This guest post, Blogging Tactics for Why your Blog Needs More Than One Writer, is from Matt Volpi. Matt is a writer, marketing consultant, and member of the nDash Content Community.
You wouldn’t expect The New York Times or The Huffington Post to only feature articles from one writer, would you?
Publications like these clearly benefit from having multiple voices that can offer different perspectives and appeal to different parts of their audience. And yet, too many brands assume their content creation can and should be handled by one person.
Avoid the Common Mistakes
It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking your head marketeer or content marketing manager should “write the company blog” — broadcasting on-brand messages to the market is the bread-and-butter of their job, after all. But creating and maintaining a blog that keeps readers coming back for more requires more than a single individual, no matter how dedicated and prolific they may be.
Benefits of a Multiple Author Content Strategy
There are many benefits to featuring multiple bylines beyond the obvious increase in bandwidth.
- Varying Viewpoints: If you have the same person blogging day after day, week after week, the perspectives and opinions of that lone author will create a familiar and repetitive vibe for the blog. Readers may still find the content informative and valuable. But their chances of surprising or engaging them will dwindle over time.
- Building Trust and Credibility: Posting tons of content with no byline might give visitors plenty to read, but there’s not much motivation to take that content particularly seriously when you don’t know who’s writing it. In fact, 63% of people find blogs with multiple authors to be more credible. Qualified and identifiable authors will give the opinions some weight and let the reader know who’s behind the words.
Where to Find Your Content Community
You understand the benefit of having multiple blog authors, but that doesn’t mean you can just go out and hire a team of content creators. So, where can you find the writers that will make up your content community?
Turn Your Internal Experts into Rockstars
If you’ve got subject matter experts in the trenches that possess great takes on current events and industry trends, showcasing them on the company blog is a cheap and easy way to build their loyalty by giving them credit for their work and building their own brand. Featuring multiple employees on your blog also shows off the depth of talent and expertise your company can offer to potential customers.
Be Welcoming to Guests
Guest bloggers are a great way to add some variety to your blog while simultaneously boosting its traffic. A guest blogger, by definition, is offering a different perspective that isn’t “tainted” by being authored by an employee whose motives are obviously to promote the company. Guest bloggers — be the industry experts, customers, or complementary vendors — can talk about relevant topics, as well as your company’s relevance and role in that ecosystem, from a completely new angle.
Leverage Freelancers to Round Out Your Content
While your internal experts, marketing staff, and guest bloggers are all essential members of your content community, freelance writers can fill in the gaps and expand the scope of your blog. As dedicated writers, they’ll give you high-quality content to keep up with the demands of generating engaging posts frequently.
Not only can you assign freelancers the posts that you know you want to be written but simply don’t have the time or resources to create, but they can also be a great source of ideas themselves. You can evaluate their pitches and select the ones that match your strategic goals for the blog.
Managing Your Content Community
Once your blog is relying on content from internal experts, guest posts, freelancers, and staff, it’s essential to implement systems and schedules to keep content queued up and content calendars populated with engaging posts. The best systems allow you to assign posts, view status and communicate with contributors all from one platform. The logistics of managing your community shouldn’t become a full-time job of its own. By leveraging a content community platform, you can easily keep all of your contributors informed, engaged, and organized.
To keep your blog vibrant, you need a lot of content. A single author can only come up with so many ideas and churn out a limited number of words every month, but statistics show that more content means more leads, which is why you started your blog in the first place.
Final Thoughts on Blogging Tactics for Why Your Blog Needs Multiple Writers
To succeed in the long term, your blog needs a community of contributors. Each additional blogger adds diversity to the voices and positions being presented, and these multiple perspectives will break through the potential monotony that can creep into corporate blogs. Even the uniqueness of different contributors’ writing styles can keep things fresh and engaging. Swap out your solo act for a community and see how it makes your blog come alive.