Transcripts
1. Introduction: Blogging is just something that is an extension of my personal superpower. I wanted to be in a writer since I was in eighth grade. And it just so happened that after I left the television industry and I became an entrepreneur who knew that my writing ability was going to create a whole new opportunity for me, not only as a writer, but as a teacher and educator as well. Hi, I'm Melinda Emerson and my nickname is small business lady. As the small business lady, My mission is to end small business failure and content and producing really good blog content is key to meet fulfilling my mission. I kind of look at myself almost like a teacher because I give actionable tips and advice that people can read and use. And that's always been my formula in today's class. I'm going to be talking to you about how to launch a corporate blog. There's a lot of things you're going to have to take in consideration. What I want for you is to be ahead of the process so that it doesn't stress you out as you watch this corporate blog, my hope is that I hope you get organized. I want to help you think about exactly who your target audience is for this blog and how you're going to set up your editorial calendar. You're also going to need to recruit writers and make sure that you have a copy editing process. I'm going to tell you a secret about how to make sure your blog always looks Chris and doesn't have typos. And then you're going to have to strategize with the social media team to make sure that all this hard work that you're putting into your blog actually is used across the company to grow the brand of your business. Anyone who needs to launch a blog as part of their overall strategy for their company. This course will be a great thing to have in your toolkit because I have a background in journalism. I actually became really, really good at blogging. And I have published on my blog three times a week for the last 12 years. And I can't tell you how many opportunities have come to me because people were loyal readers of my blog. In fact, before I was invited to write for the New York Times, my editor told me he read my blog for one year before he ever reached out to me because he wanted to make sure that my content was always top notch. You never know who's watching. So you always want to put quality content on your blog that is a value to the target audience that you're trying to reach. I am so excited for students to take this class because it is another way for you to be creative in your work environment. And you're going to be adding value to your company. And it might be something that leads you on a new path of skills. You didn't even realize the jihad at the end of this class, you're going to work on your project. And I want you to refer to your blogging goals worksheet as well as your editorial calendar template. And if you have a question, leave it in the discussion section so I can chime in and give you some feedback. Now let's dive in.
2. Setting the Goals for Your Blog: In this lesson, we're going to talk about setting the goals of your corporate blog. Now, depending on what department you work in, the goals could be different. And sometimes other departments might want to creep in and horn in on your blog. So you wanna make sure that you understand upfront, who all has the authority to give you feedback on the goals of the blog. If you're from corporate communications, you might have one goal. If you're from marketing, you might need to do doing legion. If you're from the sales department, sales department wants to generate direct sales. You might also have someone from customer service weigh in on blog content. So you just want to make sure that your crystal clear up front so that you don't have to do any rework. You don't find yourself in the middle of any politics as you're working on developing this blog. One of the other things that you want to keep in mind is what kind of resources or you going to need to be successful. For example, are you going to have budget to hire outside writers to help you? Will also need to determine which department is really going to be in charge of the blog and have the final say and other departments be allowed to give you input. You also need to understand who's going to work with the social media team to promote the blog content. And lastly, you need to understand what your approval process is going to be. Do you need to get your legal department involved in reviewing content prior to it being launched. Now, well, the other things I want to walk you through is actually your blogging goals worksheet. Now, this is going to be part of your project at the end of this class, but I will walk you through it so that you understand some of the things that you need to think about going in. First of all, you want to understand what are your short-term goals for the blog. You also want to take the time to think about what are your long-term goals for the block. Usually blogs take about two to three years to really, really become a resource that people refer to. So you wanna make sure you understand how long of a runway you have internally, in terms of the support, you're going to have to build a following for your blog. You also want to understand who is the target audience for your blog content. And then once you know that, what are the problems that your blog readers are facing? Now it's important to know this because you want to develop content that solves your blog readers problems. So that's why it's really important to get clear on the target audience. And then you always want to have a mission statement for your blog. In my business, the mission statement of my blog is to end small business failure. So he doesn't have to be long, just has to be clear. So you want to make sure that you're spending the time to really develop a mission for your blog because you can always work out from your mission. I want you to take a stab at completing your blogging goals worksheet. And then up next we're going to talk about how to develop the content for your blog.
