SEO – PPC – Webdesign – Ten Thousand Things

One thing that I tell everyone to do is start a blog. Blogging can bring in traffic for keywords you plan for (both long and short tail) and you will also see traffic from some keywords you never thought of – even after all the research, all the analysis, all the everything you thought about before you started your website.

Companies especially can benefit from blogging. They can write about new upcoming products, company life, fun things that happened at the company, new hires, case studies… the list goes on and on. Everything under the sun can be part of a company blog. The only hard part about it is getting your employees ramped up and excited about the company blog.

Something that is asked of me over and over is “Who’s going to blog? How do we get them to blog? Do we have to hire someone special?” No you don’t have to hire anyone special to blog… sure you could and there are a lot of great jobs out there for bloggers and a lot of great writers looking for them.

The people who will write blog posts for you, however, you already pay – they are the ones that are excited (if you’re a good manager) about your company and what is going on.

How to get them excited to blog? My favorite way to do this is to allow time for them to write blog posts and then reward your employees for blogging and/or make it competitive. Contests like “whoever brings the most page-views or comments in a month gets X” where X=something good and not something like a 10$ Starbucks gift card… (sweet 2 cups of coffee for 30 blog posts woooo) No matter what you reward them with it will be cheaper than hiring a blogger and if the reward is good enough it will keep them excited about blogging.

You can moderate blog posts as you see fit. If you trust your employees not to write trade secrets I suggest letting them run with it. Give them each their own login names so when they do post it says right at the top who wrote what (this will also start to rank for their names – another reason they want to keep their writing at a high standard.)

Blogging IS the best way to open up to your customers and the first step into becoming involved with social media. The benefits of being open with the people who buy your products/use your service are many. You put a human face on your company while at the same time getting feedback from your target market. With blogging there is really nothing to lose and only traffic and new ideas from consumers to gain.

Tags:   blog · Blogging · how to blog · start a blogNo Comments