If you are unsure as to whether or not you should blog for your business, the following story may help you to make up your mind.
A company blog is a huge asset, research has shown that companies who blog get:
- 55% more visitors;
- 97% more inbound links; and
- 434% more indexed pages
The more indexed pages your company site has, the more chances it has of showing up in search results. The more inbound links your company site has, the more valuable the search engines view it and the higher they place you in the rankings. All of this leads to more traffic, and the more traffic a company website has, the more opportunities there are to convert that traffic into leads and eventually, new business.
So blogging is important but most of the time the staff outside of the marketing department don’t realise just how important it is.
In order to build a great company blog you need help, a one-man band is just not going to work long term…so how do you convince others to blog for you?
How I Did It
By day, I work for a legal and tax consultancy firm and I had been trying to get a blog going for some time. I had produced all the data and the reasons blogging was important but I just couldn’t get the professional staff on board to write pieces for me. They said they didn’t have the time, but really it was just they didn’t understand its importance – and I was fighting an uphill battle.
In the end, I decided to just write the blog myself.
As I’m neither a solicitor nor a tax consultant, what I did was take the company whitepapers and use those as source material for the blog. Each whitepaper probably covered 4-5 points, each of which could make a great individual blog post. I wrote probably around 15 posts, 10 of which received full sign off before the blog went live. The plan was to post twice per week so 10 posts gave me a 5 week lead time; when you’re flying solo you definitely need a cushion.
All of the company’s clients were invited to sign up for the blog and from the first day of the blog going live we could see an increase in traffic. The number of indexed pages rose and the
All good news, but it was a lot of pressure on one person coming up with topics, writing the posts, getting them approved and setting them up to publish – twice a week, every week.
However, after the blog had been running for about 6-8 weeks something wonderful happened – the clients started mentioning the posts to our company managers when they were talking to them, and the clients were asking had the manager written the post – which of course they hadn’t. This meant however that the managers started becoming much more receptive to the idea of writing posts when they realised how many of our important clients were reading.
Within 10 weeks of the blog starting I had a rooster of 10 bloggers, each of whom would submit a post once every 5 weeks. A ‘blogging hub’ was set up on the company intranet with advice on selecting topics, writing style, post length etc. We also put up the blog post stats so that the bloggers could see how their articles were doing in relation to everyone else’s – nothing like a little competition to get the creative juices flowing!
The Moral Of The Story
If I had waited to get a rooster of bloggers signed up before starting, I would probably still be waiting to publish the first post. By utilising existing company material I was able to start blogging sooner and was able to use the great results to convince others in the company to start blogging.
Sometimes you just need to take that leap!
