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Partitioning Blog Activities Series – Part 1: The Model
written by Hans
February 15th, 2008Welcome to Catchtheposts! I hope that the content of this blog will be helpful to you. Don't hesitate to use the contact form to send me your comments, feedback, suggested topics or questions. Thanks for visiting!
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I don’t know for you, but my mind continuously tends to partition things to make them more understandable. I guess this a normal behavior. 
My thoughts were running through the overall blog process. There are so many activities related to blog. Would it be a big challenge to partition the overall blog process? Of course, the answer is a big YES, but since I really like challenges I decided to do that exercise with all of you! I don’t pretend to do an exhausted analysis around that, but at least I guess I’ll be able to partition all the big activities into a series of 8 posts. I’ll ask you to help me all through this activity by submitting your comments. In order to do this partitioning, I’ll base the exercise on the traditional business structure.
The Traditional Business Structure
Traditionally a business is structured with different departments. Depending on the nature of the organization, some department may be omitted and some could be added. However, generally we can find the following departments:
1. Finance
2. R&D (Research and Development)
3. Sales and Marketing
4. Human Resource
5. Production
6. Quality Control
The Starting Point
Obviously, the traditional business model could be applied to blog; this is just a matter of semantic! However, as for any business with limited resource (human as well as financial), the partitioning into departments isn’t noticeable. The following demonstrate, at a very high level, how we can partition some blog activities. Note that some seems to be obvious and others more complicated!
1. Finance.
This department includes every activity related to money. It could be the earning as well as the bill you have to pay.
2. R&D (Research and development).
The R&D includes any type of activity related to information research, web design, innovation and creativity.
3. Sales and Marketing.
This department consists of any activity related to the promotion of your blog.
4. Human Resource.
The human resource (HR) is related to anyone who contributes to your blog. It also includes any kind of human concerns like motivation for example.
5. Production.
The production department consists of any activity related to the creation of the blog content.
6. Quality Control.
The quality control department is related to any activity that aims to continuously increase the quality of your blog. This includes the time you take to get the feedbacks of your audience.
This is a very high level demonstration of the blog partitioning. In fact, it gives a rough idea of the activity diversification associate with blogs. You may admit with me that a single blogger couldn’t be an expert on all these area. Some are expert with contents and other with promotion. Taking the time to do one step back could help us to properly identify our strengths and weaknesses. This could then help you to find distinctive competence.
The Puzzle, one piece at a time!
I’ll begin a series of 8 posts - including this one - in which you’ll read my thoughts about every blog partition. I wish you’ll be reading them and send me some comments and feedback. For some people, this could be seen as a useless exercise but I guess this could be helpful to better understand the overall blog process and have a big picture of how a blog works! If you think of it, this exercise could be a very good starting point to find creative idea for future discussion!
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[...] support your development strategy. We can see it like the central intelligence. As I state in the first article of this series, matching your blog with a traditional business structure is just a matter of [...]
Sounds like an interesting post series Hans. The one thing I think you might be missing out on is expansion. What’s the next step? If you’re looking to become a ProBlogger, then perhaps the blog is the end product. But if you aren’t, the blog may be more of a launching pad/marketing tool, than an end product itself.
e.g. I promote my design services through my blog. FreelanceSwitch have all sorts of services. Dozens of blogs sell books/ebooks. But they all started off as just blogs.
But also, I wanted to congratulate you on the diagram. It was great to see a large part of the post being represented visually. I hope you’ll continue doing that.
Michael, you are right. I wrote this article with a ProBlogger mindset, however it is often use as a marketing platform! Also, I really like to do visual support (schema, etc.); maybe this is a related to my background. So don’t worry, you’ll see more over time!
I really want to say that I appreciate your contribution! This is one reason why I like blogging… Having exchanges with me audience is important for me. Thanks!
Likewise. Writing comments in a good conversation can be more fun than writing the actual posts!
[...] Partitioning Blog Activities Series… [...]