10 Things I Learned About Writing a Company Blog

Several years ago, I started Gift Card Girlfriend to teach consumers how to make gift cards more personal. On my blog, I shared presentation ideas such as giving a movie theater gift card with a box of popcorn or tucking a home improvement gift card into a new pair of work gloves. I additionally shared the perfect words to write on gift cards and even created free gift card holders for consumers to download and print at home.

Responding to Consumer Needs

I soon discovered, however, that consumers wanted more insight than just HOW to deliver gift cards. They wanted to know the best gift cards to buy, what to do with unwanted gift cards, how to use egift cards and so forth. I responded by pouring my gift card expertise (born out of everyday buying, giving, receiving and using gift cards) into a plethora of blog posts with an expanded goal to become the one-and-only consumer guide to gift cards.

In 2013, Giftcards.com acquired the Gift Card Girlfriend blog and hired me to continue blogging for the company.

Making the Transition to Corporate Blogger

When I look back at the original posts I wrote compared to those that I churn out now, the differences are as notable as the traffic increase. Though the transition from mompreneur to corporate blogger took some adjustment, working with a team of professionals gave me the discipline and support needed to significantly increase my reach at a pace I would not have achieved on my own.

At the same time, my passion for gift cards and my unique perspective as a “consumer first” allowed me to be an educator as well.

Together, we took what started out as a personal brand with a few thousand followers to a company blog that is a significant contributor to our website’s overall success, netting yearly traffic in the multi-millions with revenue to match.

Starting Your Own Company Blog

Whether you want to start a company blog on your own or plan to hire someone else to do it, below are ten things I learned about writing a company blog that will help you succeed as well.

1.????Write “Good Enough”

Even though I write thousands of words each week, I do not enjoy writing all that much. What I do like, however, is sharing creative insight, answering questions and helping people get the information they seek. So prior to starting the blog, I took a few online writing courses to learn how to write for this format and I studied other blogs to find examples that appealed to me. Unless you are confident in your writing abilities, learn how to write well enough to blog or hire someone else to do it for you.

2.????Emphasize Quality Over Quantity

In the early days of Giftcards.com, the company mandated that members of the executive team (experts in their respective fields) write one blog post a month in order to keep fresh content on the site. Not only did many of the contributors resist the assignment, few had any inclination to write or time to get the job done.

When I joined the team, I first tried to help by editing submissions (which not everyone loved). Then I tried interviewing executives to make their portion of the task less cumbersome. After several months, we scrapped the program entirely because the posts drove very little traffic and just created more work for everyone. Plus, I wanted to spend my time writing about gift cards rather than the specialties of the various executives.

Though publishing on a regular basis is important, having a few good posts is better than pushing out a barrage of ineffective content.

3.????Write for Your Target Customers

Some companies use a blog to put a friendly face on the corporation thinking that stories about company events will entice prospective employees to apply for jobs. I guess that works, but unless those blog posts are featured prominently on the site, job hunters are not likely to come across them through an Internet search.

In my opinion, social media and review sites are a better place for posting behind-the-scenes pictures of your workplace. The blog, with its inherent ability to drive traffic and sales, should be used to reach a wider audience, namely your target customers.

4.????Give More than You Sell

Some of my highest ranking blog posts do not generate much revenue. For example, this blog post on The Best eGift Cards from Top Merchants is a fair assessment of egift cards available from over 200 stores and restaurants. Our gift card is listed, but it is not number one. Blog posts on topics such as gift card scams and stores in bankruptcy are also equally candid. Though these posts do not directly lead to sales, the traffic increase lifts the authority level of the site as a whole which then indirectly contributes to the success of pages that are more profitable.

Giving people the information they seek (whether it drives sales or not) and being honest about the industry you are in, builds trust with consumers (and the media). If your blog traffic goes up, then I think it is safe to say that site conversion will as well.

5.????Stay on Topic

When search engines like Google and Bing comb the Internet to bring back results, their primary objective is to return the best possible answer for the search term(s) entered. In order to do that, search engines evaluate the quality of each post plus the domain it resides on before deciding whether or not it will meet the searcher’s expectations.

