Should you be blogging?

Blogs are great ways to connect with customers and develop your reputation online.

Slews of companies across all industries are blogging these days. A corporate blog is a great way to engage with your customers, employees and members. If you’ve decided you need to interact, that’s great, but you’ve got to know what you want to achieve.

Whether your company is large or small, defining your blog, jumpstarting it and sticking with it can feel daunting at first (trust us, we know!). We spent about two months brainstorming ideas, defining objectives, designing the look and feel and planning a production schedule. Ultimately, the benefits were too great to ignore. Blogging can…

• Increase company visibility and give the public and clients a closer look.
• Result in pragmatic SEO benefits for an existing company site.
• Act as a sales tool for prospective customers.
• Make a contribution to your industry and establish you as an industry expert.

We hope Parthenon’s blog, which launched yesterday, will accomplish all of those goals and more. From our lessons learned, here are seven tips to make your new blog successful and reader-friendly:

1. Create a roadmap. Plan and focus your objectives and stick to your schedule as closely as possible. This way, you’ll be less likely to get distracted and more likely to post blog entries frequently (fresh new content is important!)
2. Content must be relevant and frequent. You don’t have to post every day to be successful. Consistency is key. A good guideline is 2-3 posts per week, especially when first starting out. What you don’t want to do is post 10 one week and none the next. And don’t forget to encourage and respond to comments so your readers will engage.
3. Don’t bore them to tears. It’s important to be professional, but that doesn’t mean ho-hum. Social media is typically more casual than typical business writing. Remember that you want visitors to come back and forward posts to friends. Vary the style of your posts and don’t be afraid to have a little fun.
4. Be yourself, but focus on delivering value. There’s a difference between engaging your audience and preaching to them. You know the audience you’re trying to reach, so present the information in an authentic tone that shows your passion and knowledge. While you’re ultimately building your brand, being too salesy is a turn-off.
5. Make it visually appealing. Aside from images, which are important, make your blog easy on the eye. Stick with simple backgrounds and use standard fonts (cursive and swirly fonts may be pretty, but they are really hard to read). Use your blog’s real estate areas effectively: headers and subheads should support your brand. And make sure the navigation is intuitive.
6. Launch it the right way. Just because you’ve decided you should be blogging doesn’t mean you have to start next week. Plan ahead and use your resources to get the word out. Press releases, mailing lists, newsletters (like the Post) are good places to start. Put your full weight is behind it.
7. Market it every chance you get. It might sound obvious, but the blog should be integrated into your website. Put it on employee social network profiles, letterhead, business cards, email signatures, etc.
8. Link, link, link: Try to link religiously. Though sending people away from your blog might seem counter to your mission, linking benefits your readers and may lead to cross-linking opportunities with other organizations or industry experts.