3. Developing Your Blog Content: In this lesson, I'm going to talk to you about how to develop the content for your blog. Regardless of the type of content you develop, you always have to be focused on your reader. Educate them, help them, entertain them, whatever you do, keep it about them and you always be on the right mark. Be careful not to sell to them. No one wants to be sold to, and everyone listens to the same radio station. It's WIIFM, in other words, what's in it for me? So you wanna make sure that you give them content that is going to always be helping them improve their lies. Some kind of way. You know, your blog isn't opportunity to highlight some of the hidden talent in your business, as well as grow your company's brand. So you want to use that opportunity very carefully. There are so many forms of content you can develop. From Podcast 2, blog, post, two videos, images, quotes, even mini courses. The key is to pick content that you enjoy creating so that you won't dread it. Now there's some other questions that you need to consider before you start developing content. The first one is, what does your company need this blog to do? The next thing you've got to think about is the audience. Where are you going to find out information about your target audience so that you can make sure that you can tailor the content to them. You also need to think about how frequently is this blog going to be publishing once a week or ten times a day? And then who is going to be your primary and contributing writers? And where will you find them? I hope you're able to make fast friends around your company. The other thing you want to think about is what is going to be your content strategy. Certainly, you can develop any type of content, but you shouldn't have a primary content type that you're going to develop. Maybe you're going to primarily do blog posts and occasionally bring in a podcast. Or maybe you're a podcast only blog, or maybe you're a vlog, video blog, whatever it is, you need to think about that strategy and so that you can occasionally mix it up, but you do kind of want your blog to be known for something. And then lastly, how are you going to measure your blog success? Is it going to be in pageviews, click-throughs, shares, how are you going to measure whether or not people are absorbing your content and it's accomplishing what you want. Again, keep in mind that it typically takes three years for you to really give, build a stronghold for your content with your target audience. So don't be surprised if you have to start small. Now here's an example of a really effective corporate blog. It's from the company HubSpot. They actually are CRM and marketing automation software, but they have a tremendous blog presence and they've been very effective doing it. One of the things I want to point out is they have an amazing blog with tons of content. They have their most popular content over here on the far right. They have Editor's pick, which are like the content that the editor thinks people like. They also have a couple of different ways to engage people on this blog. So you can click here to get their product for free, get HubSpot free. They also have a subscribe button. They want to know do you want to get e-mails from them and they segment their email list. So they ask you what kind of emails do you want? You want marketing, e-mails, service email sales, or a website. Emails. They also do offer information about their solutions. So they do have software platform up here. They do have pricing, they do have other resources and they have a huge amount of educational resources. So they are subtle selling with this blog. But I wanted to show you this because sometimes you can solve all of the people who want your blog to do something. You can solve that with how your blog is laid out and how your blog has certain kinds of navigation. So we can just scroll down here how to use Google Calendar 21 features that will make you productive. Now, obviously, that content is not talking about serum software. Content is just helpful content. And what you always want to do is think about your end user customer with your content. Now here's some other ones. 18 funny out of office messages, that's a good funny. Remember we said you can entertain people to, and then here's a plug about something they're doing. Y HubSpot is launching a podcast network that might be of interest, but that's also them subtly promoting their own brand. So these are just some examples of great content. And then they have an annual report. They put out the 2020 state of inbound report. So this is an example of somebody incorporating a white paper inside a blog. But really helping people understand the type of content is also one of the other things I want to help you look at is notice the visuals that they use to promote their blog content. The visuals are just as important as the headlines, ladies and gentlemen. So you do want to make sure that you have great images, because images draw people to a blog. Images draw people to a white paper on a blog. And so you definitely want