Organisations often approach blog writing without planning the frequency of publishing blogs and topics to blog about. An effectively thought-out blog strategy will make a huge difference to your blog's effectiveness.

Organisations should first consider a business model for their blog to indicate what they are going to write about. What is the purpose and what are the desired results from the blog; to build an email list? To market products or services to drive sales? Sell product information? Attract new clients or members? The type of blog to be maintained is best decided from these decisions.

Type of blog

What will your blog be about? Your blog could be about any number of things. Here are a couple of examples:

• A CEO blogging from their point of view about the organisation, what's happening within the organisation, or their personal stories about the organisation's journey.
• A strategic blog to write directly about the company's products and services. This could include new products or services in the pipeline, updates, product modifications or tutorials on using the company's current products and services.
• A blog providing complementary material pertaining to the industry that your organisation operates in.

The blog could contain a mixture of these styles of writing to keep the blog interesting and relevant to your audience.

Strategy

Who’s going to write the blog? One person should be charged with controlling the blog. If this is too much to ask of one person in your company, the blog could be maintained by employees on a rotational basis. An issue that could occur when rotating the writer of the blog involves the consistency of the writing style of the blog due to the different writers. The CEO could undertake this responsibility (as per before) or staff, guests or contractors could be brought in to blog for the company.

Decide who your audience is based on who visits your website and who the target audience is for your business. Your audience will dictate what you will blogging about.

A timeline needs to be developed to dictate when your blog is going to be published. Be consistent with the publishing of your blogs.

A breakdown of the topics and contents that are going to make up your blog is essential so that the blogger knows what to blog about. Major topics could be broken down into smaller, sub-topics in order for people to gain a deeper understanding of the topic being covered.

Monitor and evaluate

Readers may comment on your blog with questions or concerns. It is important to reply promptly to these comments to show that your company cares about what the reader has said. A comment could spark a new idea for your company or be a potential sales lead. It could also address a serious issue that you may have missed.

It is important to track the number of visitors to your blog and the types of interactions that your blog posts are receiving. The interactions with your blog will provide an indication of the topics that are being enjoyed by viewers and followers. Your company can then consider ways to leverage off this type of content to bring about return readers. Topics that are not well received should be evaluated to ascertain why the content is not being enjoyed by readers, or the topics should be discarded altogether.

If you store your blogs on your website for a long period of time you should revisit them from time to time to ensure they are still relevant and timely.  They should be easy to update or discard, if no longer relevant.

Expert’s CMS, MoST, provides comprehensive statistics and reporting on several aspects of its users website. These stats are easy to read and useful for determining pages and blogs that are being visited or not.

Keep an eye out for our next blog on tips for writing and maintaining your blog.