Blogging on a corporate level initiates a conversation, it stimulates rapport with your audience and encourages more external interaction with your company. It’s almost like giving a personal insight into what your company is thinking, how it operates and it’s corporate culture. It gives your audience a wider view about who you really are, which is great for building business relationships.
If you’ve never blogged before, and would like to kick start your corporate blogging then here are some essential tips to get you on your way to creating awesome blogs, with great content.
1. Understand Blogger Relationships.
Anyone with a small understanding of the internet can set up a blog and start blogging away, but it takes a lot more to become a great corporate blogger. The first step in successful corporate blogging is knowing the relationship between yourself and other bloggers; also known as blogger relationships. This is the basis of blogging and is about communicating and getting to know who else is blogging in your industry and who is interacting with your blog. Maintaing and growing your blogging audience is fundamental to the success of your blog. The more you nurture and grow your readership, the more successful your blog becomes.
2. Provide Relevant Content
The best way to grow your audience is to provide them with compelling articles. Write something that’s interesting and relevant. Keep your readers entertained and never be boring. This may be hard to do, but I promise you that this is the best way to attract and keep readers on you blog.
3. Sustain your readers by providing real news
Try to interlace current industry news with your perspective and knowledge. It’s no good rehashing existing news stories that have been published already. Instead, use this news piece as a starting point and go from there. see how the news relates to your business and how it may affect or have an impact on other businesses. This is what truly matters and counts when it comes to engaging with other people online. They are concerned with news that affects them. Blogging is all about practice and once you have tried this a few times, it should become second nature.
4. Respond to blog comments.
Replying to other bloggers comments or feedback is almost as important to the actual blogging. If someone has taken the time, effort and energy to read your blog from all the other blogs out there and actually made a comment, then this needs to be addressed. Never mind the positive or negative nature of the comment. The main thing is that you respond. Open dialogue on the blog will foster online relationships and eventually, over time increase your readership and in turn your website traffic. Although people may not be commenting on your blog, they will read and follow your replies. This will provide an even greater opportunities for attracting more people to your blog.
A word of warning here. Comments can come in the form of spam, so be very careful who you reply to. Check their email address in the first instance, to see if it is of a legitimate nature.
5. Criticism, Who Cares.
Don’t be concerned when people have taken a side or criticise your blog. Think of it as an opportunity to discuss openly online issues and topics that surrounds your blog article. Unless, it is outright malicious content, criticism in most forms is a good way to start a conversation that will ultimately lead to a wider audience. You never know who is reading your blog, so anything that you do take on board should be handled in a professional manner. Remember, it’s not personal, it’s just corporate blogging.
6. Stuck for content and ideas
Ideas for blogs including content can be as hard to find as the actual writing itself. Here are a few good ways to get some creative ideas happening:
– speak to staff and see if they have any ideas about the industry
– talk to your clients and see if there are any issues involving their business and blog about these
– see what your competitors are blogging about and embellish on their content
– see whats current on the social media sites. You will find heaps of good topics, especially on LinkedIn.
– lastly, if completely out of ideas and have no where else to go, then speak to a professional blog writer. Yes, it may cost, but at least you will have fine tuned blog articles, written by experts.
7. Make Sure The Blog is SEO Friendly
Optimisie your blog for the search engines. OK, what does this mean? Optimisation or sEO is all about writing content that is keyword rich on your topic, with correct titles, tags and headers. If this is done in a ‘Google Compliant Manner’, then your blog page or article will be indexed and ranked by Google very quickly. If you are unclear about this extremely important point then why not get in touch with one of the blog specialists at Hopping Mad Designs.
Why is this point so important. The answer is simple. The higher your blog ranks, the more likelihood people will find you and read your blog. The bigger the readership, the larger the subscribers.
The more people read your blog the more people are likely to subscribe to it. Use keywords in the title, content and URL, and make sure your blog headers have the right tags so search engines can easily discover them.
8. Is the Blog Button Easy To Find on Your Website?
If people dont know where to find your blog, how are they going to read it. be certain to have your blog in the main navigation menu on your site.
9. Make the Blog Easy to Share
Your readers are going to do the promotion for you. make sure that if they like the blog, then they can share it with other people. This can be done by simply putting some social media links on your blog which will give readers the ability to share your article. Having highly visible social icons at the bottom of your blog is the way to go. Think about it for one minute. A great blog can go viral with thousands of visitors in a day, if the content is worth reading. That’s a powerful marketing tool!
10. A Last Thought.
Writing your corporate blog and getting people to become followers is a long term strategy. The tips above are only a starting point and some advice on what to do. By practicing your blog writing, you will, over say 3 to 6 months get the hang of it and start to get a real understanding of the huge potential that corporate blogging can bring your business.