In this lesson we’re going to look at a simple approach for planning your blogging activities on a corporate website.
Posts
Posts are like news articles. They’re published by an author and associated with a specific date and time. They are usually organized by categories.
What should you publish on a corporate site? Consider starting with editorials (advice & opinion) and news (company updates & press releases).
You can squeeze even more value out of your posts by compiling them into a newsletter that visitors can subscribe to.
Choosing Post Categories
What should you write about? Here’s a tip: Think about the type of advice you’d give to your customers. What do they consider your company to be an expert in? If you were on television, which news stories would you be able to provide valuable commentary on? Use these topics as categories for your posts.
Action Item
Use a survey tool (e.g. Survey Monkey) to gather topic ideas. Rank them by:
- Relevance (Does it make sense for your business?)
- Expertise (Do you have the knowledge?)
- Feasibility (Can you churn out this content regularly?)
Choosing Post Tags
You can use tags across different categories, so reserve them for important keywords.
This will help visitors and search engines find related content through the Tag Archives that are generated by WordPress.
For example: A technology company may write posts about “Microsoft Office”. Some posts are categorized as Editorials, some are Reviews, some are Tutorials, and some are related to Company News.
These posts are in separate categories, but visitors to the company’s website will be able to find them all in one spot through the “Microsoft Office” tag archive.
Action Item
Identify the nouns mentioned in your post. Use those as tags. So if you mention a person, place, or thing in your post, create a tag for each.
Setting a Schedule
How often should you publish posts? That’s up to you.
In the beginning, I recommend aiming for one post a week, and try to publish them at the same day of the week. This creates a sense of discipline for deadlines.
Once you get into a good rhythm, you’ll find that posts take less time to write. Use this to your advantage. Build up a backlog of posts so that you can stay on schedule (even if you skip a week) and give yourself more breathing room.
Action Item
Install a plugin like Edit Flow, Editorial Calendar, or CoSchedule. These will help you plan out your content from within the WordPress back-end.
You can also use 3rd party tools like Trello (a favourite at WPUniversity) for collaboration with a team.
