If a corporate blog publishes 1-2 articles per month with 1-2 thousand views and only half a dozen pluses, this means that something is being done wrong. At the same time, practice shows that in most cases blogs can be made both interesting and useful.
Perhaps now there will be many opponents of corporate blogs, and in some ways I agree with them. But let's first give some positive examples.
You can start with "", useful things , salary ratings "» . Off the top of my head, I can name a dozen other companies where great posts pop up from time to time. In addition, there are many pros who write on corporate blogs and post transcripts of their hit reports there. By the way, having rummaged through the statistics for 2018, I pulled out this table of corporate posts that received more than 150 pluses.
In general, everything can go well (as long as “young marketers” don’t get their hands on them). And personally, I’m sad to see when Habr is filled with mediocre content, which is then added according to the order.
Knowing the whole kitchen from the inside, I’m not going to blame anyone, much less point the finger. It happens that all you can do is take a deep breath.
This was a disclaimer. The post itself is addressed to those who oversee company blogs and who have the opportunity to change something.
Below is a selection of things that make blog articles poorly read, as well as observations on why some posts do not bring any benefit to the company.
The team or contractors are exhausted
When a journalist spends a couple of years delving into the same topic that is not related to his personal calling or is not part of his hobby, burnout will occur. No, the work can still be done with high quality, but without any sparkle. Boring topics, the speaker is too lazy to bother again and clarify the details. And over time, the eye becomes oh so blurry - it begins to seem that there is nothing interesting here, and everything has already been written about.
In general, a reboot is needed. You can try experimenting with motivation by setting bonuses for achieving certain KPIs. However, this will not work in all cases, and it is better to start with something else.
Try to involve fresh minds in the development of the content plan. Brainstorm. After all, a cool idea for a post will light a spark not only in the soul of a tired journalist or expert.
Although, there may be other reasons. For example, a banal overload. An artist is not a machine that produces masterpieces. He cannot produce only hits within a strictly defined time and thematic framework.
Carpet bombing with announcements and translations
Marketing in the company tells the blog editor that they need to make another announcement about the meetup (or a new version of the product). And to prevent the blog from turning into a bulletin board, every post is diluted with translations. In other words, the blog is used for a purely utilitarian purpose, without a soul. And this is the same situation when... when everyone already understands everything. Therefore, there will be no advice here.
The content just entertains the audience.
There are blogs on Habré where news materials or articles are published that find a certain response from the reader, but at the same time have nothing to do with the company or its field of activity.
Why, why? This is probably how budgets are mastered by agencies that do not have close contact with their clients and work out the budget as best they can.
However, there are examples where companies cleverly get out of this tailspin by adding a small separate block of a couple of sentences to the end of posts. There they casually report their news or place promotional codes, linking them to the stories described in the article.
The reader has his own pain
You can blog for a long time about the advantages of your product, low price and other “goodies”, but if you forget about the pain of your potential client and do not offer him simple and understandable solutions in the style of “how to do this and that” (on your elemental base), consider that you are shooting sparrows from a cannon. Someone who is in the know might be hooked.
Posts are not for those
Those working in the B2B direction often publish posts exclusively for the end consumer: all kinds of guides, FAQs, reviews, life hacks. However, this audience, as a rule, is not a direct customer of these products. And they are purchased at a higher level in order to solve some tactical or strategic issues in the company. And for these people, as a rule, there is not a word on blogs.
Artistic titles
Ask yourself: can you, by reading the title, understand what will be interesting in the article? Scrolling through the feed, the reader usually grabs headlines and pictures. And if they don't give a clear idea of the content, most will pass by.
The same goes for indexing by search engines. Habr has a high weight among other sites, and articles from it are easily selected on the first page of search results. But if the title does not indicate the subject of the story, only a few will find this article.
By the way, this problem becomes no less noticeable in the Khabrov mailing list, which only includes post titles. And this, by the way, is a small stone for Habr’s own garden.
Race for hardcore
When people share deep expertise in any area, this is very good. First of all, for the image, and also for the advanced reader, who sometimes has nowhere to get expert knowledge from.
But this “coin” has a downside. In ancient times, we joked that every formula in an article cuts its readership in half. Now this has become even more relevant. And the point here is not only the ability to explain complex things in simple language, but also the fact that for every one cool pro there are a dozen beginners. Therefore, an article with the title “where to start learning JS” will gather many times more grateful readers than a cool story about writing your own static typer.
PS in an amicable way, here it’s also worth adding about marketing, whose ears sometimes stick out so much that they interfere with reading the text, but that’s another story.
Source: habr.com