Quite often I get the question ‘how can we make our employees write blog posts?’ Having worked as a marketing manager for many years, I’ve had to tackle this very question quite a few times over the years and here are my tips based on what I’ve learnt.
Start small
My experience is that it is best to start with a small and tight group of writers—usually they are employees with a specialist area or skill. They have lots of knowledge—now you need to enable them to share their expertise and experience in blog posts. This is what your customer wants—knowledge and/or verification.
Remove the hurdles
I often hear that in the beginning the employees are hesitant to write blog articles with the motivation: ‘I do not know how to write’ and ‘I do not have the time’. It is therefore important to educate the specialists how to write—with the objective to enlighten and guide the reader. I always try to make the writers think from the outside, meaning how and what information does your customers look for.
Make it easy
Set-up a smooth and efficient process that states who supports the writer in the production, a timeline and who approves the blog article before it is published. Make sure that all involved colleagues know the process and follow it—then the process works, for real. In addition to the writers—more colleagues should have the responsibility to identify and suggest content for blog articles. Proposals for content should be added in the content plan with set dates.
Celebrate the results
Show the results to the writers—how many likes and clicks their blog article resulted in. I would mentioned it at employee meetings, but also in the internal communications from the management. Most important—connect the articles and results to the business and brand value. This gives proudness and energy to write more articles. Who has most readers—who got most leads? Celebrate and show the success!
Share the blog articles to a wider audience
Beyond publishing your posts on your blog I recommend that you also publish it on your offsite touch points—social media—to get a wider spread. In addition, your writer should ask his/her team to publish the blog posts on their LinkedIn accounts. This does not happen by itself. I walked around, helped my colleagues hands-on, to share the blog articles. After a while it sets in their spine, their routines. Some might think that multiple persons sharing the same blog articles would look like spam, but on the contrary, it shows how interesting and worth reading the articles are. But first—make sure the writers and the teams have good LinkedIn-profiles.
Positive spin
I would say that all this creates interest from colleagues to also start to write blog posts. It gives a positive spin and from 10 writers we have started your climb towards 100 writers. Soon you will have blog articles in line, to be published.
Want to read more about how to get your blog machine going? Read my colleague Louise Waern’s blog post Six tips for creating a business blog content machine.
