One of the best things to help your brand is to engage your audience with a blog. One of the worst things to jeopardize your brand is to let your blog go stagnant.

What does having a blog say about your brand if there’s nothing to read? Nothing at all. Taking the time to plan your blog strategy makes tasks transparent and easy to execute.

Quality vs Quantity vs Consistency

The quality of your posts is, of course, far more important than how many posts you have. However, having a consistent blog keeps you from going stale. Balancing quality and engaging content with a consistent publishing schedule, on top of actually doing your job sounds tough – but it doesn’t have to be.

The first step in having a content creation strategy is to choose a publishing schedule that suits your organization. At Amalgam Design, we chose to publish an article for Bl’Amalgam at least once a week.

Plan Content a Month In Advance

Planning content a month in advance keeps your blog from getting derailed. Sometimes it helps to just take out a calendar and highlight the days you want to publish an article. For each day, decide the topic to blog about. Topics should be related to your industry and should remain within your audience’s interests.

Multiple Authors, One Editor

If you can’t squeeze writing a weekly blog article into your schedule, let others in your organization write too. While some worry that this may damage a company’s identity, on the contrary, it has many benefits:

1. Allowing employees to write for your organization’s blog shows transparency, honesty and trust within your organizational culture.
2. Your employees get to show off their expertise making your organization look more like leaders in your industry
3. It creates a feeling of community and ownership within your organization
4. You share the load in investing time into your blog

Take the time to review articles before posting to ensure accuracy and maintain tone.

Prepare Your Draft In Advance

Creating your draft days in advance ensures that you have plenty of time to edit, proofread and gather feedback from others within your organization. This also helps in the creation of a quality article as well.

Blogging works because it gives your organization a voice. It gives you a place to express your personality, your passion, and your unique ability to impact the world. It shows the world that you are a dynamic organization that is constantly driving forward. A static website that states your services and doesn’t change for months does not set you apart as a expert in your field.

A blog gives you the opportunity to comment on world events and how it ties into your work. It’s your chance to talk about new products, new legislation, or other news stories that tie back to your organization and offers a reason to hire you.

The difference between a blog and a “news” section is that it is interactive. People can comment on your blog. And this just in – you can comment on their blogs too! This is the social component and it’s how to penetrate the blogosphere. And before you ask, yes, people can say anything they want on your blog and,
while you can delete it, you shouldn’t because you shouldn’t try to control the message. This is the nature of “viral” marketing. You can’t just take all the good stuff and delete the rest. You have to take your lumps too. Address the negative comments the way you would to any other media outlet and don’t flame them.

I probably have about a hundred different blogs bookmarked between my computers, maybe more. Some I kept because I happened upon an informative article about a topic I was searching on. Some I bookmarked because they inspired me for a moment or I found an idea that took me off the track and I wanted to remember where I found it for when I have time to go back. On that second visit, if I make it there, I’ll check out a few other posts on the blog to see if there is anything else that might keep me coming back for more. I look for that spark that makes me want to take the reader-blogger relationship to the next level. You know, RSS.

For me, subscribing to an RSS feed is a pretty serious step. I can spend a lazy Sunday afternoon going through my bookmark categories checking out what’s new on some of the blogs I’ve saved for a rainy day, but it’s the ones with spark that I want to come to me. I want the excitement of seeing the (1) of a new post and I will take the time read it. The following blogs are ones where the spark was such that I didn’t even have to wait for that lazy afternoon. I just jumped right in.

How to Change the World by Guy Kawasaki

The best part about Guy Kawasaki is that he is connected. If you follow Guy’s blog or Twitter feed (@guykawasaki)you will find yourself hooked up to all kinds of information and cool stuff that you would otherwise have to spend hours on the internets to happen upon. Guy and his team find it for you instead. What I get from Guy Kawasaki is an easier way to look at the big picture of start ups, marketing, social media and more.

Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist

There’s only a bazillion blogs out there. How many manage to put forth great ideas and information with real life and personality thrown in for good measure? Not many. This is why I look forward to posts on Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist. She does it well. It’s like the little (1) I see in my RSS folder tells me there is a great letter waiting. Better yet, it’s like Penelope kept a secret diary about her start up and let me read it. And I can’t stop.

Seth’s Blog

Seth Godin’s blog rocks for one reason: there’s no BS. Not even a header. The posts are short and the ideas are rich. It’s the best marketing and sales blog to get your blood moving after too much rest or distraction. Plus he has an action figure. Can most bloggers beat that?