How to Start a Company Blog to Establish Your Brand and Increase Your Sales

A successful event must also be run by a successful business in order to maintain longevity in the market. In the busyness of event planning and organizing, content marketing might fall to the bottom of the todo list. But we’d like to suggest that content marketing and more specifically a company blog might be just the thing your event is missing.When done right a blog can increase your SEO ratings, further establish your brand and turn readers into customers.Now I know what you’re thinking, “We can’t justify funding an entire blog team or outsourcing blogs on a consistent basis.” No one understands you more than us! Almost 3 years ago, we were in the same position. We had pitiful attempts at a company blog but we knew there would be value if we could get our act together and do this blog thing right.I want to share with you 5 ways we’ve created and maintained a successful company blog and how you can too.

1. Just start.

It’s basic but just start. Stop over planning and analyzing and start writing. Initially you’ll use the approach of done is better than perfect but you must start if you are ever going to succeed. Don’t sweat the small stuff like categories or a social media plan and just start writing. Once you have content you can build a strategy and promote it but you must begin. Read more about how we started our blog here.

2. Be committed.

Now that you’ve started you’ve gotta commit. Make a set time and place each week when you (and whoever is going to be contributing) brainstorm, draft and edit content. Don’t break this commitment to yourself and your company. Your commitment will pay off. It may take a few months for this to become a habit but before you know it you’ll forget your pre-blogging days ever existed.

3. Be consistent.

Inconsistency is the death of blogging. You don’t want folks to come to your blog and see it hasn’t been updated in months. Or let’s say you've gained a readership and they expect you to post 5 days a week but then realize you can’t keep it up so only sometimes you’re posting 5 days a week and other times it’s only twice a week. This inconsistency will cause you to quickly lose readers. So instead of setting to post 5 days a week and risk burn out or an inability to be consistent at that quantity, choose a frequency that best suits your business, event and team.

4. Automate it.

Blogging is a manual and tedious process but there is a whole library of tools you can use to automate and assist you in your blogging. Here are a few tools I use to manage and maintain our blog.

• CoSchedule- There are a lot of calendar and scheduling tools out there but we have found CoSchedule to help connect the dots between all of our platforms we use to schedule, edit, post and initiate a social campaign surrounding our content.
• Snappa - We have two customer success agents who are also killer graphic designers but to streamline their process of creating custom animation graphics we use Snappa to build templates to streamline the process. To those who don’t have graphic designers on your team, not to worry, this is still one of the most beneficial tools you’ll use to create professional graphics to use as your feature images for your blog posts.
• Trello - Trello is a tool our entire company uses for assigning and managing tasks. We use this to organize brainstormed blog post ideas and we are able to assign them to authors and follow them along the process to a completed blog post. This also connects to our CoSchedule app through an app called Zapier. Which leads me to my next tool.
• Zapier - I’d like to say this is probably one of the most helpful apps across more industries and use cases compared to any other app on the market. It acts as a middle man between a whole host of databases and apps. For us it takes a blog assignment and creates a blog draft in CoSchedule, allowing for our calendar in CoSchedule to always reflect the task assignments in Trello.
• Google Docs - We have a team of about 12 people who contribute to writing our blog posts and then we have two of us who edit the blogs (One for content consistency and the other for grammar). Since we have so many of us touching one particular blog post, Google docs easily allows us to make edit suggestions, comments and have multiple users viewing one doc at the same time. It also can be integrated with CoSchedule to pull the content into a draft in CoSchedule which then can be imported into Wordpress seamlessly.

5. Gain Subscribers.

Subscribers are what take an okay blog to a great blog. Social media platforms will eb and flow but email is not going anywhere. Building an email list of subscribers gives you a reach beyond a trendy social media platform. Email is also one of the most tried and true means to generate sales. So while you may not be ready to start a drip campaign of weekly emails begin building that subscription list now! You can do this by adding email sign up pop ups or hello bars to your blog. Then, when the day finally comes and you’re ready to send those emails, you’ll be amazed at the audience you already have.Creating and maintaining a company blog can bring great value to your business if you use these tips. What challenges have you run into in your attempts to start a company blog? Reach out if you'd like to chat to brainstorm ways to make blogging work for you and your company!