to make sure that you vary the content as well as your images. And certainly the way this blog is setup instead of kind of magazine style. So you can keep scrolling and scrolling and see all kinds of content. This is a blog that is published to probably five times a day. Every day, they have really built their entire brand, building content. This is sort of like a best-in-class example of a corporate blog. But you want to think about what piece of this you can take on. And then maybe as you build, as you get more resources that you'd get more writers, you can do more. I also want to show you something else that HubSpot does is kinda neat. They actually have tolls that they give people for free. So for example, as you are creating your blog, you want to look at this content creation tool that HubSpot offers for free. So they have a blog ideas generator. All you gotta do is kinda put in some key terms that are relevant to your target audience. And they'll start popping up some blog ideas for you. And also if you want to dig deeper into who is the actual user of your blog, they have a log user persona tool, make my persona, which allows you to build a customizable buyer persona so that you can think about how you can generate content relevant to that specific persona or target audience. So these are amazing tolls that HubSpot gives away for free. Because again, their blog is key to their marketing strategy for their whole company. So this is just a one really good example of how you can be effective with a corporate blog. Hopefully it'll jog your ID thinking so that you can come up with some great ideas for your blog. Now that I've shown you what a successful blog looks like, now I want to walk you through some specific tactics you want to use as you start to develop your blog. Number one, you want your content to have a unique point of view. There's no point putting out me too or copy cat content. Really, the only way to have a really effective blog is to write better content than what's out there. So that might mean you're only going to write 1500 or 2000 word post or you're going to specialize and 300 work quick hits. Either way, you've got to make sure that is valuable, helpful, and consistent. The second tactic, I want you to think about, how are you going to drill down and get more information about your target audience for your blog, depending on where you sit inside your company, you might not be as familiar with your company's buyer persona's. And so you wanna make sure that you have a way to get more details about your target audience. What are their aspirations? What are they struggling with? What do they need to learn? Everything you can find out about your audience is just going to help you provide better content to them. So make sure that you do good research on them. You also want to pay attention to your key words. And keywords are the search terms that people will use in search engines like Google to find content like what's on your blog. So you wanna make sure that you think about the top four to seven key words that you're going to use to build content around. Because you're going to use these in your headlines. You're going to use them in the bullet points inside your content. But here's the thing. The wrong keywords will attract the wrong audience. So you want to make sure that you monitor your keywords ongoing, but keep this in mind. Keyword strategy is a long-term strategy. Keywords drive organic search traffic to your website. So you do want to make sure you're tweaking it and monitoring it and looking at your Google Analytics underneath your blog so that you can make sure you know what keywords is driving the most traffic to your blog. One of the other things you need to take into consideration is search engine optimization. Now keywords and SEO, as it's known, work together. But really here's what you need to know about search engine optimization to be effective, you need to make sure that you understand the searchers intent and that your blog content meets that intent. What do they look in for y? That's really how SEO has evolved for blogs. Now it might seem like it's a little bit intimidating or even tedious. But if you make investments in Search Engine Optimization in the early days of your blog is going to pay off long-term. So really there's three types of SEO. There's on-site SEO, there's off-site SEO, and then there's the technical SEO. So let me just quickly explain what that is. Your on-site SEO, well, that's all about your content, your headlines, that kinda stuff. You want to make sure that you're using keywords as much as possible. Keyword stuffing is really frowned upon at this point. So you really want to use keywords when it is appropriate. You're off-site. Seo is really about authoritative links back to your site. So the more people that link to you that have authority, the higher ranking your site is going to have. And then the technical SEO is something that your web developer, it's like the back-end of your site, is certain things that have to go on so that you can be seen. Now one of the best ways