[Photo credit: Vintage Wedding Postcard ~ Bride & Groom, on Flickr]

So you’ve decided to start a blog – good for you! Blogs are important ways for you to build a faithful following and enrich your site with valuable content.

But before you open up your first free Blogger or Wordpress account, think about how that blog will integrate with your overall communications strategy and online presence. Websites and blogs should support each other, not compete. Too many efforts are siloed, the blog hanging off the side like an extra appendage, or vice versa.

A few ideas for integrating them more closely:

Publish blog entries directly into your website. If what you’re writing in the blog relates to your site, make it show up there. Vice versa, if you’re creating content within your main website that could be useful for your blog readers, republish.

Share tags. Tags, or categories, can be shown on both website material and blog entries. Link them together.

Make the blog appear within the framework of your website. The Talance blog is actually on Wordpress while our website is on Drupal. But we’ve made them look the same so you never really feel like you’re leaving our website.

Create a related links section at the bottom of blog entries that refer back to related material on your main website.

Create a Feedback page on your blog that links back to your website feedback page.

One of the nice benefits of our Talance’s Massachusetts Non-profit Social Media Report is how many conversations it’s opening up about how non-profits are actually using social media – or struggling with how to use it.

Someone in one of my networks said her organization doesn’t use social media precisely because it does work. This is a charity that receives loads of requests for services, but that’s sorely needing donations. She’s afraid if she does start a social media program, she’ll be overwhelmed by more requests for service that she can’t handle.

My suggestion to her and anyone thinking about a social media program is to focus your efforts. Social media shouldn’t be a distraction. You’ve got to fine-tune what kinds of programs you’re using and what results you hope to get from them. If you need donors, then you don’t need to focus on awareness campaigns. You need to focus on fund development campaigns.

Make sure you know what you want to get out of any marketing program before you start one. (And of course, the best place to start is by reading the benchmarking survey.)