What Your Blog May Be Missing

Keeping your company blog regularly updated with quality, buyer persona-driven content can be a major differentiator between a successful and unsuccessful blog.

But with busy schedules and already-long hours, how can you ensure that the additional responsibility of blogging is kept up with? Certainly, one option is to have multiple contributing bloggers. However, this also comes with a downside: watered-down responsibility. With multiple authors, each individual blogger can more easily become complacent, and expect others to take more responsibility for regularly writing and publishing new posts.

So how can you combat this apathy? By appointing a Blog Editor.

What is a Blog Editor?

Much like the editor of a traditional media outlet, a blog editor is simply the person in charge of a blog’s content. It is his or her job to ensure that blog articles are posted on a regular basis, consistent with company messaging, and that all authors are pulling their weight with regular contributions.

Your blog editor may or may not be a contributing blogger, but must have a strong understanding of your blog’s objectives, audience and focus. He or she should be organized, authoritative, and respected by all blog contributors and willing to step in when needed to keep the blog running smoothly.

Editor’s Responsibilities

• Keep a blog editorial calendar, with planned (and approved) blog post topics for each author, along with deadlines and publishing dates. 

• Remind bloggers when their deadline is coming up.

• If for any reason someone is unable to complete a post on time, find another blogger to fill in or swap dates.

• Proof all blog posts prior to publishing.

• Make sure that overall brand messaging remains consistent, ensure that no company or customer information is being shared without approval, check for grammatical errors and keyword integration, and suggest categories and tags for optimization and consistency.

• Remember that most readers will scan a post first, so it should be laid out with paragraphs, subheadings, and bulleted or numbered lists when possible.

• Provide a final edit after a blog post has been uploaded and saved as a draft before publishing. Check for errors one last time, and ensure that the overall formatting looks nice, without any strange text wrapping, breaks or cutoff images.

• When a new post is published, promote it on company social networks, and encourage the blog author to do the same on their personal (professional) accounts. 

• Keep a log of when posts are published, so that you can start to tie spikes in traffic or leads to blog activity.

• Subscribe to your blog by both RSS and email. Make sure that feeds work properly and consistently.

• Review blog comments, and ensure that the author responds when appropriate.

• Help to identify opportunities outside your own blog. For example, encourage your blog authors to post comments on great articles on others’ blog posts in their area of expertise. Reach out to other industry bloggers who might make a good guest blogger on your own.

• Keep track of the blog’s overall performance through analytics and social chatter. Let your bloggers know what kind of content is most popular and resonates best with target audiences in different ways. (For example: what kind of content is most popular on Twitter, generates the most comments, gets “liked” on Facebook, gets Stumbled or bookmarked, generates quality traffic that converts to leads, etc.)

• Acknowledge and reward bloggers when they reach milestones. (Such as their first comment or Stumble, a major influx in traffic, a new customer that recognizes a specific blog post as their decision-maker, etc.)

• Adjust future topics and blog content based on what your readers want to see.

Do you have an editor for your company blog?

How does that person keep content flowing, and keep everyone excited about the blog’s performance?

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