Blogging for Dollars Blog

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You’ve signed up as a corporate blogger. So, what will you be sharing on the blog? You client’s not sure, and you aren’t either. How can you make a corporate blog fun and readable, while hewing to the company line? Mission impossible, you think. Not so.

If you need a template, take a look at Yahoo’s latest blog offering, Y! Yodel Anecdotal. The first post, Yet another self-serving corporate blog, says:

We want to share insights into our company, our people, our culture, and the things that occupy our cluttered minds. We’ll cover emerging trends, provide some behind-the-scenes commentary, profile interesting Yahoos, spotlight our beloved users, reveal some of our quirks, tap into guest bloggers, sprinkle in some videos and photo essays, and generally think out loud (lucky you… you get to listen). You’ll hear from interns to executives. Some days we’ll be light and airy, others we’ll get serious.

Sounds good to me. If you’re career (freelance) blogging for a corporate client, it should sound good to them as well. Rejoice! You’ve got a PLAN.

BTW, these “what we’ll blog about ideas” would work in proposals you’re sending out to potential corporate clients, too, to inspire them to hire you.

Technorati Tags: career blogger, freelance blogger, Yahoo, blog template, blog ideas, blog proposals

You’ve been hired to blog, either by company X, or by an agent of company X.

Because blogging is trendy, and the chairman of company X has been told that many Fortune 500 companies have blogs, the chances are good that no one at the company (or at the management firm, graphic design agency, PR company or whoever) has any real idea of what blogging is, and how it might help company X. The command “we need a blog! Make it so!” has come down from on high, and you’re the bunny the words landed on.

This means that you need to know how blogging can help company X to achieve its goals.

Spend at least a week researching company X, its industry, and its market. Interview as many people at company X as you can get to. If any of company X’s competitors are blogging, read the blogs.

Then develop some blogging guidelines for yourself, and start to blog.

Relax. You won’t break anything. Blogging is not brain surgery, and since no one at company X has any real idea of what blogging is, it’s what YOU, dear blogger, say it is.

Technorati Tags: career blogger, freelance blogger, blogger for hire, make money blogging, company blogs, blogging guidelines

** This is a cross-post from my Creativity Factory: Marketing Copywriting blog. As a blogger-for-hire, you’ll encounter buyer-resistance from potential clients. You WILL be asked by many businesses: “Why do we need a blog?”

Then they’ll tell you that they have a Web site, but to be honest, it’s not doing much for them. (You’ll know without checking that the Web site is a SEO fiasco — no one can find the site without a ouija board, so where would the visitors come from, exactly?

So here’s the cross-post:

I’m a blog-addict. I read them, write them and love them. But when I hint to my marketing clients that they might be better off with a blog site than a Web site (not that there’s any difference, but perception is everything) they pooh-pooh the idea. A BLOG? Surely you jest, they reply.

Thanks to Pro Blogger for the wonderful quote from Guy Kawasaki:

As I look back, I have done almost nothing to my site for the past eighteen months. By contrast, I change my blog about every eighteen hours. Five hundred people used to visit my site per day. About 10,000 people visit my blog or subscribe to a RSS or email feed per day. A blog is much more useful than a web site for my needs.

Heck — I’m just going to tell anyone who’ll listen: a blog is BETTER than a Web site, and be done with it.

Technorati Tags: blog how-to, blogger-for-hire, career blogger