Getting started with your company's blog - The Basics

So, you’ve decided on or are thinking about running a blog on your company’s website? Now you must be wondering what you need to take into consideration when setting up your long-term plan. At least we hope you are…

Like any other public relations strategy, corporate blogging should be approached with clearly predefined goals and targets, which means don’t start a blog on your business’ website without having a clear strategy outlined.

Same as some industries are better positioned to reap the benefits of social media purely because of what they are and do, so do other industries and corporate blogging fit better. Having said that, practically all business can benefit from business blogging in one way or the other. The important thing is to establish your goals and find an effective content strategy to get where you want to be.

Identify your blogging goals

By regularly developing new content for your website, you can keep your stakeholders connected to you by highlighting why your business is the go to place. This can be done in numerous ways, but your main goals would be all or some of the below:

• Generate business leads
• Inform and Educate audiences
• Position your business as the thought leader in your industry
• Branding
• Direct sales, etc.

Secondary goals which are actually directly connected to the ones above are:

• Increase website traffic
• Improve organic search ranking
• Build or grow your email database
• Increase inbound links to your website, etc.

Decide on the type of content you want to create

Relevant content, it needs to be relevant to what your business does. Don’t create fluff for the sake of running a business blog, focus on what you do. Second, be specific, no point in creating generalized blog posts, since there are a million of them out there. That kind of content doesn’t really do anything for you. Instead write about your industry and the market you operate in, since that’s where your customers, clients and partners are. Further on depending on the nature and the size of your business you could pinpoint your content strategy to target a very specific subset of your audience, instead of a broad range. It all depends on your business goals, as any communication worth a dime of course should.

Come up with a list of topics for your blog

What broadly do you want to talk about? Let’s say you own a healthy restaurant in Doha and your aim is to attract more customers. You can approach this from multiple angles. One, you can write about why exactly your items on the menu are so healthy. And we don’t mean that this needs to be a brazen sales pitch, this is not marketing per se, this is more about building trust in your establishment. So let’s take a look at some interesting blog post ideas that could relate well to your restaurant:

• Organically grown vegetables in Qatar: How to know what’s on your plate
• The Doha Stone: Why eating healthy is by far the best way to prevent Diabetes
• Organic labeling in Qatar – is it regulated?
• Farm to table – Do we have it Doha?

Now not all of the above might work for you, the thing is you know your business inside out and by informing and thus empowering your existing and potential customers, you build trust in your brand. As illustrated in the example above, you’re the one running the healthy restaurant and you know what to highlight. And why would you do that you say? We’ll tell you why – because practically nobody is doing it in Qatar and you have the perfect opportunity to make your business a shining example. The fact is there is a lack of information in practically all fields in Doha, which is a consequence of insufficient messaging from both the State as well as the private sector in addition to a not exactly inspiring media landscape and of course the fact that Qatar is a revolving door. People come and go constantly, which means there is a need to constantly educate newcomers.

And they will thank you for it, as anybody trying to find information online about specifics in Qatar will gladly attest to, since that 8 year old discussion on Qatar Living just doesn’t always cut it ?.

Create and publish content

Since one of the main advantages of blog posts is attracting new visitors to your website through Google Search, you should keep in mind that nowadays Google ranks long form content higher than short form.

Meaning if you write and publish an article on your blog that is long (1,000 words and above) and of course at the same time provides really valuable information to your visitors, you have a much better chance of ranking high on Google Search, than with a generic, fluffy article that is 300 words long and doesn’t say much at all.

The evolution of Google’s search algorithm is definitely working well for those that can and will create useful long form content, meaning who better than you (or us of course, since we offer that service), since you know your business and industry well. Basically the good news is that the emphasis on technical SEO know-how has been greatly reduced when it comes to ranking highly in the list of search results.

Now obviously you might not have experience with writing blog posts or simply don’t have time to do that yourself, be it if you are a small business owner or heading a team of communications professionals in a corporation.

In that case your best bet is to carefully choose an agency that you can trust to produce great content for you. Now the thing is who to go with? Well honestly, it’s not really the Agency (PR, Creative, Marketing, etc…), it’s about the particular person you’re working with from that Agency, that will ultimately dictate how fruitful your relationship will be.

What you’d ideally want is to work with a person that has a combination of experience across public relations, journalism, digital marketing and of course with an in-depth understanding of the market you operate in – Qatar. Not to mention someone that also at least has a basic grasp of what you do.

And that is where Priya DSouza Communications comes in with our team of seasoned professionals who bring together over 45 years of hands on expertise in Qatar, combining their diverse skills across publishing magazines and websites, content creation, public and media relations and digital marketing among others.

But enough about us for now ?.

Don’t forget to promote your blog posts

After you’ve written and published that last blog post on your website your job isn’t done just yet. Next and perhaps just as important a step is to notify the audience about it. So make sure you publish it on relevant social media platforms and of course in your newsletter, which you send to all or a segment of your emailing list subscribers.

And speaking of emailing lists, if you aren’t already actively building one, you really should start. Why? Well if a website visitor went to the “trouble” of giving you their email address with the expectation of receiving updates, then that is obviously someone that has expressed an above average interest in you, your brand and what it offers.

Best thing is these opt-in forms can easily be incorporated into your company’s website and if done well, they can really do wonders for your mailing lists. By far the biggest conversion rates happen when you offer the visitor something of value in return for them giving you their email and signing up for your newsletter. For example Qatar Diabetes Association could easily put together a comprehensive information pamphlette (either a general one of diabetes or a specific one for a particular occasion like Ramadan, Sports Day and the like), which website visitors could download as a PDF (yes that’s fine in this case), after leaving their contact details (email address only is fine).

This way you give your website visitors a tangible benefit to subscribing to your organization’s email newsletter – they immediately receive something they would find useful and your email database grows automatically, without you having to manually add people that might or might not be interested in what you have to say.

Also, make sure that opt-in form – where website visitors can subscribe to your newsletter – is visible; don’t put it on some obscure page of your website, but instead make it as visible as possible without being too disruptive. This can be achieved by putting it in website headers, footers, side-bars or as pop-overs, pop-ups and the like. If you want to be more specific, the latter options can also be displayed on only specific pages of your website.

If you outsource corporate blogging to an agency…

In case you outsource the writing of your company’s blog to an agency, make sure you are as accessible as possible to them. The thing is you and your organization posses the industry expertise, which you are trying to showcase to your stakeholders. That means the more involved you’ll be in the process of conceptualizing the topics of your blog and the more you’ll open the doors of your organization to the PR/Content agency, the better product you’ll end up with.

Basically you want to make sure the person you work with understands your organization, its business goals and target audience almost as well as you do. Otherwise they’ll end up creating some banal, general content that wont do anything much in terms of positioning your company as a thought leader in its field.