Either you’ve been tasked with starting your company’s blog, or you just think it’s a good idea. Now what?

Unless you’ve already dipped a toe in the blogging pond, the entire experience can seem overwhelming. Since any corporate marketing initiative comes with a lead time – consisting of everything from design and development to legal approvals – the best first step is to start a blog of your own. As your company is going through the necessary machinations, you can take the time to get a feel for what blogging is.

This may seem like a big step, but it’s actually rather tame. Don’t spend too much time planning (or worrying about what you’ll write). Just head over to WordPress, register and look around.

While approval processes and messaging are being negotiated, you can discover what it takes to write, post an image, embed a video and publish a blog post. You’ll learn what the various buttons do, how to make the most of the different features available and generally become more comfortable with the technology involved in blogging.

Though you may find you enjoy blogging while embarking on this pre-corporate experiment, what’s more important is that you’ll demystify the process for yourself. You won’t have to guess as to how bloggers come up with ideas or turn raw text into posts that the entire world can read – you’ll actually be doing it. The magic will disappear, and you’ll become much, much more comfortable.

Eventually, of course, the corporate blogging initiative will be approved, your environment will be ready and you’ll graduate from the minors to the big leagues. When this happens, you won’t have to scramble to figure out how posts are scheduled or how to tag your articles effectively.

Does it work?

Before I had the enter:marketing blog – or any of the other corporate blogs I’ve worked on – I had my personal blog. Not only did it help me learn the basics (and some tricks along the way), but it’s become a great test bed. I played with Twitter integrations, the WordPress reblog feature and tag clouds on my personal blog before making decisions about these features (and others) on the corporate blogs I’ve managed.

Seeing how a particular plugin or design element can play out over time can make a profound difference in how you move forward, especially since you can act from a position of knowledge instead of waiting to see how decisions work out once they’re live.

Know something about your new corporate blog before you launch it. Start and maintain a personal blog, even if you don’t update it regularly. The insights you gain will help your company with its early steps into social media marketing, and you’ll have more confidence in every step you take.

[Originally published on Technorati]