How do you get others within the company to become committed, engaged, and passionate about blogging?

Photo Credit: Victor1558 via Compfight cc
This is a question that all of our clients face when they start using Innoblogs. We make collaborative blogging easy with great tools built into Innoblogs, such as, editorial calendars, topic reminders, staleness notifications, ect. However, no tool, not even Innoblogs will build passion into your employees to blog. Here is how we approach it

Let employees participate in selecting and owning their topic focus - You will have a very disengaged employee if you approach the situation by instructing them to just write on this topic. Now I am assuming this isn’t an employee whom has the sole purpose of writing for the company. I’m under the assumption that … Read More »

I work with clients on content creation continuously when they sign up to use the Innoblogs Business Blogging Platform. There are 3 main stages that we go through.

1. Implementation planning
2. Implementation/content building
3. Continue content creation and blog maintenance

During the implementation planning stage we discuss the the goals of their content and blog. Also, we discuss the voice they will use to accomplish these goals. These two building blocks lay the framework that we’ll use to be successful with this tool, and not to get lost from where we originally wanted to go!

Implementation and content building is the time where we build up some content for the launch of our blog. The developers are quickly putting the nuts and bolts together so we have time to prep. Since we know our overall goals and … Read More »

Blogging for business is not a new subject. In fact, you can find thousands of articles discussing the benefits, downfalls, and process to blogging for business. In this post we’re simply going to discuss one issue…

Can you build an audience while writing for SEO?

Yes! You just need to understand how to inject quality SEO into a post that is helpful and relevant to the audience you’re trying to reach!

1. Identify a problem/issue your audience is facing.

2. If you have domain knowledge and can speak to this, then move to step 3. If not, do your research to find a solution or come to a conclusion you believe.

3. Write an article as if speaking to an individual in which you’re invested enough to share your true thoughts and feelings. How would … Read More »

In my earlier post, Content 101, I mentioned the 3 C’s of large-scale content marketing strategizing. Today I’ll dive into day-to-day content planning, once again borrowing some principles from the field of education. After all, content marketing brings customers in by offering something, and often that is information or a skill. Sounds a lot like teaching and learning!

Understanding by design, or backwards design, is a planning framework that starts with the desired end result and, you guessed it, works backward. In teaching, the obvious goal is knowledge, but there are different ways to measure that: written tests or quizzes, performance tasks, or project deliverables, to name a few. I often wrote these objectives as “I Can” statements, as in, “I can identify the four trophic levels,” … Read More »

In keeping with my last post’s theme of questioning, let’s look at the most angst-riddled question every blogger asks him or herself at least once a day:

What should I write about?!

You can have the best blogging platform in the world. (I’m partial to the benefits of Innoblogs…but that’s just me.) You can have a legion of wordsmiths at your disposal. You can even have tons of eager prospects chanting, “Blog! Blog! Blog!” at your web site and a foolproof way to turn those prospects into clients. But the truth is, without a steady stream of quality content…Your. Blog. Will. Die.

Heavy, I know. But an easy way to relieve that what-to-write anxiety is to turn the question around: What do my viewers want to read about? What are the key questions coming from your audience? If you have … Read More »

Did you know that teachers are the ultimate content marketers? It’s true! They generate squillions of activities, assignments, and assessments in order to move their students toward that noble but slightly nebulous goal of “learning.” Their payoff is not in dollars but the very tangible benefits of an educated populace.

More than once in my teaching career, I had the arduous task of designing an entire course from scratch with nothing but the Ohio Academic Standards to guide me. I had a flashback to that past life this week as we sat down to plan Innogage’s content strategy for the coming year.

If you feel like your online content marketing is a bit haphazard when it comes to form and/or function, maybe it’s time to sit down and plan a little. As a teacher (and, further back, a student), I found that the keys … Read More »

Does your business blog have social share links for easy social distribution of your content? If so, GREAT!

Does your business blog expose how many people are sharing… or more likely NOT sharing your blog posts?  Hmmmm – not so great.

The fact is, most business blogs do not get shared a lot. Why would you expose that fact to readers who come to your blog? It’s like hanging out a banner that says “Our blog sucks and has no credibility! Please leave without reading.”

You work for a business that sells products and or services to other businesses… I get that. After all, that is what Innogage Digital Marketing is! We sell Digital Marketing Consulting and Business Blogging Technology to help businesses improve website traffic, content marketing, conversion, ROI and more.

Your blog gets traffic but not insane traffic and most readers do … Read More »

I am sitting in a session at Content Marketing World by Jason Falls listening to him tear it up on content marketing and specifically on marketing through business blogging.

Many businesses blog but not many really know why or understand how to make it truly valuable.  If you are thinking about blogging or are blogging (but not sure why) then ask yourself this simple question:  WHY should you be blogging. Each time you come up with a reason, ask the same question “WHY” again.  Continue to ask yourself that question until you get to something measurable. Answers such as “because everyone else is doing it” are not acceptable and are also not measurable. You need a reason to blog and that reason needs to be strategic.

[editors note: Jason reviewed our Read More »

The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) today released a whitepaper / presentation on 8 amazing content workflow technologies which greatly enhance your content production efforts. We are very proud that the Innogage collaborative blogging tool, Innoblogs, was included in that list of eight. In fact, Innoblogs was THE ONLY CONTENT TOOL recommended under the category of Blogging Workflow Tools!!

The other categories covered were Content workflow tools (4 recommendations) and Content workflow tools combined with writer networks (3 recommendations).

This report covers information about Innoblogs, what it is and what kind of customer stands to benefit the most from the powerful blogging workflow tools inside our technology. It also gets in under the hood to tell you exactly what you get in the areas of workflow, search engine optimization, and customer conversion. It even covers cost and who some of our … Read More »

Organizing a blog that has a number of contributors is not an easy task. There are a few keys you need to have in place before you can be truly successful.

When I first was assigned the task of organizing employees to write content for a blog it reminded me a lot of coaching. As with coaching, you must be organized, have a plan, and bring energy to the task at hand. It isn’t easy writing each week for your employer, and one tip is to really align your team with their passions. It will be so much easier  for you to do your job around creating content if you employees are excited to write. Here is a list of organizational “must-haves”!

List of Topics - I have seen the most success when the blog team meets and builds this together at … Read More »