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Want to Get REALLY Good at Corporate Blogging? Blog for Fun

There are all sorts of reasons to start a company blog. A company blog can help build your brand, establish corporate personality, provide a path for direct dialog with customers, help with search engine optimization (SEO) and a host of other cool things. Great content is, arguably, the most important component of a corporate blog — or any blog for that matter — but there’s a lot more to it than just content. Ensuring the blog has a professional look and feel is also key. If it is more inviting and easy to read, people are more likely to linger. And if the blog looks slick and professional, that says a lot about the company (even if readers only notice subconsciously). If it is messy, that says something too. Beyond that, there are a lot of other things that make a good blog great. These include:

Usability
Use of graphics, images and dynamic content
Intuitive archiving and navigation
Use of additional pages
Effective use of SEO

All this stuff requires extra time and effort, but the pay off is huge. My view is, if you are going to take the time to do it, taking the extra time and effort to do it well only makes sense. I’ve found that one of the best ways to REALLY get good at blogging is to blog about something about which you are passionate. If you are passionate about your corporate blog, consider yourself lucky. My guess is that, for most, even if they enjoy working on their company’s blog, it still feels like work on some level.

Blogging about something you love makes you a better all-around blogger

Earlier this year, I started a blog about cycling. My original intent was to use the blog to help keep my riding buddies informed about rides we had planned, share tidbits of info with some of the newer riders in the group and document our training. After only a few weeks, I noticed this blog was getting a LOT of traffic. So much so that I quickly decided to start writing it for a broader audience. Within a few months, my hobby blog had more posts — not to mention more traffic — than my corporate blog, which had been around three times as long. Then, one day, I compared the two side-by-side. I realized that my fun blog, which I did entirely on my own, looked every bit as professional as my corporate blog (which I paid a Web designer to create, customize and get running). Only then did it occur to me how much time and effort I had put in to my bike blog and how much I had learned. Unfortunately, I also realized how much I had neglected my corporate blog. Regardless, the extra experience I gained from my hobby blog has proven invaluable to me. Ultimately, it has had a positive impact on all the various blogs with which I’m involved. If you are building a team to work on your corporate blog, I highly recommend you encourage them to blog on their own as well. A strong case can even be made for allowing them to do a bit of personal blogging on company time every now and again. And if you’ve been given responsibility for spearheading your company’s blog and will be doing most of the heavy lifting yourself, I would, likewise, encourage you to start a blog on the side just for fun. Pick something you are passionate about and I promise you’ll have a great time with it. Even better, if you end up creating something great and you build a big enough following, you might even find ways to monetize it. Just don’t forget about your work blog.

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Want to Get REALLY Good at Corporate Blogging? Blog for Fun

Dean Rodgers

KoiFish Communications

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