In my last two installments on Creating and Maintaining a B2B Blog, I offered suggestions on who should write your company blog, how often you should post and how to develop a content strategy for your blog.

In this third installment of my blogging series, I’d like to make some suggestions on how to promote your blog.

If you are going to invest the time, resources and discipline to create a blog you’ll want to be sure it’s getting read. It is not as simple as, “Build it and they will come.” You’ll need to promote your blog, let people know it exists. Consider all the tactics you can use to announce and then promote your blog including email, your website, search and other blogs. You’ll need to be proactive. Think about active and passive forms of promotion. Here are a few suggestions.

1. Start with your company website. Make sure there is a link to your blog somewhere on your site, or multiple pages if relevant.
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In my last blog on Creating and Maintaining a B2B Blog I offered some suggestions on who should write your company blog and how often you should post.
In this installment, I’d like to follow up a bit more on the frequency of posting and give some direction on what you should be posting.
The question we are often asked is, “How often should I add new content or post on my company blog?”
The simple answer is: When you have something relevant to say.
When you post and what you post is related. Let’s assume you’ve identified an internal “expert” or core team of employees with the responsibility of managing to your company blog. You now need to determine the frequency of posting and create a realistic schedule.
Let’s start at the top.
1.    Think Strategically
       a.    Does your company have a marketing and communications strategy? What you
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As social media continues to make inroads into the B2B universe, more companies are including blogs as a communications tactic. According to the Society for New Communications Research, 16 percent of Fortune 500 companies support a corporate blog while Forrester Research reports the number is closer to 29 percent. Both reports are one to two years old so I suspect the numbers are much higher today.

As acceptance of blogging continues to grow I thought it might be helpful to give some advice on how to create and maintain a company blog. This is the first of several blogs, each focusing on a specific topic.

Let’s start at the beginning. You’ve decided to create a blog but are faced with two important questions:
1.    Who should write the blog?
2.    How often should you post?

Some companies are fortunate and have an “industry expert” on staff, someone with broad industry
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Are you tired of all the gloom and doom news regarding the economy? I am. I watch the news constantly looking for any positive signs. I’m still watching and waiting. But I’m an optimist. I can’t single-handily fix the economy but I wonder what I can do, what I might recommend to B-to-B marketers that will help them get through this tough time and prepare for that eventual turnaround.

Last week I attended the monthly, early-morning coffee chat with members of our local chapter of the AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts). The predetermined topic was, “What challenges are we facing in our business and what are we doing to cope?” Not surprisingly, many are experiencing similar issues: reduced staff, unpredictable workloads and just the uncertainty of what is to come.

There were a few positive indicators. Two firms noted that a few of their clients were taking the opportunity during the slow time to fine-tune their branding and these
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You can’t go anywhere or strike up a conversation with anyone without the topic turning to the economy. Invariably the question I ask or is asked of me is, “How’s business?”

We’ve been through this before and weathered the storm. So have our clients. Typically, the knee-jerk reaction is to cut budgets, reallocate funds and tighten the marketing and advertising belt. We have a white paper titled, “Why Branding Becomes More Important In Uncertain Times” written by Ken Jones. You can download this white paper here.

Marketers who decide to continue to invest in their marketing programs during tough economic times, albeit possibly at a smaller allocation, need to be more prudent how and where they spend their money. That’s obvious.

So how is business? You’ve still got a communications budget, probably smaller than originally planned.
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