5 practical tips on how to manage a corporate blog

It’s common knowledge that Google loves blogs, so if you want your website to be found by potential customers, then it’s a good idea to publish articles. But you’ll have to commit - do it regularly and take care of the quality of the texts. I already wrote an article about creating a successful corporate blog, but this time I want to focus on what’s behind the scenes. You already have and idea for your blog and know what/how often you want to write. Today I want to focus the most basic thing in the day-to-day management of blog - the logistics. Since you’re reading this, then I assume that you are familiar with our blog and know that we update it quite often. However, it’s not caused by the free time of our Developers who have nothing better to do than writing - their schedules are filled to the brim on the day-to-day basis. The secret is to plan ahead and divide all the work. Let’s break it down into prime factors.

Logistics of managing a corporate blog

1. Ask people what they want to write
2. Ok, you obviously have the theme - when you’re a software house, you write about web development, app development, and design. But there are loads of articles you can write - sky’s the limit! You only have to ask people what they want to write and make a list of everything they come up with. Maybe someone has a really great idea and is eager to work on it, but simply has no time at the moment. With a list, you can wait even few months and when the time comes, they will be able to write it.
3. Keep track of day-to-day planning
4. Tasks of your coworkers are planned quite far in advance. Take advantage of that! You have topics, the only other thing you need is time. Our department receives weekly updates, thanks to what we know whether there’s a possibility to schedule few hours for Developers to write. Even if we are set with publications on our blog in the particular month, we can keep the additional ones for the future use. Because of that, we don’t have to worry about times when everyone is booked, and no one has even an hour to spare.
5. Make guidelines
6. The most common problem that you will meet (besides the lack of time, but I covered it in the previous point) is developers not knowing what to write. Some people have an idea but are unsure what aspects of it they should cover. That’s why we talked with our colleagues and together created guidelines that show writers on what they can focus, such as a pros and cons list of described technology or comparison of two similar tools. Its purpose is not to tell people what to write, but only to help them if they get stuck.
7. Divide the labor
8. A lot of developers quiver on the very thought of writing an article. They are great when it comes to dealing with code, but want to leave writing essays in the past. In Merixstudio we created a way of combining their vast knowledge with the writing skills of PR department. A developer writes an article, then gives it to our team to review. Depending on the language we translate it (when it’s written in Polish) and make sure that it’s grammatically correct. But don’t get me wrong - they way our people write is far from bad, we just strive for perfection! ;) It’s a typical editing task when you publish something for people to read. When authors approve the changes, then we are sure that their articles can be published. It sounds a bit like coming back and forth, but thanks to that we are able to not only assure the quality of every text but also to make writing a bit easier for Developers.
9. Don’t push it
10. Division of labor makes writing articles much easier for the developers. They don’t have to worry about the way their texts are written and can focus on the most important thing - sharing the knowledge. Sometimes initial reluctance is caused by the fact that, when publishing anything online, you have to worry about every tiny detail. There are always trolls that will point out even the smallest mistakes. With our help authors can worry only about what cover in their articles. However, if someone really doesn’t want to write, don’t push it. It will backfire on you because you will have to fix an article that’s written by someone whose heart is not in it. Believe me, I’ve made that mistake and paid the consequences. ;) Make a distinction between being wary of doing something and truly disliking writing.

And that’s it - I warned you that I’m going to give you only practical tips! There are a lot of articles about how to write articles, and there are many blogs dedicated to taking care of blogs. My goal was to share my experiences and show you how you can make it easier for developers to write something. Remember, the main task of the Developers is to share their knowledge, when it's your duty to edit it.