Whether you know it or not, your blog is a powerful communication tool to engage your channel partners and enable their success. For either marketing “to” your partners and prospective partners or marketing “through” your partners to end customers, your blog is a very powerful tools. Why? Your blog provides a platform to train your partners on how to solve their pain points while promoting you as a thought leader. This is not a place for shameless self-promotion, but instead an educational opportunity to establish yourself as the thought leader in your industry and train your partners to sell more effectively. The foundation of a good blog is content and consistency.
Content Your blog should focus on a variety of topics of interest to your partners. These topics could include commentary on trends or relevant news in your industry; marketing, sales, and business development advice; announcement of upcoming events and resources (yours or others); resources to help your partners solve their customers’ pain points; highlights of your partner(s) success; and other trainings and information of interest to your partner community. Examples of blogs that do a good job with this: Lang Tibbils Blog (McAfee), Cisco’s Channel Blog, and Oracle’s Partner Blog.
Consistency Choose a blogging schedule that you can stick to and fits with your audience’s needs. At Channel Maven Consulting we typically blog twice a month, which is an amount we can manage while still allowing us to create timely and well thought-out content that is relevant to your audience. Whatever amount you decide be sure it is consistent. Your partners will come to rely on a certain blogging schedule, so don’t choose a schedule that is so demanding that you can’t keep up with it. The VAR Guy and Channel Marketer Reportare two of our favorites who not only provide relevant content, they also blog consistently. To be sure you are providing a good rotation of content and that you are delivering on a consistent schedule, we recommend using a blog plan. Below you will find an example of a blog plan with explanations to help you get started.
| Start Date | Topic | Description | Title | Type | Blogger & editor | Audience | Due Date | Review Date | Launch Date | Keywords | Meta Description | Status | |
| Description | The day you begin writing your blog | What are topics relevant to your partners | What are you going to cover in this blog? Add as much detail as you need | Short, engaging, good for SEO | Written blog, video blog, interview…. | Who is responsible for writing blog & who is responsible for editing | Are you targeting your partners, providing resources for their end customers, or another group? | Date draft is due | Date review is due | