Growing your B2B blog is a group effort.
However, it can be challenging to get your internal subject matter experts to share their knowledge on your company’s blog. After all, blogging is likely not part of their job description, and they may not place writing posts high on their list of priorities.
If you want to get your internal team more involved in your blogging efforts, here are some ideas that may help:
• Bribe them.
Your internal subject matter experts need to see the benefits of contributing to your corporate blog. Be sure to explain the personal branding benefits and give them an author bio with a link to their LinkedIn profile.
If this doesn’t work, you can also offer them incentives for blogging – such as an Amazon gift card when their first post is published or a prize for the person who has the most posts published throughout the year.
• Create guidelines.
Your internal subject matter experts won’t contribute to your blog unless they know what you’re looking for. That’s why you must give them blogging guidelines. The guidelines should briefly explain your goals for the blog and describe your target audience. It should also provide tips on how to write blog posts (such as what topics to cover, what tone to use and how many words to use). The more specific, the better.
• Teach them how to blog.
You might want to bring in a professional blogger to teach a blogging 101 workshop. This gives your internal subject matter experts hands-on blogging experience and can make it easier for them to submit great posts.
• Edit their work.
If your internal team includes talented writers, give them the freedom to write as much as they would like for your blog. Once they submit an article, your editor can review it to make sure it meets your criteria for publication.
• Hire a ghostwriter.
You may have experts on your team who know your products and technology inside and out. However, they might not be the best at translating their thoughts into something you can publish. If this is the case, you would benefit from hiring a ghostwriter. The ghostwriter can schedule interviews with your experts, write blog posts on their behalf and run the posts past them for final approval.
This can also help if your internal subject matter experts don’t have the time to blog, as they’ll only need to schedule a short interview with your ghostwriter and find a few minutes to review the post before publication.
And finally, ask your subject matter experts to pitch article topics before they write anything. This saves them the hassle of writing about a topic that isn’t relevant to your readers and will get rejected by your editorial team. The last thing you want to do is turn down their ideas.