One of the hot topics from the Web writing workshops last week was the use of blogging software. Notice that I didn't say "blogs."

I think the "ah-ha" moment for many people was thinking about blogs in a different way. Not the "Here's what I had for lunch today." way or "Why I think Sean Penn is the greatest actor of his generation." way, but as a way to organize content.

Newsletters are a perfect example of "bloggable" content. I think one of the examples from the workshop was actually called a "Blogazine."

You can look at the newsletter example from a couple of angles. One, you can post one newsletter article at a time, rather than saving them for a quarterly newsletter. This gives you the advantage of communicating with your clients on a more regular basis.

Alternately, you could use your blog to archive newsletter articles after the newsletter has been sent. That's an easy way to make the transition from a traditional printed and mailed newsletter to an electronic version. Keep them both running simultaneously.

Another advantage to the blog format is that the search function searches only on your blog. On your website, the search function searches the entire ANR server.

"Tagging" also allows you to group articles by subject matter. That feature is not fully functional in the ANR Blog software but the Web Action Team tells me they're working on it.

The key to a successful blog is regular posting. If you start a blog you should commit to posting regularly. Less than once a month and your readers are going to wonder what's going on.

Another traditional blog feature is comments, and some potential bloggers have expressed hesitation about blogging because of this feature. Fear not! You can turn off the comments feature. You can also control who can comment as well as review comments before they are posted.

More about blogging, including how to use the ANR Blog, in my next post.

There are 25 blogs in the ANR Blog Roll - any ANR bloggers want to comment on how it's working, or not working, for you?