Consider this to be your quick and painless guide to starting a corporate blog both effectively and practically.

1 – Begin by defining your purpose.

This may sound obvious, but many bloggers do not think of their editorial purpose until well into the life of their blog. Exploring social media simply is not reason enough to start a corporate blog. You need a concept that is better defined. Rather than just saying that your blog’s intention is to engage your customers, you want to have a polished editorial purpose, like “Share inside information about the day to day operations within our company in order to better enrich the experience of our customers, engaging them in a dialogue with our business.” This may be a wordy way to put things, but it gives you a real solid idea of what it is that you are trying to accomplish with your blog. This way, if you ever find yourself wondering why you started this project in the first place, your editorial purpose can serve as an excellent reminder. “Oh, right, my goal was to reach out to my customers and share something of myself in the process.”

2 – Determine who responsibility will be given to, next.

Most people do not consider this, despite the fact that it is fairly obvious as part of a practical start up guide for corporate blogging. If you are smart, you will form a team of hardworking individuals that will work on the blog, or at least that will collaborate to come up with good subjects and topics for the blog. However, no matter how many people you have working on your corporate blog, you do need to have one single person in charge who can say yes or no to an idea or a blog post. Having a group is an excellent tool when putting a blog together, but someone absolutely needs to be in charge, otherwise you may have difficulty actually getting things on the page.

3 – Determine who your writers are going to be.

Sure, by now you have a social media manager who is in charge of the final say, but he or she should not be the only writer or the only person in charge of coming up with the content ideas. Depending on the size of your company and its scope, there are probably different departments within; each with a different area of focus. Because your audience is probably interested in all of these different areas, it would benefit your company and your corporate blog to have bloggers from different disciplines. Develop a list of capable writers, and then have each of them agree to writing a little bit every month on a variety of different subject matters in order to get the most out of your corporate blog. Then you can space these assignments out and post their blogs throughout the month easily.

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Originally posted 2008-12-30 05:58:19. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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