How to write a blog? Answer: I don't know, but I like Astraware's approach

I've now spent two months trying to get a feel for how to write a blog - but think I've got a long way to go yet.

The accepted wisdom is that you should stick to things you know about, and take a brickbat to everything else - in fact the same advice which Keith Waterhouse once gave to Tony Parsons.

If you dig through the links on my FriendFeed trail, you will find countless tips from blogging luminaries such as Seth Godin.

From what little I've read in the past couple of months, I've found that his approach is as much to do with how you do business and how you treat your customers, as it is to what you sell.

If that's the case, while there are plenty of blogs out there which might be considered to be the best in their field, there is one which I must mention: Astraware

It is a long-running blog from a computer games company that I first discovered while working as a business journalist in 2001/2.

The company was founded by two Keele University graduates, David Oakley and Howard Wilkinson, who decided to start up their own company on the back of their own coding skills - skills which many teenage lads in the 80s and 90s would have died for.

Since then, the business they built has become an established developer and publisher of casual games for platforms including the Palm, Symbian and iPhone operating systems.

During the time I worked as a business journalist, I probably wrote half a dozen articles about the company. Partly because I was interested in their products, and partly because I, like many kids of my generation, grew up loving the idea of teenagers who made a mint from programming games on the C64 and Sinclair Spectrum.

After all, here was two lads who had the courage of their convictions and actually done it.

However, there was a third element: the personality of the company. As many will know, the statistics for any new company to survive its first 12 months are not good.

Depending on the field you go into, every seven of out of 10 entrepreneurs will fail in their first attempt in business during the first year.

I've tended to find that most entrepreneurs in this phase are desperate for any publicity and can be quite ruthless about their demands in what they want from their publicity - even if they don't realise it.

I never got that once from Astraware. Indeed, I've always found the team at the company to be friendly, competant, and generous with their knowledge.

Despite that, they managed to increase sales and gain recognition as an exemplar to other would-be software and technology-based entrepreneurs in North Staffordshire - region best known until the past decade or so for its skills in producing coal, steel at potteries.

So why do I like their blog? It gives you a good steer about the way that the company is run, and the people that run it.

There are reasonably regular entries which give fans updates on the latest products to come from the company and the platforms that are being developed.

But over the years you will find references to children that have been born in the company, recipes and other things which help reinforce the ethos of the company.

It's that generosity that makes me a fan of this company, in the same way that I and other gamers are fans of games by Valve, who made Half-Life, Criterion Games, behind the Burnout series of games, and even SensiSoft, who made legendary C64 games such as Wizball, Parallax, Sensible Soccer and the Shoot Em Up Construction Kit (SEUCK).

And if you can make your customers (readers) fans, you can start to build a solid fan base for your blog.