After reading our last article on why you should blog, you are now ready to jump in and start blogging and creating a blog schedule is one of the most important thing to remember.
Well, where do you start?
There are several things you need to keep in mind to make your blog work for your company or organization.
Audience
One of the first things you need to keep in mind is who is your target audience and what will be of interest to them. If you have been in business long enough, you should have a good idea of who your audience will be and what they want to read about. For example, an HVAC company may want to write a blog post about how to clean their home HVAC system. How-to articles are big according to Google as more people want to know how to do things at home themselves. So they search online for how-to articles that will give them the information they need.
Brainstorming ideas
You will also want to make sure you never run out of ideas. So, you will want to come up with ideas to blog about. Keep an idea log. Any idea you think that might make a good blog, write it down somewhere. Also, make sure you read any comments that your customers leave on older blog posts. These may trigger ideas for a future post. They might ask you how to do something else which you can turn into another post. I have included a small list below on other ideas that can make a good article to publish on your company blog.
- Meet the team
- FAQ
- Photo blog
- Featured Customer
- Case Studies
- Tech Talk
- Quiz
- Top Ten List
- How to
- How much
- Hot it works
Don’t think that you are the only one that can write articles. Invite others to write a guest post or if you have employees that can bring different ideas, ask them to write up something to post.
Consistency
Now that you have a good list of ideas to start blogging about, the next important thing is when to publish. You don’t have to publish every day and you don’t have to publish every week. You do however need to stick to a set schedule and stick to it. If you decide to publish every day, then you need to make sure you have published every day. If you decide to publish once a week on Wednesdays, then make sure you publish every Wednesday. The frequency is not the key but the consistent schedule is. Airtable is an online service that provides tools to help with various tasks. They have a content calendar tool to help in planning your schedule.
I would recommend starting with about one article a week. To get started, I would take one day and put together your first month of ideas to write about and then write your first month of articles. The good thing with WordPress is that you can create the post ahead of time and then set the day and time you want the post to publish. So you can write a month’s worth of articles and then set them to publish every Wednesday for the month at whatever time you want and WordPress does the rest. Then take a day the next week and go ahead and write the second’s months of articles. Now you are good for the first two months and then you can go to once a month, take one day and write a month’s worth. This will help you keep ahead of the schedule and stay consistent.
Of course, this is just my recommendation. You need to find the schedule that works for you and stick to it.