to handle this on a blog is to use some of the great plugins that are out there. There's many, but I'm just going to list a few. There's all in one SEO for WordPress is a good one. Sem rush is another one you might want to consider. There's also Yoast, SEO and Rank Math. So all of those are really good SEO tools that you might want to consider. And certainly you want to consult with who's ever doing SEO for your company's main blog. Because they probably can give you a lot of insight right off the bat to help you be really effective with your corporate blog. There's lots of different approaches you can take to developing a corporate blog. If you want to do a blog that's really focused on customers, you could just set up your blog as a customer resource. And a great example of that is his Koch's. They sell insurance to small businesses, but they've set up an amazing resource center just for their customers. I want to kinda show you and walk you through. So obviously they have information on small business insurance, why his cogs and resources. But this blog is really just set up as a resource. So research and insights, business insurance 101, FAQs, different kinds of insurance. And then they've got different templates that you can use for business plans, a general NDA argument, even invoicing. They've got partner services like people that have strategic relationships that you can use to get discounts. And they also offer a profit calculator. So you can calculate the ROI breakeven point for any contract opportunity you're looking at. And then their blog content is underneath all of that. And they even have an opportunity for earn some money to refer a customer. So this is a different strategy. It's not a traditional blog per se, but it is more of a resource center. I mean, this one is a little heavy with content about their industry, but insurance is confusing. So depending on your industry, you might be able to get away with this and it not turn off customers. So this is just another example of the type of blog you can pursue with your outreach efforts when it comes to the content format for your blog, I would do long and short content. Let's say you write blog posts that are 500 words and blog posts that are 1500. Work, just make sure that you have a visual strategy for any content you develop, and not just on your blog, but how it's shared out in social media as well. Make sure you include some video, maybe an infographic or a podcast. And let's talk about podcasts. If you develop a pocket, transcribe it, you can use it as another form of content on your block, or you can use a little snippet of it out in social media. The point is, whenever you develop content, you should have a repurposing strategy. There may be other departments that can use your content in a newsletter or an external communication with your target customer. Now it's time for you to determine the type of content you're going to develop for your corporate blog, for your student project. I want you just take some time to write down the type of content you want to produce and then develop an exhaustive list of potential topics. The longer the list, the more content you are going to be able to develop quickly. Good luck.
4. Promoting Your Blog: You develop great content. You're always going to have an audience. But developing content isn't enough. You're going to have to leverage social media and online ads to boost your content. Make sure you know the hashtags and keywords that your target audience is going to use to find your content. You want to use those to listen in and learn about your audience, especially if they have a question, because you want to develop content that answers those questions. The other thing you wanna do is make your content searchable. Makes sure that you have a search bar on your blog so that people can find out about other content that you've developed. And as you're publishing new articles, be sure to link to old articles. Someone may have missed it. So you wanna make sure that you're always highlighting at least one older piece of content in your new content as it comes out. You also want to consider using your blog to promote in a newsletter. I tell you, I just promote a little paragraph of content in a newsletter with a link click here to read more. And eight out of 10 times they click. So you want to use all kinds of different tactics to get your content in front of people. Another great tactic is to reach out to five to seven experts in your industry and ask them to give you a comment about a question, get their answers back, and produce a roundup blog post that features them. Put a picture of them, their website, a link. They'll love it. And you'll be highlighting some people in your industry. And you'll also be bringing a lot more eyeballs to your blog. You'll always want to stay focused on the big picture goal of your blog and what your audience needs. The more you know about your audience, the more effective you're going to be with your content. That's how you're going to be able to reach your metrics for success with your corporate blog.
