Having (or not having) a blog can have an impact on your business.
But it can be challenging to determine whether or not it is the right way to spend resources.
However, a blog can be an incredibly useful tool for a fledgling journal (and an established one). In this article, we’ll go over some of the reasons why having a blog can be beneficial to your business and your journal.
What does a blog do?
This is often where the discussion about blogs will start. What does a blog do? How does a blog help your journal? Why should you use limited resources in order to produce something that people might not read?
Here we’re going to cover three important uses for a blog, one downside, and one piece of advice. Let’s start with the three uses:
- Your blog can be used to share news;
- You can highlight collaborations and events;
- Your blog can be used to highlight research.
There are other uses, but these are three of the most important things to keep in mind from the perspective of a journal.
Your blog can be used to share news
Your journal is a company, and people might be interested to know what your company is doing.
Are you expanding?
Have you started a new journal?
Will you also be involved in conferences?
There are many pieces of information you might want to share. In addition, sharing this is a sign of transparency. When people are considering publishing in a journal, they want to know about it. Consider that your blog is a powerful tool for communication. Remember that your company needs some form of outlet for announcements.
You can highlight collaborations and events
You can talk about all the different elements of your business using a blog. But what about talking about other people? Your journal will be involved with other parties. As such, you’ll be able to amplify them as well. When you collaborate with an institution, sharing news about that event with others is good. Not only does it help to promote your even and your involvement in it, but it also helps to inform about any potential partners you might have.
Whenever you get involved in collaborative events you have a unique opportunity. And that opportunity is to expand your message beyond your own spheres.
Using your blog as an opportunity to promote others can have a major impact on your own reputation. Remember, as we’ve discussed before, your reputation is important and you should try to improve it at any opportunity.
Your blog can be used to highlight research
As your journal grows, you will want to direct attention to the research being published in it. Running a journal is not like running a bakery. At a bakery, you can count on regular repeat business, in fact, some people might come in daily.
But research takes years to complete. Sometimes decades. Because of that, you can’t rely on the same people to support your business in the long run.
If people like your journal, they might submit their next paper to your journal, but that could be years from now. Promoting research accomplishes two separate things. First of all, the authors you promote will have a positive experience from this. Researchers love talking about the work they do, so getting quotations from them when you write the content can be helpful as well. The second thing is that you’re creating a space for other researchers to see that you are serious about the work and the field.
Exposing the work of your authors to the world is a great marketing tool to help you build a reputation as a serious publisher.
The bad part of a blog
Resources. And then more resources. And then time. Also resources.
Running a blog means that you need to commit resources to an ongoing project which may not necessarily have immediately tangible benefits. It’s possible that these benefits never quite become clear, but there’s a reason why so many companies have blogs.
They work.
But because time is money, a blog has a number of associated costs.
In addition to the costs involved in paying someone to write, you also have to consider that there are costs related to IT.
As they say, you need to spend money to make money, and in this case, you need to spend money to get your message out into the world.
Additional things to know about a blog
Blogs are both simple and straightforward, but can also be very complicated.
The difference between these two is whether or not you take them seriously and learn about how they work. Having someone on staff that understands search engine optimization (SEO) and how you can grow your traffic can be helpful. It can be the difference between 10 visitors and 1000.
Remember, that in the same way that you do research about journals, institutions, competition, and other business related matters, so too should you do research about blogs.
Remember, understanding how a tool works can help you build a better journal.