ideaLaunch Blog

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At ideaLaunch, we agree with Kipp Bodnar of Social Media B2B that having an army of bloggers is the best way to build hoards of great content and offer in-depth coverage on industry trends. It also takes the pressure off any one person being solely responsible for producing all the content on our company blog. You’ve seen regular blog posts from iL staff members and Jen Byck, our Content Monkey; now we’re inviting guest bloggers with proven experience in content marketing to share their insight. Stay tuned for posts by Vince Font and Britt Reints later this month.

So how do we manage so many contributors, both on-site and off? Here are a few tips for keeping the blog posts rolling in and the sanity under check.

1. Make sure you have a company blog plan. What’s the overall goal of your blog? If it’s for SEO, do you have a plan in place to attract traffic and rank for targeted keywords? Is your blog purely informational, there to establish trust with readers and customers? Is it a tool to make your company an industry leader? Are there any off-limits subjects? Confidentiality clauses with clients or barriers in the legal department? What’s your tone—serious, informational, funny? Make sure everyone’s on the same page before they hit the “publish” button.
2. Consider readers and search engines. We like our posts to appeal to readers as well as search engines. Tell your troopers to accompany their posts with an image (and image credit), video or some other visual element—everyone likes a pretty picture. (It also looks better when we link to the post on our Facebook account.) Give employees and guest bloggers ideas for appropriate topics and the keywords you want to target to help your blog get exposure in Google. They should include internal links and optimize posts with meta tags.
3. Get everyone involved promoting their blog posts in social media. Once a blog post is up, only half the work is done. Now it’s time for all the contributors to publicize their post on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and other social media outlets, as well as comment on each other’s posts. When everyone pitches in, it’s less work for all. Reward contributors with the highest-traffic blog posts or posts with the most comments.

Do you manage a menagerie of bloggers? Have any tips to share with me?

Tags: blog, blogging, blogs, carolyn mckibbin, content creation, content marketing, facebook, SEO, social media, Twitter

This entry was posted on Friday, November 20th, 2009 at 5:38 pm and is filed under SEO, Social Media Marketing, Twitter, Writers, blog, content marketing, employee management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.