5. Monetizing Your Blog: When it comes to monetizing or corporate blog, the first thing you have to do is go back and think about what was the goal of the blog in the first place, if you're doing lead gen or you were doing it to close sales, then you already have a monetization strategy. But if you had it as a more traditional blog, there are some things you can do, but you can't do anything until you get some real traction and that means visitors. So once you get five to 10 thousand visitors a month, that's when you can start exercising some monetization strategies. The first one is affiliate marketing. Certainly you want to make sure that you make your company's products and services available on the site. But let's say your company has an affiliate relationship with a strategic partner. You can certainly make those products available and maybe even offer a little discount to incentivize people to utilize them. Another strategy you might want to consider is advertising on a site. Now there are four main advertising networks you can use. The biggest clearly is Google AdSense. So you definitely want to look into that. But there's also other ones. You've got Amazon RDS, There's also median net and then there's buy-sell ads. You just want to make sure that you make it clear to them that they can't put one of your competitors ads on your site. Let's say you're using your site for lead gen and that's where you're using it for. Well, if you're doing that, then that means that your website has sales funnels. And sales funnels are driven by e-mail and e-mail automation. So a typical sales funnel might have ten to 20 e-mails and you're going to send out over a 90 to a 120 day period to build the relationship, to build trust, and to remind your target lead 0 of your offers. But you don't want to lead with your offer. You want to leave with more great content, bonuses, special, you might want to even invite them to a free webinar or a live Q and a, you just want to use e-mail to nurture that relationship so that your customer potentially knows that you are their best solution. And when they're ready to buy, fam, they will buy from you. Another monetization strategy is really securing sponsorships, believe it or not, if you build a big enough amount of traffic to your site, other corporations will pay you to promote their events or even their product. So you'd certainly want to look at this, maybe for some of your strategic alliance partners that your company works with. But that is another great way to monetize a blog. And the last way that I want to talk about with you is promoting a live or virtual event. Now if you're going to promote live events on your site, there's a couple of ways to do it. You can certainly add a pop-up with a little link for people to register for more information. You could use a pop-up when people first log on to your site, or you can use an exit pop-up. So when it looks like somebody is ready to leave and exit pop-up will invite them to click here for more information. One of the other things you can do is advertise, right? So you want to advertise your event to draw people back to your site. Or you can also use a really fancy landing page with extra information, with headshots of who's going to be speaking and testimonials from people who come to the event before. Those are all things you can do within your blog to monetize other parts of the business. But remember, you always have to go back and look at what the goal of the blog was in the first place to make sure that any monetization strategy you want to execute is aligned with that. Let's say you are developing an individual blog. Like me, I have an individual blog has succeeded your own boss.com. Well, if you are looking at monetizing an individual blog, you would do it slightly differently. You would promote any books or ebooks that you have. You might even develop courses, online, courses that people can sign up for. Now if you're doing a corporate blog, you might offer an online course for free. But if you're an individual blogger, selling your online courses might be one of the main ways you monetize your business. So we might want to give away a little mini course for free, but your big course, even on a charge for that, one of the other things you might want to do as an individual blogger is create a membership site within your blog. Now, a membership site is a gated area on your site where you offer exclusive content or you do live coaching for some of your readers. You want to make it special, almost like a VIP experience, if you will. And then the last way you can monetize a blog, if you are a pretty successful individual blogger is with corporate sponsorships. If you have a big enough group of people that follow you, and it's a specific target audience that a corporation wants to reach. They will pay you. And they might pay you for a sponsored post. Or they might pay you to do social media promotion for them. Or they might pay you to come and speak at a live event. So there's all kinds of different ways you might want to monetize a blog. You certainly want to sell your services or your coaching or consulting. But there's all kinds of different ways that you can promote and sell on a blog. But you gotta do the hard work first. You gotta build the content, build the following, and then figure out what strategy you're going to use to make that money. Because at the end of the day, all businesses want to make money.
6. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for enrolling in my class on how to develop a corporate blog. I hope I have empowered you with tools and tips to be successful with this kind of project. Remember, they key is making sure there is full agreement on the goal of the blog. And then after that gets started writing, don't forget if you have any questions. Please leave them for me in the discussion boards. And I want to see your work on your project goal sheets and your editorial planning sheet. So please post those in the project gallery. And with that, I wish you well with this new project for your business.
Melinda Emerson, Author and “SmallBizLady”
