Starting a Business Blog? Step One: Developing a Blog
Should you start a business blog for your organization? Of course you should… and I’m serious when I say it’s not even a question anymore. The real question is: what should you expect when developing, launching and managing it? This is step one in a three part series on starting a business blog for your company.
If you’re already convinced you should start a blog, then this series of blog posts is for you. I’m going to try to break down what you should be prepared for in starting your company’s blog in three easy steps: developing, launching and managing your blog. If you’re not convinced, I suggest checking out my colleague Brian Haugen’s post about SEO and leveraging content.
Step One: Developing Your Blog
At Priority, we spent a lot of time contemplating the best format for our own blog. I think there are a lot of really good tips out there (including these from ReadWriteWeb) on issues you should address while developing your blog, such as:
- Domain: use yourcompanywebsite.com/blog, not blog.yourcompanywebsite.com. This point was hammered home during a session at the 2010 Online Marketing Summit, which I attended last month. Using the correct blog domain means more SEO for your website.
- System: We’re WordPress people here, but there are a lot of great blog-friendly content management systems out there. Just be sure to host it on your domain as mentioned above.
- Design: I think a really clean design that matches your existing website is best. I love how our web design & development team made our blog really clean and ‘clickable,’ so our audience doesn’t have to scroll a lot. If you’ve got some good user feedback from your website, be sure to incorporate that into your blog.
- Content Strategy:
One person point of view vs. multiple contributors? I think there are benefits to both the one contributor and multiple contributor models. I would ask myself: is there one person in this company that is already a voice for the company, has star qualities AND has knowledge that my audience would highly value? Will this existing star be able to either write themselves or be in the writing process frequently (i.e. will someone be able to interview them for every post)? If there isn’t a good match, then it’s probably best to put together a team of experts.
Relevancy? When it comes to topics, whether it’s one contributor or multiple contributors, your blog should cover topics that your audience values. Provide knowledge that no one else is providing whenever possible.
- Management: who is going to manage your blog? I suggest putting one person in charge of your blog regardless of whether you outsource portions of your blog, or have it completed internally. Give your blog a champion to ensure it becomes and stays relevant and aligned with your brand.
With all of that in mind, this is just the first of three steps. In the next step, I’ll cover launching your blog. For more ideas on developing a great business blog, check out this top 15 list from Mashable that covers some of the best corporate blogs in business.
