Content marketing through a blog is only effective if you can set up an efficient plan and workflow that will maximize your writing and promotion efforts. Your blogging efforts will suffer if you get stuck in internal bureaucracy. Here are five tips that will make your business blogging more productive and keep your projects moving forward.
1. Convince Your Boss that Blogging Matters
Perhaps the hardest sell for implementing a content marketing strategy through a blog will be to your boss. Is it going to work? You need to answer this question right off the bat for your boss or you’ll hit nothing but frustration and road blocks along the way.
HubSpot dedicates significant time to developing effective inbound marketing techniques, and their findings about blogging’s results can be staggering:
- “The average company that blogs generates 55% more website visitors, 97% more inbound links, and 434% more indexed pages.
- HubSpot’s 2011 ROI Study shows that 69% of businesses attribute their lead generation success to blogging.
- 57% of businesses have acquired a customer through their company blog.
- The Nielsen Company shows that US internet users spend 3X more time on blogs and social networks than in email.
- Inbound marketing, of which blogging is a crucial part, costs 62% less per lead than outbound marketing.â€
These are solid numbers that you can use to sell your boss on your content marketing strategy through blogging. They may even help you sell him on the next thing you need to do.
2. Develop a Blogging Team
You need partners to help you post relevant content that is accurate and won’t cause any problems for your company. The trick is to invite the right people on board without overloading your team. If you’re waiting for your boss and two other team members to get back to you about approving a post, you’re going to be stuck.
Instead, work with one other person per post, even if you have a team of writers. Set up a simple approval process, lest you lose valuable time waiting for several people to approve each post. If you have one or two people invested in the blogging process who understand how important it is, you’ll develop a more reliable work flow.
3. Create a Blogging Work Flow
Whether you share files through a collaboration tool, Google Docs, or give colleagues admin privileges on your company’s blog, you need to figure out a simple way to bring editors or reviewers into the blogging process without hindering the work flow of your blogging.
In addition, everyone on your team will benefit if you set up a simple style guide that will help each blogger stay on message and use a similar voice throughout each post. Are you looking for a more conversational blog or do you want to sound like experts? Are you looking for data, stories, or images? Your style guide will streamline this process and save everyone a ton of time.
4. Address Legal Concerns Up Front
It’s extremely inefficient to address legal concerns on a post by post basis. It’s far better to work with a legal team on the front end to set up simple guidelines that you and your blogging team can follow. In addition, consider adding disclaimers to your company blog that can save you headaches down the line. For instance, if you review products on your blog from time to time, you can add a disclaimer to your post template or page footer that mentions all reviews are of products given to your company.
5. Set Up Expectations for SEO Success
If your boss or blogging team doesn’t understand how SEO works today, then you may have a hard time agreeing on the wording of your posts and how you allocate your time. Today social signals and overall helpfulness can prove far more important to the success of a blog post rather than inserting strings of the same keywords over and over again. In fact, keyword stuffing and other SEO hacks are now viewed as counterproductive and may even result in a lower page rank.
Build natural networks with high profile guest posts, write posts that readers will share on social media, and connect with bloggers who will link to your content because it’s the best. These strategies take time that can’t be classified as “blogging.†You’ll need to budget time to also network and market your blog in order to maximize its effectiveness. Unless you get buy in from your boss and blogging team, there could be friction over the importance of these practices.
The effectiveness of your content marketing blog hinges on your ability to set up a simple and streamlined writing, editing, and marketing process with your team members. With the right tools and systems in place, you’ll be far more productive as you manage your blog each week.
This post was written by Lior Levin, a marketing consultant for a css company that provides services for webmasters all over the world. tool for ecommerce businesses, and who also consults to a startup company from Israel who created a Passbook app that helps you find unwanted charges on your credit card.