many clients we pitch to about blogging tend to have the same response at the outset, i.e. they think they do not have the time. But a proficient PR can put together several blogs in a day, following an interview, at a fraction of the cost of a client’s valuable time. If you were to compare blogging to pay per click advertising, it is comparable if not cheaper in several markets and drives quality traffic to websites.

A successful and engaging blog is written in a style that fits the person whose blog it is, avoiding PR press release-speak or sales-speak.

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Picture by catsfather on 30 Apr 06.

Top five PR and media blogs

There are tons of blogs on the net regarding PR and media. The majority of them are from the USA, but there is emerging talent from London (surprise surprise), Leeds and the North West. The South West has been sadly lacking … until the introduction of www.prbristol.co.uk!

We are all busy people so here are my top five must reads blogs :

- Buzz Machine - JEFF JARVIS blogs about media and news

- Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni - Connecting Idea and People - “How talk and the global conversation can change lives”

- Journalism.co.uk - National blog and news site for journalists in the UK

- Online Journalism blog - online and PR journalism from Paul Bradshaw Senior Lecturer in Online Journalism and Magazines at Birmingham City University

- Guido Fawkes - A fire starter in UK politics

What are your top five blogs?

‘RSS feeds now an integral part of communication’

Research finds that more than half of adults in the USA are now relying on text messaging, blogging and other Web 2.0 tools to communicate with friends, family or colleagues.

One in ten US adults publishes a blog - double the figure of a year ago - and “RSS feeds, which make reading blogs easier, have become an integral part of the way people communicate and exchange content,” according to Universal McCann.