In one month I had conversations with law firm, accountancy, IT and architecture partners complaining that their staff had nothing they could talk about.
They wanted to blog. They looked at their competitors who blogged. But they couldn’t understand why their own staff couldn’t.
It’s easy I said.
Really, it’s easy.
You don’t need to be a great writer – you can buy that skill in or get another staff member to ghost write them.
You just need ideas.
And that’s when they collectively scratched their heads again. But we’ve got nothing to write about.
Not true, I said. They all did work that mattered. They all created ideas or strategies that changed the work businesses functioned, or changed the world we lived in, or changed how society progressed.
They had lots to talk about. But they couldn’t see it.
It’s easy, I said. Use online data to identify topics that gain the most traction from your target audience. Monitor competitors. Plot the content landscape and then make a strategic decision about whether to talk about what’s hot, what’s emerging or what’s not being said.
Then find the easiest way for your staff to blog. It might be hothousing, it could be ghostwriting, or could be writing the skeleton and getting your technical experts to complete it. It could be training them to write quickly and pointedly. But at the very least they need a content schedule and a driver.
Our own Jonathan is our driver. He forwards plans 6 weeks in advance. That’s 30 blogs in advance, and when we’re running dry he reminds us that for some of our blogs that might only be 15 minutes of time.
