3 Essential Questions to Ask Yourself Before Launching a Corporate Blog
April 11th, 2009 / Blogging Tips, General Blogging
Ever since blogging has become “mainstream”, companies have discovered a new marketing tool in blogs. Some took blogs even further and transformed them into brand elements and it proved to be a winning decision, as blogs have the power to give a voice and a personality to a company.
But even so, corporate blogging has not always been the best choice for some. Just as with any other marketing tool, it needs to fit your company’s profile, needs and expectations in order to be truly effective. Is a blog really going to help your company? Ask yourself these 3 essential questions before taking the step and launching a new corporate blog.
This post has been revised and included in the Corporate Blogging Guide.
You can read the revised post here.
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One more reason why companies launch their blogs is that it build a bond with their potential customers.
And that SERP reason: Its not like the blog itself would make your site stand better in search engine rankings. Its how you interlink the pages of your blog and the website. Nice post.
yeah, they’re not easy. it takes months before people recognized my business blog, we’re small enterprise. i dont know how long it takes for them to follow us, we just moved to paid hosting. all i got in mind is keep improvising. once you stop, it died.
I can tell you 90% people don’t look at point number 2 and launch their blog which leads to it being ailing.
for most companies, a blog is a must have! and now, twitter too! and to promote your blog,
http://www.blogtogreat.com/200.....blogs.html
Question #2 is the most important to me. You have to be realistic when answering your question. Ask yourself, “6 months from now, will I really be able to update my blog at least 3 times a week with quality content?” A blog is a commitment. Unfortunately, for most people, it turns out to be nothing more than a short term fling.
To add to #1: Most company ignore existing customers and focus on just lead generation. This is a mistake because a blog and and a modern email deliver system are much easier to manage than writing an e-newsletter. You can post to the blog and have the email newsletter assembled automatically from blog content.
#2 is very important. It’s critical you understand the productivity impact of pressing amateur writers into duty writing the company blog. Think hard about outsourcing writing the blog if you lose more than $45 per post of productivity (NOT LABOR COST. Think lost revenues or project cost impact) to write a blog post.
Mike, excellent observations. But also, when outsourcing the writing there’s the risk of loosing personality. Outside writers may not understand and “feel” the business as an insider does.
While hiring a writer may be a solution, investing a bit in training an “insider” or using the PR Department too could also turn out to be good moves.
This is a really useful post and raises some pertinent questions for me at the moment, particularly around the ‘resource’ factor. Time is money and all that.
Good stuff.
Man this was a great article honestly.. hope to read more in the future…
really nice tips…
As Gerald pointed out, commitment is needed, in fact it’s a way of life for at least how long you are prepared to go with it.
Point 2 raises an interesting topic, too many people take things for granted, until they actually do it themselves and find out how exhaustive and the time and effort needed to put into keeping the research, analysis and posts going.
Yeah! Nice tips, Thanks!
This was a great post. Question 2 is very important. Do I really have something to put to my blog every week, perhaps 2-3 times, EVERY week..