Five Ways to Make Blogging a Team Effort

‘Content is King’, or so the saying goes. However, when it comes to sitting down and creating this content that gets results, many marketers find they are strapped for both time and (gasp!) ideas. Fortunately, when it comes to writing a company blog, there are abundant resources in the form of your co-workers. Who knows best practices, tips, and tricks of the trade better than those who are completing the work?

Every marketing team should be trying to tap in to these amazing resources in order to compose unique, insightful, and helpful blogs. How do you encourage co-workers to write for you? Here at CommonPlaces, we encourage our entire team to write for our blog by following these 5 steps.

1. Create a Style Guide

Your blog is a part of your company’s branding, and just like the design of your logo and website, you should create a style guide to follow. This style guide should include a glossary with the proper use, capitalization and spelling of common words. It should also discuss the ‘voice’ of your writing as well as the general format. By providing a style guide, you are doing two things

1. Ensuring that your blog reads as one cohesive unit
2. Giving all co-workers an idea of what you are looking for as a marketing team

2. Create an Editorial Calendar (and stick to it)

An editorial calendar is an efficient way to organize your thoughts, outline your blogs, and create a blogging schedule. If everyone on the team knows when their blog is due, they can plan ahead to make sure it is done on time. The editorial calendar will also provide them with the idea/topic as a starting point.

When putting together your blog topics, it is very important to remember your buyer personas.

You can download our editorial calendar template to get yourself started.

3. Talk it out

Not everyone has amazing writing skills. In fact, most people find themselves overcome with a HUGE case of writer’s block as soon as they sit down to begin writing. Sit down with your co-worker and ‘interview’ them to get the flow going. Take ample notes, and help them out by putting their words onto paper.

However, you should ALWAYS make sure that the author is given final approval of the blog prior to posting it. You want to make sure they feel the ownership of their words. After all, it is their blog.

4. Fire up the competition

Here at CommonPlaces, we only hire the best employees in the business, and they didn’t get that way without being a little competitive among their colleagues. Turn the blog into a bit of a competition. See whose blog can earn the most comments, or shares, and provide the winner with a small prize. Once you add a little competition, your co-workers will try coming up with new ideas to surpass their colleagues.

5. Provide them with the results

After you post the blog on your website and share it on your various social media accounts, monitor it! When the blog is liked, favorited, or shared, let the author know. Show them the comments and ask them for a response. Once they see that their thoughts are well received, they will be eager to write another blog and see how the various communities respond.

Creating content is vital to a company’s success online. You need to generate new, unique, and helpful information to engage your buyer personas on a daily basis. Team members are a fantastic resource for any marketer. Tapping into their knowledge and experience will increase the value of your blog to your customers.