- August 6, 2015
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Remove the Guessing from Guest Blogging
For many businesses, corporate blogs are the backbone of their integrated marketing strategy. Blogging is one of the few ways you have total control over your brand messaging.
However, even with such an open invitation to position your company, products and services accurately, the mechanics of blogging can be tedious. The continual upkeep of plugins, features, images and more is deceptively time-consuming, and the most formidable juggernaut is coming up with fresh content.
“That’s where the contributor model comes in,” explains Lisa Kasanicky in a MarketingProfs column.
“For organizations, the blog is no longer the voice of one person. It’s the voice of many telling the story of your brand.”
She outlines four ways to transition to a contributor model and amplify the reach of your blog:
Hire (or Contract) the Right Talent. Work with a blog editor or manager who can edit judiciously, write concisely, and make posts come alive with excerpts, social metadata, titles and more. Find a person proficient with blog software, plugins and editorial calendar management.
Identify the Top Voices within Your Target Market. This is called the ‘halo effect’. Kasanicky recommends courting guest writers who “not only craft authoritative, brilliantly engaging posts but also intimately understand your industry and have a flock of content-hungry followers ready to snap it up.”
This approach, also called influencer marketing (tips here), is the key to a buzz-worthy contributor blog model.
Humanize Your Blog. If you prefer to post anonymous content vs. offering a byline, Kasanicky recommends developing a persona that will resonate with your readers. “Creating personas of your blog readers is imperative to developing strong blog guidelines,” she says. “Give your target audience personas a name, age, level of education, personal traits, and their professional challenges so that you can help resolve them.”
Develop Contributor Guidelines. This may seem like a no-brainer, but many companies skip this step, assuming guest bloggers will know what to write. They may, but will it be “on brand” for your company? Kasanicky recommends to “think of your contributor guidelines as the ultimate love letter to your contributors in that it inspires them to write compelling, sharable content.” Turn to Copyblogger’s guest post guidelines to kick start your own contributor guidelines.
And here’s a final tip from us: Once you identify your contributors and school them on guidelines, make sure you treat them well. For ideas, go to “The Care and Feeding of Content Producers.”
