How to blog on a small business budget

How to blog on a small business budget

Businesses often have a goldmine of blog content at their fingertips.  This post provides tips on how to manage your blog inhouse.

What I always tell my clients usually generates a big groan, but the best way to generate quality content that is useful for a potential client is to have it done in-house. That does NOT require a dedicated marketing team, but it does require a point-person to keep everything organized (almost easier to outsource the organizing of it, really). I recommend having the internal team write blog posts based on the questions that they most commonly get from leads and customers. Here are a few ways to generate blog topics:

• Ask the sales team: what are the top 5 questions you are asked from customers? What are the answers? That is 5 blog posts.
• Ask the customer support team the same questions.
• Higher-level management and executives: Where is the industry going?  What is the business doing to keep up? Break those answers down to bite-size pieces. For example, the announcement of new pricing packages would be a great blog post. For an extremely busy exec with an assistant, have the blog post dictated to the assistant.

The biggest thing that I see companies overlook with blog posts is that the content comes from knowledge that already lives within the company. Nobody needs to do an 8-hour research blog post to blog about an industry that they work in all day already. What is common knowledge to the staff is valuable insight to the potential customer reading.

What you CAN outsource: What tends to be the most cumbersome to internal staff writing is forcing them to each learn how to create and publish a new blog post. That's confusing! Who wants to learn a whole new system? To take away that obstacle, I suggest having one person in charge of collecting the blog posts, editing (grammar/spelling), sourcing/adding images, putting them into WordPress and publishing them on a schedule. THAT role can be outsourced to an SEO or developer with a blog publishing program.

Need help setting up, optimizing, or publishing your blog posts? Jollity's web dev and SEO team can help - get in touch now to discuss.