Strategies to Encourage Internal Blog Writing

Strategies to Encourage Your Staff to Blog for Your Company

The great thing about company blogs is that nearly anyone can write or contribute to them; however, in today’s competitive world, it’s harder and harder for your blog to stand out.

From a marketing perspective, blog writing for your website and social media is crucial for any business. Personalized blogs on specific topics around your business and business experiences have the highest impact on successful SEO and online presence. Blog writing is often left to the marketing team, and keeping up with creating fresh, engaging content can be challenging.

A successful blog should have a range of content that can give voice to your entire enterprise, but it is unlikely that your marketing team can become experts in all departments and topics. Marketers often run into content development challenges due to a lack of personal knowledge and experience on key issues that are specific or unique to areas of a business. For example, someone on your marketing team could do extensive research on the latest innovations in your industry and write an article. Yet, that blog post would lack the unique insights from your internal team’s knowledge, perspective, and experiences with those innovations that would make it highly engaging for potential and current customers.

A better way to grow your business blog is to leverage the knowledge from all departments of your business. This can be accomplished by engaging all levels of internal staff in writing content across the company. Below are some incentive ideas to encourage and empower your team members to help generate high-quality content that your readers will value.

1. Include executives/CEOs

To encourage other staff to participate, a change in culture from the top down is necessary. If the company’s leaders are not taking blog writing seriously, will experts in other departments?

2. Gamified Incentives and Friendly Competitions

Make it fun! Award gifts to those who submit the most posts or write more than required. Have rewardable goals for things like; the most read article, the most liked or shared article on social media, or the most leads generated from an article.

3. Writing flexibility

Let your staff write about what they are excited about or even topics that cause them frustration. Employees who face frustration on a topic can use writing as an opportunity to share what they’ve learned working to resolve the issue and work through their frustration as they reflect on the subject.

4. Provide/Assign Topics

Sometimes, staff lacks the creative spark needed to come up with topics that readers might engage with and need a little push. Assigning a blog topic can push employees out of their comfort zones and help them discover new ideas. For example, instead of a developer electing to do a blog post on their favorite tool, assign them to write a blog post about a tool they find least user-friendly and why.

5. Assign minimal additional workload

While you could make blog writing required, you should also make blog writing available at your staff’s leisure. For example, instead of immense pressure for several posts, try requesting 1 per quarter. That’s only four a year!

6. Retrospective thinking

Looking back at a situation can help employees understand technology as a process rather than solely focusing on the end result or conclusion. Blog posts help employees learn by giving them a chance to reflect on a piece of technology or related process. Implementing blog writing into time already set aside for retrospective thinking can encourage blog writing.

7. Encourage Open Discussion

For those who have trouble putting their thoughts into a blog post, an open discussion amongst employees might prove beneficial. Not everyone is a natural writer, so by giving everyone a chance to brainstorm blog ideas, not only will creativity improve, but so will overall knowledge of the topics and technologies discussed. Open discussions are a great place to build the foundation for a successful blog post.

8. Give recognition

Last but not least, be sure to give recognition to those who are participating and providing valuable blog content. Recognition should be given during meetings, on social media, and on your website or the blog page itself.

Final Thoughts

Blog writing is an excellent way to convey information about experiences on various topics and generate engagement with potential and current customers. The best way to stand out when writing a blog is to write about something people are researching or is a new topic in your business or industry. Due to its complexity and endless evolution, there is always something to write about pertaining to business and technology. Likewise, there’s always someone looking for more information on those topics.

We hope this list of strategies will help encourage your staff from all departments to begin contributing their expertise and knowledge to your company blog! Have more ideas on how to encourage internal blog writing? – Share your thoughts with us on social media!