A recent Wall Street Journal article based on a Forrester Research review of 90 enterprise blogs describes most B2B blogs as “dull, drab, and don’t stimulate discussion.” A few highlights from the WSJ article:

• 74% rarely get comments
• 70% stuck to business or technical topics
• 56% simply regurgitated press releases or other already-public news
• 53% of B2B marketers say that blogging has marginal significance or is irrelevant to their strategies

I’ve written before about the success we had at NetQoS with www.networkperformancedaily.com. But what I’ve never talked about were the challenges we faced in the early stages of the blog’s development. At first, we struggled to make a network management blog interesting without the ability to rely on a technical thought leader. So, we took the unusual approach of hiring a full time blogger – a former journalist who could not only report on news but who could entertain and dig deep into stories. Something like an investigative reporter with a twisted sense of humor.

We positioned the blog as “anything and everything that affects network performance from the mundane to the bizzare” and published sometimes humorous, sometimes scandalous, and often educational content. We mixed in relevant company content and interviews with technologists on staff. The blog was an immediate success. One of the early stories our blogger broke netted inbound links/mentions from the Washington Post, Wired Magazine, etc. At its peak, the blog reached 10,000 monthly readers. The key to success was developing original, humorous content, fun videos, and digging deep into breaking news stories.

I am now the VP of Marketing for BreakingPoint and we just re-launched our blog/community. While we don’t have a full-time blogger, we are working with some of the more visible experts in the company including our CTO, Dennis Cox, and others experts in our BreakingPoint Labs research team including HD Moore to provide useful and entertaining posts and videos that are relevant to our target audience. We are just getting started but already have more than 350 subscribers and I’m looking forward to another blog success. One of the keys to driving readership is the use of Twitter and other social media sites to highlight new content on the site and attract new readers.

Looking for great tips on how to make your blog a success? Try The Secret to Writing a Successful and Outstanding Blog by Liz Strauss, one of the most influential relational blogger on the Internet.

Would also love to hear from the rest of you on techniques for finding your blog “voice.”