Midnight Oil Writing

B2B companies, from large enterprises to start-ups, are grappling with how to start and maintain a corporate blog.

Blogging is like flossing (and somewhat like New Year’s resolutions).  You start off gung-ho, doing it (blogging or flossing) every day for a week or two.  Then you do it once a week.  Six weeks in you think about doing it, but haven’t in a while.

Why is this?  Perhaps you’ve run out of topics.  Perhaps your expectations for the effort haven’t been met.  Or you’ve just fallen off the wagon.

Here are some quick tips to make blogging easier:

F – Frequency.  You don’t need a new blog posting every day.  You just need to stick with a regular schedule, so that your readers will know when to expect new content.  Make a plan to blog every week, or every other week.  Just one blog post.

L – Links.  There are different philosophies on linking.  Personally, I think each blog entry should include links to related topics, other blogs and references.  After all, the value your blog should provide is information, education and insight.  Adding links adds to that value.

O – Objectivity.  Sure, a blog is similar to a seminar.  A company provides information, but there’s also a product/service pitch in there somewhere.  Lose the self promoting from your blog.  It may be tempting to blog about your latest product, but if your blog is only about your company, you won’t get many readers.  Focus on what your audience wants and needs to hear.  Industry news.  Opinions.  Would you want to spend your valuable time reading about why to buy a particular product?

S – Short.  Keep your posts short.  By short  I mean 200 – 500 words.  Visitors faced with paragraphs and paragraphs of text are likely to bookmark the entry and read it later.  Often that later never happens.  Give them small bits that are easily digested.  Not only will your readers actually read your content, but you’ll also have less to worry about when generating content.

S – Search.  Companies have different goals for blogs, but a fundamental purpose of blogs is to have your content appearing on various search engines.   To do this, you need to pick one key word/phrase for each blog entry and use it repeatedly.  Not too much, but enough that you get value from the entry.  It’s easy to get caught up in generating content and forget the “higher purpose” for the blog.  Make yourself a map of key words/phrases with guidelines for frequency and usage.  After you write each post, go back to your map to make sure you are following it.

Happy blogging!