Blog Management for Business Owners

If you have recently had a blog installed on your business website, you may find this helpful. The purpose of this article is to help you ensure that your Blog:

• Enhances the image and credibility of your business
• Drives additional traffic to your website
• Delivers a return on your investment

What are the benefits of having a Blog?

• It allows your business comment in an authoritative way about issues affecting your clients and your industry.
• It enhances the credibility of the business and of individual staff members within the business.
• It can be very helpful in driving additional traffic to your website.
• The articles written can also be used to set up a monthly newsletter.

Why your Blog needs to be actively managed

The simple reason is that, in our experience, it its not managed it won’t be regularly updated.  Not only do you stop getting the benefits from your Blog, you in fact can begin to damage your reputation as potential customers see that you have lost interest in keeping it up-to-date.  They might assume that your interest in them as customers may be similarly short lived.

To illustrate this, if at any point the Blog becomes too time consuming to keep up-to-date we normally recommend removing it from your site.

Benefiting from your Blog – Simple Tips

1. It is likely that you will be asking several staff members to make regular contributions to the Blog.  If you don’t clearly explain the short and long term benefits for them and the business they will see this as an additional burden they can do without.

   ACTION: Allow 15 minutes at your next team meeting to explain why a Blog is important and why it is on your website.




2. As the business owner, you need to make the Blog as ‘self-managing’ as possible.  Otherwise it will prove to be a burden for you.  The Blog should feature as an agenda item at regular management/team meetings. You also need to delegate the writing of articles to appropriate members of staff.

   ACTION: Include ‘Blog Articles’ as an agenda item at all management meetings ACTION: Decide who will write articles and brief them accordingly ACTION: Agree number of articles required per month and then define a schedule that everyone can sign up to.  (Ideally the Blog should have 1 new article per week but certainly no less than 2 per month).

3. Try to build up a small bank of articles so that you are never short of an article.  This really reduces the stress on everyone.

   ACTION: Ask for 2 articles per person to get things started.  Then hold the extra one back and release as required.  Obviously bearing in mind that some articles need to be more current than others.

4. Like all parts of business, you will need to apply a quality control measure.  You should ask to review all articles before they go live on the site.

   ACTION: Ask contributors to email their article to you before it goes live and to also give you a certain number of days to review it.




5. Why not use the articles you have written to make a monthly email newsletter?  And if you do, invest in a newsletter design and system that fits your overall online look and feel.

   ACTION: Assess whether an email newsletter would be suitable for your business.