Who Do You Need to Run a Corporate Blog
The key specialists behind a corporate blog and where to find them
A corporate blog works out better as a team effort, so you need a team.
A person with some writing skills can single-handedly manage a reasonably successful blog. This can be the case for niche topics and abnormally productive people that are obsessed with what they write about. Say, someone who writes for their fellow garden gnome collectors can have a loyal audience for the given niche without a dedicated editorial team. They would cater to a relatively small audience and use the advantage of low competition while probably running their blog as a hobby. Corporate blogs are usually pretty much different from that model.
A corporate blog is expected to be a marketing tool that benefits your business by getting new leads, raising awareness about your brand, or showing off all that top-shelf expertise you have. Regardless of the goals you set, it will require frequent updates, sharing content all over social media, and working with analytics. In order for your blog to be maintained and eventually noticed you’ll need someone to do all these things.
Key roles to fill
The exact scope of specialists you might need is actually limited solely by your imagination. We will simply highlight the basic roles you have to consider. Note that these roles may be split between different people or combined by the same specialist depending on your team.
Writer
Surprise. Somebody will have to write. Your colleagues can definitely contribute posts once in a while, but they already have their full-time jobs to begin with. Dedicated authors, however, are supposed to keep up with tight content schedule and deliver well-prepared content. They take topics from the editor or suggest their own.
Designer
Designer makes the visuals for the articles. They read texts and come up with the ideas they turn into cover pictures and illustrations or infographics to convey the meaning better. Aside from these graphics, each publication goes with a bunch of pictures for social media reposts. And everything should be cut to specific sizes.
Editor
Editor is the one who puts everything together. They are in charge of the overall feeling of the content, as well as its core meaning. Editor checks and riveses an article to get the right flow and makes sure that everything is clear. If there’s too much to handle, they can leave comments and send the article back to the author. If the article has links, editor will check those as well.
Editors are typically responsible for publication schedule and subjects to be covered. They work together with SEO specialists and writers to pick the optimal topics. Ideally, you want the most popular ones that are relevant to your business and have less competition in major search engines. Generally, editors also come up with the editorial policy, strategy, and marketing of your blog.
Proofreader
This is a crucial role if you wnat yor articels tto be clean and tidy. Proofreader is the one who weeds out typos and double spaces in articles. Certainly, authors do proofread their own pieces, but it is impossible to catch all the errors after looking at the same text for a couple hours straight.
It is typically fine to have several authors read each other’s pieces, or delegate this task to your editor. While a typo here and there won’t be a disaster, ending up with a clean copy is important for the reputation of your brand. If you don’t have a dedicated proofreader on the team, at least make sure that somebody has the skill and psychological fortitude to check texts after the author.
SEO Specialist
You probably want your blog to get all those delicious clicks from Google or another search engine. Therefore, you need to have somebody to keep up with all the trends and technology. A decent SEO specialist will help pick the trending topics and research the competition. This role also includes analyzing the statistics for the published posts. If you already have a SEO specialist on the team, they may have spare time to help with the blog.
Social Media Manager
Social media managers get in touch with the general public via your social media channels. They take part in relevant discussions and share content outside the comfort of your corporate blog. SMM people can also produce original content exclusively for social media, but that’s probably a subject matter for another post.
Technical specialist
When your website lets you down, there should be a person to fix everything. Depending on the engine you use there will be a whole lot of technicalities and problems to deal with. When everybody is busy making shiny content and the website fails, your technical specialist will be fixing it and preventing the whole thing from going down again. Consider picking those who know how website magic works and are familiar with the technologies you are using. For less complex solutions like Medium an editor can fulfill this role as well, but note that they will always have a lot of other things to do.
Editor’s note: yes, please spare me.
Final touch
These are just the roles to fill in. Where to find the actual people, on the other hand, is way more difficult question. Your typical options in this case are as follows:
- Blatantly saying you have job openings on your corporate website, blog, and social media channels.
- Reaching out to the authors you like.
- Onboarding enthusiastic people from the community.
- Hiring freelancers for less regular tasks.
Still, you can combine roles and make people share certain responsibilities as long as they can keep up without sacrificing the quality. Just make sure to not overwork them. It’s a well-known quality killer.
