Two industry association blogs that are branded well and have a good presence are California Raisins and National Peanut Board, found at these respective sites:
http://blog.loveyourraisins.com http://energyforthegoodlife.org
Best practices these sites have incorporated:
1. Create a unique URL address.
Have fun with it. But make sure that it represents your brand and the content. It should be search-engine friendly, easy to remember and read well in print.
2. Brand it.
Design your blog to be consistent with your brand and other marketing communications materials—especially if your blog is hosted outside of your current Web site.
3. Cross promote social media.
Utilize social media icons for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. to promote your other social media outlets to your readers. Because you have a captured audience, it’s a great opportunity to create connections in other channels that your readers may also frequent.
4. Post often.
Anything less than one post every two weeks will likely aid in readership loss. We recommend posting at least once a week, but the more the merrier! With that said, you also don’t want to post too often, especially if a reader has signed up to your RSS feed. You don’t want to “annoy” them. The best rule of thumb is to think about how often you like to receive content and when you are most likely to read it.
5. Be relevant.
I think this goes without saying. At times, you may feel like you are clawing for topics to post about and notice your posts start to sway toward irrelevancy. The best advice is to stop thinking so hard! Comment on personal experiences or articles you’ve read, ask an expert to be a guest contributor or even use your own readers’ comments to spark a new topic.