3 Quick Ideas to Improve B2B Blogging Productivity

3 Quick Ideas to Improve B2B Blogging Productivity:from Savvy B2B Marketing - Latest Blog Entries
Like many people, I’m motivated to get organized and be more productive in 2013. At the Content Marketing Institute, one of the things we work on is a daily blog. Even if you are not publishing 365 posts per year, your blog probably takes a substantial amount of time. And, you want it to result in the best possible outcome for your organization.
If you want to improve your results while saving you time, here are a few quick ideas.
1) Create a Google spreadsheet for your calls to action.
All of our posts have a call to action at the end. While we have some standard CTAs we use, we realized we were missing opportunities to promote a wider swath of options. Even though our editorial and marketing team is small, it was still difficult for us to stay in the loop about everything that our readers may be interested in. To help, we created a Google spreadsheet in which we listed all possible CTAs sorted by topic. The marketing team can now input any ideas, and the editorial team uses this when deciding what to use. For instance, if the post is about blogging, our blog editor have certain CTAs to choose from. Again, this was a pain experienced with a  small team, and it’s something that that bigger teams are challenged by even more.
2) Get a handle on key posts.
As your blog grows, it can be challenging to decide which posts you want to link to . . . if you rememeber to link at all. “Should I link to this post about content strategy or this post?” To help with this effort, we created a roadmap of our key posts that our editorial team has access to. Now, no one needs to second guess which posts are most important for cross-linking.
3) Focus on titles.
One of the changes we made last year was hiring someone to specifically title all CMI posts. While we have both an overall editor and copy editor who does a final look at each post, we did a trial in which we asked someone in to provide title suggestions for every post based on our target keywords as well as what compels readers to open and share posts. This may sound like overkill, but having this person focused on titles has been a great help. Traffic and social sharing have increased -- and this person is a key part of the team in 2013.
What other ideas do you have to making your blogging process more efficient in 2013?
About the author: Michele is the Content Development Director of the Content Marketing Institute where where she works with a fabulous group of contributors who know a lot about content marketing. She's also a B2B content marketing consultant who has a passion for helping companies use content to connect with their ideal buyers. You can follow her onTwitter @michelelinn or read more of her posts on Savvy B2B.