Who
The first question to consider is who is your audience. For me it's our clients and fellow designers. We also have content geared more towards programmers and crypto currency enthusiasts. This means every article isn't written for every user, so we use tagging functionality to keep related content together.
What
My personal blog is where I share works in progress, glimpses into my artistic process, and work by others that I am inspired by. This blog reflects our company, our vision, and our love of sharing knowledge.
When
It's better to post once weekly than to post 5 things at once and then nothing for a month. Currently here and on my art site, I'm blogging for every weekday for 30 days and Dave's helping. This blog post was inspired by an email I wrote to one of our clients this morning.
A standard feature we use for our client blogs is Scheduler. There is a "scheduler" tab in the lower left tabs of our Drupal forms that gives authors the ability to schedule blog posts. I love that a post can go live when when I don't even have time to be at the computer. This is especially handy for content that isn't time sensitive and also helps me to think in terms of ongoing, related content.
On this blog, I often pre-write the Typography Tuesday and Type on Thursday posts and use scheduler liberally for them. Friday is dedicated to Robot Sex Nickel updates and market recaps so those need to be written on Fridays due to their time sensitive content. We sort our content with tagging functionality that gives us the ability to create nice listing pages and tags Google+ pages.
Where
Share everywhere, share often! I recommend setting up your blog to auto-update your social media accounts. I use If This Than That to keep my networks current and have posted how to do that here.
Why
A blog drives traffic to your business. Your content shows potential clients your areas of expertise and helps with search engine optimization (SEO). Search engines give preference to sites that have regular updates. Google Trends is an excellent tool that suggest words to help with SEO.
How
Image: Please include an image! I made this list of sites that have photos that are free to use and free of copyright! Some need attribution in the form of the photographers name or a link to their site, but most do not. This image is from Death to the Stock Photo although they do not require attribution.
If your content management system has the option, go ahead and use the same image as the teaser and in the main body. In Drupal, we use these images to make listing pages and social networks often use the teaser image.
Summary: Since CMS varies, if you have a summary field, use it. In Drupal, this is immediately above the main text body and extremely helpful for designing the listing page. Like the teaser image, the summary can show up in search results and social network posts.
Abstract: Use abstract meta tags if your CMS has them. In Drupal, this is one of the vertical tabs in the bottom left corner. It should be 150 characters in sentence format and include hot search terms within a concise article description. In addition to helping with SEO, it can be used to customize search results. My dynamic home page was only showing the copyright line as the description and I used meta tags to dictate what the search engines would display. When writing abstracts, consider using Google Trends to help pick words that are searched for often.
Have fun and happy blogging!