If you are leading the content marketing efforts for your team, chances are good you’ve encountered a common frustration — getting your team to blog.
You’re constantly pleading for blog posts, but no one wants to chip in and help out.
While you can certainly outsource your blog content, your team will always be the best source of blog content.
But, how do you get them on board? How can you get your team excited about contributing to the blog?
Tips to Get Your Team to Blog
Whether you’re just starting out with content marketing or you’ve been in the trenches awhile, here are some tips to help you encourage your team to blog.
1. Tell them why it’s important.
No one likes to receive orders to do something — especially if they don’t understand why they are doing it.
To get your team on board with blogging, you have to show them the vision for it and why blogging valuable for the business. Let them know your goals and how blogging can help you get there.
It especially helps if this message comes from your company leadership.
When the team understands what the promise land looks like, it will help everyone be more willing to jump in and help out.
2. Share how it benefits THEM.
Although employees want to do what’s best for the team, the reality is that everyone wants to know “what’s in it for me?”
Blogging has tremendous benefits for the individual — so tell them!
For instance, blogging gives your team members a microphone and the spotlight. It might help establish them as an expert on a topic, which could lead to opportunities to write for industry publications or talk at conferences. All of this can help generate more leads and sales for the company.
Not to mention, those things can also help your employees get noticed and advance their career. And ultimately, that’s what people want.
3.
Provide training and resources.
Once your team understands why blogging is important, you need to give them the training and resources to help them be successful.
That means, you should help your team understand how content marketing, blogging and social media works. Give them a framework for building effective blog posts and show them examples of excellent blog posts.
Then, once they start writing, have someone on your team review and edit their work and offer guidance to further improve their efforts. All of this will help your team get more comfortable with blogging.
4. Give them the time to do it.
If blogging is going to be a priority for your team, you need to give them the time and space they need to get it done.
This shouldn’t be an activity that they have to do after hours or squeeze in around everything else. They should be given the time in their regular workday to get it done.
That might mean you have to delegate some of the blog team’s tasks to other people or find other ways to distribute the work.
However, if you’ve got a large blog team or if everyone at your company is blogging, it shouldn’t be too big of a burden for someone to write one blog post every month or two.
5. Show results.
One of my clients has started seeing some success with his blogging efforts, but has had trouble getting everyone else on board.
However, once he showed the partners at his firm that he was starting to get more traffic and leads thanks to blogging, the partners paid attention.
Results speak volumes. Don’t hide this information. Talk about the traffic, leads and sales your blog generates with your team. Share stories about the comments and responses you get.
If you’re able to demonstrate how the effort is paying off, your team will be more apt to jump on board.
6. Give thanks and public praise.
When employees participate in your blogging efforts, thank them! Let them know when they wrote an exceptional blog post or when their efforts led to some positive results.
Even better, you can publicly praise your blogging team in your internal meetings and communications. For example, I love Marcus Sheridan’s idea of creating a social media newsletter to highlight results and applaud the efforts of the team.
This kind of approach gives people the encouragement to keep going and
7. Offer rewards and incentives.
If you’ve followed the steps above, you may not have to take this step. However, offering some incentives or rewards can help you get the ball rolling with your blog team.
It can be as simple as ordering in lunch for your blog team meetings or giving a simple thank you gift after someone has written their first post.
Or, if you want to raise the stakes a little bit, you could hold a friendly blog competition. You could reward the employee who writes the most blog posts or for the blog post that receive the most traffic, social media shares or email sign ups each month.
Doing this will help make your team’s blogging efforts a little more fun and rewarding.
Do you struggle with getting your team to blog? What has worked for you to get your employees on board with blogging?
