Making Sure To Protect Your Privacy While Blogging
It's a fact; the internet is a vast and potentially dangerous place. It is now so easy for anyone to get personal on blogs, like using photos, voice and more, but should they?
As entrepreneurs, this can be a problem. People say to make your blog personal, share information and build a relationship with your readers, but what kind of relationship? Where do you draw the line? On one hand, you want to be approachable and open to your customers. On the other hand, you value your privacy. Ah, the dilemma.
There is no right or wrong answer but there is a lot of things you can to protect your privacy. While much of it is common sense, sometimes they are easy to overlook during our every day course of business. So let's review what you can do.
Who's Blog Is This? As a passionate and involved business owner it is often difficult to get away from thinking that you and your business are one in the same, but it is important to do so. When blogging you should definitely bring your personality in, but also consider keeping it focused on business and away from giving out too much personal information.
Business Information Only Set limits for yourself what information to share besides the obvious like mailing address and telephone numbers, which should be different from your personal one. Consider things like: What pictures are you willing to put up? If you're comfortable with putting out your own picture, it can help build your credibility but what about pictures of you and your family? Would you share your children's names and ages? What information about your spouse or other family members are you willing to put out? What about your past? When going on vacation should you post it on your blog? Telling people your offices will be closed should suffice.
Set a sort of agreement with yourself. It's normally not a good idea to get into personal issues on a business blog. For example, a post about an idea that came to you during Father's Day barbecue is OK, but if you tell people the barbecue was at Mary's house who lives out in ABC town and accompany it with a picture. That *may* be a bit too much information. Write just enough to give people a brief background to set your story. Everything else is overkill.
Consider drawing up an employee blogging policy even if you don't have employees. Think of how you'd advise an employee and apply it to yourself. And when you do have employees, you'll already have a blogging policy in place.
Review, Review, Review Because blogging is so easy to do, sometimes we tend to hit the post button too quickly. I've been guilty of that. Try to adopt a review-before-publish rule. I sometimes leave my posts overnight so I can see it with a fresh eye the next day.
Reviewing each post after you write it is a great way to prevent posting information that can be used, or used collectively with other information, to put you or your privacy in jeopardy. It would be a good idea to keep a short review checklist you can pull up each time you make a blog post.
Blogging can have some gray areas. One great way to be sure you don't give out too much information is to check before you post every time. You'll soon develop a knack for being frank and sincere every time, while still keeping your private life to yourself.
Affectionately nicknamed Tech Diva by her peers, Lynette Chandler regularly dispenses blogging and RSS help to countless business owners. Visit http://www.BloggingStarterPack.com to learn more about blogging and get a copy of her video free.
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