When you’re looking for ways to put valuable content into your corporate blog, sometimes you need to look no further than the nearest headline that’s delivered to your inbox.
The reason? –because all businesses experience similar challenges. When the headlines are about how a megacorporation like Schering-Plough has to pay $435 Million for admitting multiple violations of the law, the topic you might want to address in your blog that day is corporate ethics. The angle you can take is about how your company handles difficult challenges such as the temptation to market a product that’s not up to par. What do you do in a situation like that?
If you don’t know the answer, it could be the start of a valuable internal discussion with your staff–everyone from your executives to your frontline people–about what the company’s values are and how you expect staff to live by them. You might even consider telling your blog readers about the process you follow.
That’s the kind of meat that makes a blog powerful. The trick is to write about it honestly and appropriately. Email me with questions.
Cutting costs is good blog stuff
Your corporate blog can be a real bear. When your brain just isn’t registering something worth writing, what do you do? You can’t let it go too long. or you risk losing your readership. So let’s examine one of the tricks you can use to jog yourself.
One way to break your “writer’s block”–and yes, it’s very similar to what professional writers run into at times–is to just start writing. Sometimes the very act of starting to think “out loud” (well, on paper at least) can get your brain going in the right direction. After all, you are an expert in this area (if you’re not, you’d better have good resources who are), so your brain is full of knowledge. And sharing knowledge is what the best blog entries are about–no matter what the subject.
Say you’re a manufacturer who makes widgets. Yesterday you wrote about how the global market was affecting your supply chain–and thus the customer’s price. Today your brain is blank. Well, what about what happened down in parts today? Did your part person face a new challenge today? Did a customer demand something unusual? How did you handle it? Did you make a decision that couldn’t be avoided? Did you think of some way to get around additional cost and still make your customer happy?
Find gold in employee and customer surveys
Sorry for the long break. Been working intensely on a big project.
Meanwhile, just learned about a company that specializes in helping design, deliver and analyze customized employee and customer surveys. And in a minute, I’ll tell you why there’s gold for your corporate blog in that kind of activity.
At the National Business Research Institute (NBRI), a team of psychologists works with you to assess true levels of employee and/or customer satisfaction, and also to find ways to improve it. And I emphasize “true” because poorly written surveys are a big waste of money.
Online ads, brand awareness, and corporate blogs
The Poynter Institute’s latest study on eye-tracking indicates what you may know already–search engine optimization is the best way to get visibility on the Internet. And that’s where a corporate blog comes in.
Natural search is considered the supreme method (meaning your content actually relates to the keywords or phrases the customer types into Google or elsewhere). Add the freshness-of-content factor and you can see that a corporate blog contributes dramatically to help position your site for high rankings.
But the content has to have value–be interesting, entertaining, rewarding, or valuable in some other way to readers. That’s the hard part–keeping it that way consistently over time. Read more of what Poynter has to say about how to spend your money online here. Need help? Call me or email me with questions.
