Like most businesses, you probably have a ‘Blog’ section on your website. Check the date of the last blog that was uploaded – was it a month ago, six months, over a year?
Blog pages on websites that sit unused and unloved are extremely common. You’re too busy to take the time to update them and it’s always that one job you never get round to. If that’s you or your company, you are missing out on some PR that you can control and, if you write the content in-house, is completely free!
Think of a blog page as a place where you can share your experience of the industry you operate in and push your company as the expert in your field, whether that’s through case studies, how-to articles, company news or PR stories.
Regular posting schedule
There’s no rule around how often you should post on your blog, but it should follow a regular pattern. Once a fortnight, once a month, twice a week – it depends on the amount of time you can devote to it and the amount of content being generated by your business, but if the blogs are posted to a schedule it shows visitors to your website that your blog is alive and well.
Regular posting is also important if you are doing PR campaigns which put your business, or the people working in it, forward as thought leaders. If a journalist receives a press release about all the great thought leadership you do and then looks at your blog to find a post you published last week, but then nothing for six months, it damages your credibility as a thought leader.
Use the news to find an angle
One of the biggest issues around company blogs is knowing what to write about. Some business owners are cautious about sharing too many secrets with competitors, or giving advice that would enable their customers to do the job themselves.
When looking for an angle for your blog post, it is worth looking at the news of the day relevant to your industry. Did you see a news story and have an opinion about it that you could share? Could it be an alternative viewpoint about something that is different from what the general consensus is saying? If you can offer a unique point of view, the media will find you and your business more interesting.
Post your press releases – but don’t copy and paste!
An easy way to populate your blog would be to upload press releases you send out, right? Well yes, but not word for word – if anything this is worse than not posting at all.
Copying and pasting your press release onto your blog means that your website will fall foul of ‘duplicate content’, which will affect your site’s domain authority and ranking on Google. Not only that, but the press release will have been written in the third person, so directly copying it onto your blog is going to look strange when the content is on your own website. We hate it when people talk about themselves in the third person – the same goes for businesses.
A simple way to avoid duplicating the content is to change the press release into the first person. For example ‘the company has expanded’ can be changed to ‘we have expanded’ or ‘[company name] CEO said’ can be amended to ‘Our CEO said’.
Alongside this, perhaps expand or change the quote that you used in the press release, or go into a bit more detail about the subject – press releases generally need to be quite concise to have a good chance of being used, so use the added flexibility of a blog to your advantage.