If you’re feeling overwhelmed about the prospect of starting (and keeping up with!) a blog, here are nine things that can help ease the burden and allow you to create a valuable resource you customers will come to respect:

Developing Content – draw on available resources

Has your customer inquired about a certain aspect of your technologies or services? If they’re asking, others are probably curious as well.  Use it as an opportunity to develop a post that preemptively answers the questions they are asked.

Select up to four people (or specific departments) and ask for just one post a month. You may need to provide general topic areas or suggest idea resources, but you probably already know many of your major industry trends and can tie them back to relevant postings.

What do you already have in your marketing arsenal that can be brushed off and polished up, or sliced and diced into different angles to serve as new content? Any long-form piece, from application notes to full-fledged white papers, can serve as a good starting point. And don’t forget multimedia representation as well!

Frequency of Communication – find what’s right for you

1. 1. 4. Keep in mind posts do not need to happen every week or every day. As long as you’re consistent in your posting frequency, you will start to build a rapport with your target audience who will seek out your trusted (and steadily-streamed) advice.
      5. Select a frequency that you can reasonably live with. Don’t commit to a weekly posting if you know it’s going to put unrealistic expectations on those that need to provide the content.  It’s better to have less postings that actually say something of value, than to just post something for the sake of posting.
      6. You don’t need to enable comments. You’re not looking to ‘build a community’ (we suggested LinkedIn for that type of interaction), but rather build a useful library of information that helps solve customer problems.

Be Relevant & Insightful – keep information on point (and to the point)

1. 1. 7. Topics need to support the business you are trying to garner. So, while company updates, work anniversaries and personal accomplishments are a good way to showcase your company culture, those types of posts should be supplemental and not the only pieces of content you are including on your blog.
      8. On that note, merely posting news releases to your blog is not all that exciting, either. Keep those in your press room, and maybe write a piece tied to an industry trend that relates back to the news announcement.  That’s a great way to get people back to your main site anyway!
      9. While there are different theories on the necessary word count for an SEO-optimized blog post, it really comes down to the value of the information. Don’t skim the surface with lofty claims of technological superiority and not prove them.  At the same time, don’t dig in so deep that you lose the reader—save that for the full white paper or video overview (a gated piece of content you can track).

Post with Intent

And always have a goal in mind, of course, based off a clearly-defined marketing communications plan.  What’s your overall objective and how does the blog and its content support it?

If you take stock of what you have access to, and set reasonable expectations for yourself and your team, you’ll find that creating a blog with value isn’t that overwhelming after all.