Blogging: 7 Ways To Get Your Team On Board

Once you’ve embraced blogging as the best way to attract visitors to your website and demonstrate your capabilities and value, it’s time to get others in the organization ready (and willing) to pitch in writing posts. This will be an uphill battle – you probably won’t have a single person raise his or her hand and say, “I want to blog – please, include me!” Not only are most people reluctant writers, they don’t believe they have the time to blog.

Here are some tips for convincing would-be bloggers in your company to get involved – and to keep them excited about being part of promoting your company.

Provide statistics that demonstrate the value of blogging. There’s a wealth of good information available related to blogging’s benefit to an organization. Here are a few highlights:

• Blog frequency impacts customer acquisition. 92% of companies that blogged multiple times a day acquired a customer through their blog (HubSpot State of Inbound Marketing, 2012)
• 81% of marketers rated their blog as “useful,” “important,” or “critical” (HubSpot State of Inbound Marketing, 2012)
• There are 31% more bloggers today than there were 3 years ago (eMarketer, August 2010)
• Once you write 21 – 54 blog posts, blog traffic generation increases by up to 30% (TrafficGenerationCafe)
• Businesses that blog more than 20 times a month get 5 times more traffic than those that blog less than 4 times a month (HubSpot)
• Nearly 40% of U.S. companies use blogs for marketing purposes (eMarketer, August 2010)
• B2B marketers using blogs generate 67% more leads than those who don’t (Social Media Today)
• Companies that blog have 97% more inbound links to their websites (Social Media Today)
• Websites with blogs have 434% more indexed pages (Social Media Today)

Share these stats with your bloggers so they understand the importance of what they’ll be doing – they’ll be helping market the company by sharing content prospects are looking for, and they’ll be attracting these people to your website where you can turn them into leads.

Choose people with expertise in relevant areas. People generally love to talk about what they do and how their role contributes to the company’s success. That’s just one reason to include people throughout the company on your blog roster. Rather than simply choosing people to blog based on what they tell you about their writing abilities (most will say, “I’m not a good writer”), choose people based on what they know about your business and your prospects. They’ll appreciate that you recognize their skills and value, and they’ll be able to talk much more productively about topics related to their role than someone who’s not in that role. Here are some departments that can be real assets when it comes to writing content:

• Sales: Salespeople often know the most about what prospects need, what questions prospects ask (which your content should answer), and what competitors are up to
• Engineering. Engineers know why your company does things they way it does – why, for instance, your lawn mowers’ steel blades go through a special hardening heat treatment step while competitors’ do not
• Marketing. Marketing people know what’s going on in the market, what innovations are being unveiled and what’s next on the horizon
• Operations. Operations people can talk in detail about manufacturing processes and how they affect product quality and performance
• R&D. As long as they don’t give away any trade secrets or proprietary information, your R&D team can discuss the “how and why” of some of your already-launched innovations

Everyone, from the top to the bottom of your organization, knows something about your company that would be valuable to your audience, so tap into them!

Don’t ask for more than one blog a month. The more you blog, the greater the positive impact on your web traffic, but for most organizations daily blogging is unrealistic (unless you hire an inbound agency to help). Determine what you’ll reasonably be able to do (blog at least twice weekly), then start making assignments. Don’t, however, overwhelm your bloggers. If you have enough staff to make it work, give your them just one post a month to write.

Provide helpful tips on how to write. As I said earlier, most people don’t believe they can write. But giving every blogger simple tips can reduce their anxiety and give them confidence. Here are some of our favorite blogs about blogging:

“6 Things Every Blog Post Should Have”

“How To Phrase Blog Headlines For Maximum SEO”

“How To Become A Better Blogger By Starting With A Thesis”

“Anatomy of An Impeccable B2B Blog Post”

“3 Simple Tips To Make Blogging Easier”

“Great Blog Ideas: 6 Columns You Could Start Today”

“Creating Content: 7 Questions To Ask Before Writing Your Blog”

Start with an outline. An outline makes the job of writing a blog post infinitely easier and helps reduce the stress the writer goes through. Work alongside each writer to create an outline that:

• Starts with an introduction that tells the reader what they’re about to learn
• Has a solid, well-articulated “core” that will lead people logically and clearly through the topic
• Has a closing that wraps things up nicely and reiterates your introduction

Assure bloggers they’ll have access to an editor and a review team. Bloggers need the “safety net” of both an editor and an internal team that can evaluate each post and provide constructive feedback. An editor’s job is to verify the appropriate subject matter and tone, check spelling and grammar, determine each posts’ relevance to the audience, and evaluate the overall value of the piece, then make recommendations for improvement (or, usually, do it himself or herself). Because your editor may not know “everything” there is to know about every facet of your company, a review team, usually made up of representatives from the primary departments in the company, is set up to give each post a “once-over” that ensures the accuracy of company facts and figures.

Share successes. With a software program like HubSpot, you’ll be able to see, in real time, how many visitors each blog post gets, where these visitors come from (social media links, organic searches, etc.), what topics generate the most traffic, etc. Share these with all bloggers so each knows how well your blog efforts are performing. Early success (and if you blog often enough, you’ll have them) creates momentum and motivates bloggers to improve.

Reward people for their efforts. Because blogging is almost certainly not a part of your team members’ job descriptions, you’ll want to reward them with gas cards, gift cards, company apparel…at the very least, hold blog meetings over the lunch hour and buy pizza.

Once you get your blogging protocol down, it's time to start building other systems of content output. That's the only way you're going to cultivate leads. Email is king in lead generation, so convert your blog subscribers into prospective customers with this tip sheet.