Best Practices for Business Blogging

Having a blog for business can be a huge asset to your company. Not only can a blog help with search engine optimization efforts, but it can also help to show your company as a thought leader in your industry. Being a thought leader in your industry means people will turn to you as a trusted source for information. Being the go-to person ends up driving business in your direction. Thus blogging should be an important business strategy to consider implementing.

Here is the panel from the Social Media Business Forum with Jeff Cohen, DJ Waldow, and Alison Bolen on "Business Blogging Best Practices." It was a great panel and some very good tips, tricks, and how-to on how to get your blog working for your business. Runtime 51min.



Business Blogging Best Practices from Alter Imaging, Inc. on Vimeo.

Timestamps from "Business Blogging Best Practices"


1:30 75 of the fortune 500 companies actually blog

2:00 Corporate blogs are not just to show the personality of the company but also what the company actually knows.

5:00 Blog strategy – know who your customers are so you can determine the kinds of things to say to them and what you are trying to get across.

6:45 Just having a blog because everyone else has one is not a strategy

7:42 Corporate priority blogs – what are your top priorities of your business?determine the most important areas to focus on.

8:20 feed clients ideas to blog

8:57 Important factor of having a blog - inbound marketing and the inherent value of SEO in your blog

9:30 About 80% of people in the B2B space when they are doing a product search go to Google. If you are not found, you’re dead meat.

11:15 Blue Sky Factories Strategy with their blog is to drive leads and the other is to been seen as thought leaders

12:20 Business Blogging Resources Page

13:00 Have a call to action in each blog post driving them back to somewhere on your site to grab contact info and get that lead.

16:28 Who should blog in your company?

17:30 Consumer education services crowd sourced 100 employees to write a blog and then picked out the best bloggers. Six employees where picked and are incentivized to write a post a week.

21:35 Employees need to 1. be really good writers and 2. know a lot about the industry. Writing can be coached and industry knowledge can be gained through experience.

25:30 Have a consistent voice in your blog. Have consistent topics.

26:42 Marketing and PR people don’t necessarily make the best bloggers

30:00 Ghost writing a blog post is NOT a recommended practice. You loss out on the level of engagement that is a blog post.

33:30 Mixing of personal and business blogs only if applicable

36:00 IBM and AMEX list their employees blogs on their site. These lists of personal blogs can give the company a softer more human image.

40:00 Fitting into the corporate voice

40:20 Social media policy “Don’t say anything online that you wouldn't want your mother to read”

45:50 The Process of implementing and building a team blog

48:00 Cheerleading your blogging team. Encouraging people to stick with it is sometimes necessary.

49:50 Comment on one blog a day