Although I could write about other things I enjoy (like tennis, popcorn, being a work-at-home mom and so forth), I focus exclusively on gift cards because that is what our site is about—that is the category we serve most effectively.

Off-topic posts add no value overall and could actually downgrade your site’s authority level if visitors come in to a post via search and bounce back out quickly when there is nothing else available on that same topic. Blog posts that are in harmony with the rest of the site will do the most good.

6.????Partner with an SEO Expert

I have worked with a few different search engine optimization (SEO) experts and have been most successful with the ones who treat me like a crime-solving partner. The current Cagney to my Lacey does just that. He tells me keywords to write about, gives me insight on how different blogs are doing and frequently offers suggestions that help us both be more effective in our jobs. Together, we also use the blog to test our theories on things like how to get featured snippets, improve a call to action or tweak messaging before rolling out similar changes to main pages on the website.

Having an SEO expert who sees the potential of and is vested in your company blog is invaluable.

7.????Keep SEO in Mind

Unless you are a mommy blogger, fashion blogger, designer or a foodie who people follow every day like your mom and her friends used to watch soap operas, most of the traffic to your company blog will come through search results. That means every blog post has to serve a purpose and follow SEO best-practices in order to be noticed.

Though you should work with an SEO expert to solve search-related mysteries and to be part of the strategic conversations, writing with SEO in mind is your job and is something you can easily master.

8.????Now Forget About SEO

When I first started working for Giftcards.com, I got slammed with SEO tricks, tools and tips on how I needed to write blog posts going forward. Wanting to learn, I followed all of the rules and nervously ran new posts through an SEO checklist of everything I had been told to do.

Over time, however, I felt like my blog had lost all personality and the writing had become formulaic, so I went back to simply writing good content. In doing so, I discovered that some of the SEO techniques had taken root and started to come out naturally as I typed while others could simply be integrated at the end with a few edits.

Although it is important to learn SEO to be an effective blogger, it is equally important to let go of the rules and write for people instead of just search engine robots. When you figure out how to do both, the blog will thrive.

9.????Write Base Hits

My top traffic-generating blog post is pretty simple and my top revenue-generating post is equally concise. I never could have predicted that either one would do as well as it has. Conversely, I have spent hours producing posts that struck out even though I had been sure they would be home runs traffic-wise.

Since you do not know how well a post will perform until you publish it, I suggest going for consistent base hits. Just keep publishing good content, reviewing the results and making adjustments until you figure out what works best for your audience.

10.?Publish then Polish

The best thing about writing for a digital platform is that you can make changes even after you publish. When I notice that a blog post is performing well, for example, I take the secret sauce from that post and update other posts accordingly. If I see an opportunity to use the high-performing post to send link power to an under-performing page, then I will make that type of change as well. And since I can be a little hard on myself, I frequently update posts that I think should have been better written in the first place.

Keeping your content current is a great way to improve the overall quality of your posts as well as send a signal to search engines that fresh content is available and ready to be crawled.

10 Things I've Learned...so far

As much as I have learned over the years about writing a company blog, the one lesson that impacted me the most is realizing that things are always changing. A trick that made one post pop in 2014 is no longer relevant in 2017 and could even have a negative impact in 2020. A post that did nothing for a year may suddenly be a “big mover” on everybody’s radar and a post that used to consistently top the charts may fall off the list. Though you may be able to keep up with all of that, I have learned to simply analyze, adapt as best I can, and move on.

I am not writing a company blog to prove my chart-topping abilities. I write this blog to help people get the most from gift cards and to have a positive experience on our site. When I keep that as my primary goal, knowing that the technology and theories of the day may change, I know this blog can stay relevant and succeed.

Have you learned any lessons about writing a company blog that you would like to share? Or do you have questions about how to get started? Let me know in the comments below and I will see what I can do to help.

Until then…

Happy Gift Carding,

Shelley Hunter, Gift Card Girlfriend