At some point in the near future I swear I will get back to the intro to cause blogging series. In the meantime, Josh Katherman has a great short and sweet post on Best Blogging Practices.

A couple of points that he makes that I’d like to emphasize:

Give your readers a reason to share. Useful information. This sums it up quite well. Readers need a reason to want to share all the knowledge and information you’re providing to them…

There are many ways to practice this in a cause blog. For example, say you write a blog for the skin cancer foundation. How about a post on the best ways to minimize sun exposure? You could write a post explaining the difference in the SPF ratings and which ones experts recommend. How about a post on how often you should get moles screened? These are informative posts that your audience can use and are likely to share with others. This is the opposite of only writing posts about what the foundation is doing.

He also advises to stick to a specific topic:

While there are exceptions in every niche, you’ll mostly want to stick to one general “theme” of information. The more categories you have random things, the more polluted and dissolved your information will be in the eyes of search engines.

Having more categories and random topics also creates a lack of focus that will effect your readership, not just search engines or visitors from search.

Sometimes it takes awhile to get into the groove, to see what specific subjects get the most interest and are most relevant to your audience. On the other hand, it can save you a lot of time and hassle if you start off with a specific niche. Instead of blogging about your entire operation, why not just set up a blog for a specific program? For example, a food bank could focus their blog just on childhood hunger programs like backpacks and Kids Cafe.

The only point of disagreement I have with Josh’s advice is about Digg. I have used Digg over the years but have not found much benefit from it. On the other hand it is easy to set up your blog to automatically post links to your Facebook and Twitter profiles. Just be sure to set up a Facebook page for your cause instead of a personal page.