At least once a week I describe myself as the cobbler with bad shoes. We talk everyday to clients on the vendor and partner side about using social and blogs to better engage their audience. We help curate content, stay relevant and engage your audience members. Sometimes that means we fall down on our own. I’m all about admitting our mistakes and figuring out how to be better next time. Looking back we haven’t done a blog post in a month…yes a month, not the once a week we strive for. Vacation this, client project that, excuses are just that, excuses. So here are some suggestions on how to be more timely and not let your blog get stale.

1. Stockpile: Get 4-6 blog posts in the inventory so that when you have a busy week (or four) you’re able to pull from your inventory. Make sure it’s evergreen so you’re not talking about Heart-bleed (I know remember that?) six months after it’s relevant.

2. Guest Bloggers: Reach out to some of your partners and see who has an idea for a blog post they could contribute. The good news is you can both blog about the same topic on each others blog post and as long as it’s not identical you have to do very little work to create a post.

3. Mini-blogs: Twitter introduced us to the micro-blog. All your thoughts in 140 characters. While generally we shoot for 350-600 words in a blog post if you have something going on that you simply want to point to for reference that can be a mini-blog. A simple blog post in 100-200 words.

4. Editorial Response: We’re all reading a ton of information online. Some we agree with, some we don’t and some we’re in-between. A great way to compile more interesting blog content is to simply give a short response and point to the original article.

5. Ghost Blogger: When really in doubt if you’re team isn’t able to get a post at least every other week then reach out and ask for help. Make sure your ghost blogger understands your voice and your opinion and please, please, please make sure you review the post.

I hope this has been helpful and I plan to take my own advise starting immediately! Anything else I missed? Any suggestions on what you’d like to hear more about from Channel Maven?

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