Laura’s Winning Ideas

Patrick Dodd of Shadowbox Studios wrote these tips for designing a blog strategy for your company:

Launching a corporate blog is a lot like launching a new product or service – without a proper strategy in place it is doubtful that your blog will achieve much success. If your company has an up to date marketing plan then answering the questions below should be relatively easy. If you do not have a current marketing plan, then maybe this will be the impetus needed to develop one. Shadowbox Studios has developed a series of questions that, when answered, help you define the overall strategy and direction for your corporate blog.

A) Developing your blogging goals and objectives
Why is it that you are starting a blog and what are the results you expect to receive?
Setting goals and objectives is critical for any business process and blogging is no different. Without realistic goals and objectives, your blog WILL NOT succeed. Please keep in mind that the goal is where we want to be. The objectives are the steps needed to get there. Successful goals and objectives are SMART: Specific – Measurable – Attainable – Relevant – Timely.

Sample Goals (not limited to 5)

1. Improve my company’s online visibility.
2. Acquire 10 clients after 6 months of blogging.
3. Position myself as an expert in conversational copywriting.
4. Network with other online copywriters.
5. Produce an example of how a blog can extend a company’s message.

Sample Objectives

1. Identify 5 competitor blogs.
2. Read every new post in the above mentioned competitor blogs.
3. Make at least three comments per week in the above mentioned competitor blogs.
4. Have 10 reciprocal blogroll links with similarly focused blogs.
5. Target ten keywords or phrases (we’ll discuss these on the next post) and get in the top 20 results.
6. Be able to identify key topics by reader comments and trackbacks.
7. Produce at least 3 blog posts per week.
8. Assess the effectiveness of blog effort by analyzing subscriber data (RSS and mailing lists)

B) Identifying your target audience and defining your blog focus

1. What is the vertical market or cross functional specialty on which your blog will be targeted.
2. Who is your intended target audience?
3. What are the topics of your blog going to be?
4. Please list 5-10 key words that are associated with your topic?

C) Identifying and understanding your competitors

The best way to find your competitors who are blogging is to input the keywords that you listed above into a blog search engine.

Although I recommend Technorati , there are other very good blog search engines such as Feedster , PubSub , IceRocket and Google-blogsearch .

Technorati has a feature called “authority” that makes it easy to determine who your main competitors are. When you conduct a search on Technorati you can choose whether you would like to see only the results that have authority – Technorati calculates a blog’s authority by how many people link to it.

We assume that the bloggers in your industry with the most “authority” are your main competitors. When conducting your search try different combinations of your key words. Try putting two or more key words in quotation marks (“corporate blogging”). Once you have identified who are the main players in your industry, we strongly suggest that you start following these blogs. Reading what other corporate bloggers are writing can provide you with basic corporate blogging guidelines and spur ideas for future blogging topics. Lastly, another great way to find quality blogs is to check out the “blog rolls” of the competitor sites you have already identified.

1. Please name the URLs of the top 5 competitor blogs.
2. What are the blog categories of these 5 competitors?
3. How long have these blogs been in existence? You can determine this by looking in the archives section of these blogs.
4. On average, how many posts per week do these blogs publish?

If you are thinking about blogging, you will also be interested in Patrick’s White Paper, a primer on Corporate Blogging you can share with others in your organization.