Media in the New Millennium

by Nate Warren

So you’re in charge of content for your corporate blog. If you’re at a small company, that blank text field in the WYSIWYG editor can be a big bucket to fill. You have an acute compulsion to be brilliant, a gut full of passion, and no time to think of something cool to write about. The same way, every time I walk into a Blockbuster, I can suddenly remember none of the thousands of movies I was dying to see.

The first step: make buckets. Think like an editor. This blog is your news channel, and the “buckets,” or categories, are your departments. As a business owner, three natural buckets appear pretty organically to help you channel your thoughts: insight, commentary, or thought leadership pieces; news and announcements for your company; and “around the industry” links that pertain to your company’s niche. The latter is a valuable way to keep your post frequency up without a lot of brain damage. Make a monthly posting schedule that lets you mix it up. Generating an original post of even 250 words every week can become a real grind, especially if you’re wearing a lot of hats.

The second step is to make sure and get your target keywords into your categories. Being an incurable copywriter, I had to wean myself off of crafting clever category names and think about the quickest way possible to tell Google what the category is about. Actually, the same goes for naming the blog itself.

The third? Keep the notebook handy. Even a fragment of a thought, the name of a website, an anecdote, can be the backbone for a good post. Keep those and throw them in the right bucket, and you’ll soon have good posts on backlog.

This is a good quick-start way to get an editorial schedule organized. You can, and should, add more granular categories as needed along the way. But starting with your three buckets can help you tackle the “What do we write about?” question in short order.