Content Management Marketing through Blogging

It is no secret that blogging has emerged as a major channel of marketing one’s content. And it’s nothing new to say that any expansion stage software company should be driving a focused program around blogging to drive awareness and traffic.

By the way, if I were you, I would skip all this and go to the end of this blog for links to people that really know this topic…

What I would like to cover here are the elements that go into building a high performance blogging initiative within a software company… that results in a meaningful and measurable impact on the sales and marketing economics of the company.

As always, we at OpenView like to practice before we preach. We launched our own blogging initiative through our OpenView Labs team. The goal of the initiative was to:

• Promote the OpenView brand to our prospect persona (our persona target is the early to expansion stage software company CEO)
• Generate a large volume of insightful, quality content to share with our community (our community being expansion stage software companies)
• Drive up our organic rank on a long tail of relevant keywords (not because organic search is our best source of prospects… we’re using this approach as a demonstration for our portfolio companies)

Our blogging initiative is firm-wide, and started off with a commitment by our “CEO,” Scott Maxwell. Scott then worked on us to get our commitment to support the program by submitting blog posts on a weekly basis. So, in order for your company to have a successful blogging program there must be a commitment by the CEO to hold everyone accountable to submitting blogs regularly.

We then invested in a blogging platform. Our platform of choice is Compendium, which we found to be the best platform for the enterprise. The key features of Compendium that suited our purposes are the enterprise administration features and the “compending” feature of the product.

We then allocated a full time resource to be the blogging initiative owner and administrator. Devon Warwick is that person, and here are some of her suggestions for running a successful blogging initiative: 

• Hold every person accountable to submitting one blog post a week, and have a blog due date for each team each week
  • At OpenView we have 5 internal teams – each day of the week, a different team has to submit its blog by 6pm
  • If a person is not able to submit his blog for some reason, he must inform the blog administrator before 8am on Monday morning
• Each blog post must be longer than 5 sentences, must contain a minimum of 3 keywords, and must be relevant to the business in some capacity
  • Blogs that are rejected for not meeting the following criteria must be resubmitted with the appropriate edits within 24 hours
• Referencing other sources/ideas is fine, but the composition of the article should be a minimum 80% our own ideas, maximum 20% someone else’s ideas 
• The blog administrator should send out a weekly report that includes the firm’s top bloggers (most pageviews), general observations for the week (keywords being used, overall popularity of the blog each week, and finally, tips on how to improve your post or market it better.
• The admin should sign up to Google Analytics and review it a couple of times a week to check out the stats. Everyone must be aware of the value that the blog is bringing to the business in order for people to take it seriously. The weekly report is a great way to remind people of why blogging is worth everyone’s time.

Other best practices we found at AtTask, which is leading the portfolio in its blogging initiative:

• Coworkers “retweeting” each other’s blog posts increases visibility and draws more visitors
• Including keywords in blog titles helps SEO rankings tremendously
• Monitoring Google rankings by manually entering keywords into the search engine on a weekly basis to see where your content is on the list/page allows you to better understand your SEO efforts.
• Reading/Commenting on other Industry thought leaders blogs enables you to build a connection with that person (In turn they will most likely comment on your blog post and/or reference you in one of their posts, thereby increasing visibility of your brand and driving more visitors to your site.)

Creating a competitive advantage through blogging is a thing of the past… A blogging initiative should be one tool in your overall content marketing strategy… with a focus on driving more relevant traffic to your site, and driving up your organic search results around a long tail of relevant keywords.

More reading:
Chris Baggott’s guide to blogging
TippingPoint Labs