Three reasons your company needs to blog

Blogging. Gone are the days it’s only meant for travelers or sharing recipes. Whether your company is in email security, construction, fashion or IT service management you should be be blogging. A company blog is meant to share your point of view, spread your thought leadership and be a resource to your industry. In fact, according to research from HubSpot, companies who have an active blog get 55 percent more website traffic and 70 percent more leads than those who don’t. It’s a great way to share content via social media – branching out to another medium. But, most importantly, your blog should serve as the backbone to your content bureau. Here are three best practices for starting and continuously posting to your company blog:

1) Setting up your blog: Usually in life, and work, getting started is the hardest part. When it comes to blogging, that’s the easiest part. The hardest part about blogging is keeping it up and writing. Wordpress is a great blogging platform with several plugin options and the ability to customize the blog to be “on-brand” with your company. Add different authors, linking back to their LinkedIn or Twitter profiles, so the blog posts come from specific experts on different topics. Lastly, make sure the blog is visible on your company’s homepage – preferably with an image so it is eye catching.

2) Content is king: Create a content calendar. Plan out your content to coincide with relevant editorial calendar opportunities. By doing this, you already have a relevant piece of content and thought leadership to share with a reporter. The content calendar is also meant to keep you honest and on track with posting. Some companies organize the content calendar so that every day of the week has a specific topic or theme – Wednesday could be a Q&A, Friday could be a weekly roundup of industry news, etc. When you’re first starting the blog, it is important to blog every day, Monday through Friday for the first month. Once you have a solid content bank and have established your presence, it is fine to cut back to posting twice or three times a week.

3) Sharing is everything: It’s not enough to create content and just let it sit on the blog. You need to share it via social media and pitch it to relevant editorial opportunities. Tweeting, posting to Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit and sharing it to platforms such as Scoop.it instantly spreads the chances of people seeing and sharing your posts – helping to drive traffic back to your website. Encourage your personal network of colleagues to share the blog posts as well. This not only helps increase the blog’s impressions, but it also highlights your colleagues as thought leaders and serves as a resource for your industry. In addition, no one likes someone who talks only about themselves. Take the time to comment on other, relevant blogs sharing your opinion and insight.

These three blogging tips will not only get your company started, but it will help keep you on the right path creating content. It’s one thing to say you have a blog, and it’s a whole other thing to say you have an “active” blog.