Small businesses frequently suffer from growing pains caused by “the people problem” - too many tasks, not enough people. Making the decision to add blog marketing to your online strategy may be a great idea, but what to do next is not always so clear. To successfully execute your blog marketing strategy, you will need to have someone available to manage the blog. How do you decide if you have the resources in house to manage the blog on an ongoing basis?

Here are some questions that will need to be answered before you can launch and manage your own business blog:

How frequently do you need to post?
You should post at least 2-3 times each week. Regularity is critical to building readership.

How many hours per day/week need to be dedicated to posting to the blog?
For a solid post of 300-500 words you can expect to put in 2-3 hours per post. Some posts can be shorter and require less time, but without valuable information posted to the blog regularly you may find your traffic to the blog flat.

Who will update the blog?

This is an important question. For many small businesses, this is dictated by the amount of time going into it. If you have multiple people in marketing, you can share the responsibilities among your team and get it off the ground quickly. Keep in mind, the person writing the posts needs to be able to form the concept, do the research, and write the post.

What is the general tone of the blog?

Is your blog going to be a direct marketing tool? Will it be more focused on building a community with customers? Is it more of a PR tool, or an extension of your SEO efforts? Maybe it’s a news and tips resource for customers or prospects? Hopefully, it’s all of the above.

Do you have the technical resources to integrate a Wordpress or Movabletype blog into your website?
This is the most difficult for most companies. Integrating the blog into a subpage on the website is important. It needs to be an extension of your brand, and carry on the message to a more personal level.

Tags: Blog Marketing, Blog Training, business-blog, business-blogging

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 17th, 2008 at 5:59 am and is filed under Blog Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.