Develop Blog Strategy First
Posted by Patrick on April 12th, 2006
When I started blogging I just jumped in with both feet. It was great fun but I do have a few scars from mistakes I could have avoided. So before you start shooting from the hip like I did, I’d like to offer the following suggestion to ensure that you get started off on the right foot
Develop your blog strategy before you do anything else.
Launching a corporate blog is a lot like launching a new product or service, without a proper strategy in place it is doubtful that your blog will achieve much success. If your company has an up to date marketing plan then answering the questions below should be relatively easy. If you do not have a current marketing plan, then maybe this will be the impetus needed to develop one. Shadowbox Studios has developed a series of questions that, when answered, help you define the overall strategy and direction for your corporate blog.
A) Developing your blogging goals and objectives
Why is it that you are starting a blog and what are the results you expect to receive? Setting goals and objectives is critical for any business process and blogging is no different. Without realistic goals and objectives, your blog WILL NOT succeed. Please keep in mind that the goal is where we want to be. The objectives are the steps needed to get there. Successful goals and objectives are SMART: Specific – Measurable – Attainable – Relevant – Timely.
Sample Goals (not limited to 5)
- Improve my company’s online visibility.
- Acquire 10 clients after 6 months of blogging.
- Position myself as an expert in conversational copywriting.
- Network with other online copywriters.
- Produce an example of how a blog can extend a company’s message.
Sample Objectives
- Identify 5 competitor blogs.
- Read every new post in the above mentioned competitor blogs.
- Make at least three comments per week in the above mentioned competitor blogs.
- Have 10 reciprocal blogroll links with similarly focused blogs.
- Target ten keywords or phrases (we’ll discuss these on the next post) and get in the top 20 results.
- Be able to identify key topics by reader comments and trackbacks.
- Produce at least 3 blog posts per week.
- Assess the effectiveness of blog effort by analyzing subscriber data (RSS and mailing lists)
B) Identifying your target audience and defining your blog focus
- What is the vertical market or cross functional specialty on which your blog will be targeted.
- Who is your intended target audience?
- What are the topics of your blog going to be?
- Please list 5-10 key words that are associated with your topic?
C) Identifying and understanding your competitors
The best way to find out you your competitors are that are blogging is to input the keywords that you listed above into a blog search engine. Although I recommend Technorati , there are other very good blog search engines such as Feedster, PubSub.com), IceRocket) and Google’s Blog Search). Technorati has a feature called “authority” that makes it easy to determine who your main competitors are. When you conduct a search on Technorati you can choose whether you would like to see only the results that have authority – Technorati calculates a blog’s authority by how many people link to it. We assume that the bloggers in your industry with the most “authority” are your main competitors. When conducting your search try different combinations of your key words. Try putting two or more key words in quotation marks (“corporate blogging”).
Once you have identified who are the main players in your industry, we strongly suggest that you start following these blogs. Reading what other corporate bloggers are writing can provide you with basic corporate blogging guidelines and spur ideas for future blogging topics. Lastly, another great way to find quality blogs is to check out the “blog rolls” of the competitor sites you have already identified.
- Please name the URLs of the top 5 competitor blogs.
- What are the blog categories of these 5 competitors?
- How long have these blogs been in existence? You can determine this by looking in the archives section of these blogs.
- On average, how many posts per week do these blogs publish?
Once you have completed this strategy exercise you will be on the right path to successful blogging.
No related posts.
on April 13th, 2006 at 7:20 am
Blogging Strategy
Corporate Blogging has a great post on blogging strategy: developing your blog strategy first – before beginning blogging. Patrick Dodd elegantly states without a proper strategy in place it is doubtful that your blog will achieve much success. Apparen…
on April 13th, 2006 at 9:30 am
Couldn’t agree more – the planning phase always seems to be one that people miss out on when they start a Business Blog, I imagine it’s just that they want to get on and do it! The SMART acronym is a perfect one to use for this. The other element that I often suggest they consider at the same time is how it will integrate with their other marketing activities, if indeed it’s an externally focused blog. Nice overview – thank you.
on April 14th, 2006 at 11:23 pm
Mark’s right. And I think for me, these tips are useful even though I’ve been blogging for six months now – I need to re-evaluate my progress and ask myself what my goals really are. Thanks for this post!
on April 17th, 2006 at 12:27 pm
[...] Develop strategy and set goals before you begin blogging. [...]
on May 17th, 2006 at 8:18 pm
[...] Corporate Blogging 101 » Blog Archive » Develop Blog Strategy First An introduction to corporate blogging. (tags: corporate-blogging) [...]
on May 24th, 2006 at 4:26 am
[...] You?Äôve jumped into the blogosphere with both feet. ¬?After diligently developing and sticking to your blog strategy, you begin to see the fruits of your labour ?Äì traffic to your site continues to increase each week and you?Äôve started to get good reviews from peers and colleagues.¬? Everything is going according to plan except that you have not been able to monetize your traffic ?Äì presumably the main reason for starting your blog. [...]
on May 25th, 2006 at 12:32 pm
Excellent goal examples for rubber-meets-the-road readers like myself. Good stuff.
on July 10th, 2006 at 3:33 pm
[...] Just because your blogs reside behind the company firewall doesn’t mean that you don’t need to establish blog strategy, policies first. A poorly planned blogging campaign is worse than not blogging at all regardless of whether the blog is in front of or behind the company firewall. [...]
on July 17th, 2006 at 9:48 am
Damn great goals. Thanks for the tips.
on February 5th, 2009 at 7:10 pm
[...] your blog strategy and tweet in support of that strategy. Don’t use it to simply do short versions of your press [...]
on September 3rd, 2009 at 10:36 am
Excellent site, keep up the good work