The 7 Habits of Highly Successful Corporate Blogs

Successful corporate blogs have seven things in common, plus a little heart, and a little structure

If you run a company, and you have a website that attempts to make a sale, accept new subscribers, or generate new leads – you can benefit from a corporate blog.

On successful corporate blogs – a blog post is an advertorial. Writers seem to hate this, but marketers and business owners understand what that means. Every blog post is a new landing page, and it works for you. It has a job and a hard hat, and it goes to work 24 hours a day for you. 

[Tweet “Every blog post has a job and a hard hat, and it goes to work for you every day!”]

If your blog doesn’t send new website traffic, sales or leads your way, then you’re doing it wrong.

If it does, then you’re following the 7 habits of highly successful corporate blogs (congrats!):

1. Successful corporate blogs have an editorial calendar.

Waking up and popping out whatever topic you feel like on any given day, is not an editorial strategy. This leads to missed days, posts that don’t go out until 3 pm, and just a hot mess of a blog. Plan out your blog editorial calendar at least a month ahead of time, if not a quarter. This is the template that we train new BuzzFarmers Managing Editors with. Feel free to use it, or call us and we’ll take care of the heavy lifting for you.

2. Successful corporate blogs are authoritative and helpful to the reader.

Content always comes first. At BuzzFarmers, we’ve hired and trained professional writers to be content marketers – not the other way around. The quality of your content is how you get people to read from your title tag to your call to action. Don’t skimp on the meat of your articles.

3. Successful corporate blogs are optimized for search.

Not sure what to write about? Do your keyword research. Find out what your customers and target customers tend to search for on the web. Look for the questions they ask, and then provide them with a solution. Every post on your blog will work for you while you sleep, as long as it’s search-optimized.

4. Successful corporate blogs have a long tail social media promotional cycle.

Don’t stop at promoting your post a couple of times; let it live forever. Do this by using something like CoSchedule or Hootsuite. We write 12 unique social media posts per article and schedule them to share throughout the year.

5. Successful corporate blogs test everything.

Test headlines, test Tweets, test Facebook formulas. Your readers will tell you what they like best when they click, comment, share and retweet. Measure this!

6. Successful corporate blogs have guest posts from their leadership team.

You may have an on-staff writer (or you have us) producing daily content, but readers resonate with thoughtful posts from the leadership team, sharing case studies and insider stories. We interview CEOs all the time to ghostwrite these posts on their behalf.

7. Successful corporate blogs have calls to action.

Without purpose, your blog is just a jumbled mess of text. Give every post a job. Add a call to action in the middle of your post (see above) and below it (see below). Link to other articles on your blog. Link to related products. Be casual about it, but don’t put good content to waste.

I wouldn’t include this in the list because it’s out of scope, but it’s still a big deal: Don’t post pages and call them blog posts. WordPress is becoming a popular standard not just for blogs, but as complete content management systems for websites. Google reads and indexes WordPress blogs easily, but for the love of goodness, make sure your blog is on the same domain as your website.

Beyond these basics, come up with some out-of-the-box ideas. For example, our office dog Napa has his own blog, which is built to entertain dog lovers, but also drives pet-based business our way. And it does!

Not to mention, we get to have fun interviewing dogs for #WorkingDogWednesday, like Ben & Jerry’s, Glassdoor, Wistia, PetBox, and lots of others!

Beyond this critical structure for a successful corporate blog, it also requires heart  – that’s what your blog is for. Your sales pages are for the jargon. Your blog is where you connect.

In the words of one of my favorite copywriters, Ash Ambirge:

“Anyone can sell treadmill parts. There’s nothing genius in that, nor particularly difficult. The difference has nothing to do with what you sell. The difference is in how you sell it, and furthermore, how you make the people feel who buy it. And when that comes down to your words on the screen, versus the next guy’s words on the screen, then what you say really IS more important than what you sell.”

So tell me, what do you think makes a successful corporate blog?

Does all this sound good, but more than you have time for? Get in touch to find out how we can help you make money with a blog. Our team is dedicated, focused, and excited about blogging for business.

Order a BuzzAudit, or contact Patrick at: patrick@buzzfarmers.wpengine.com or 401-573-5409 to get started.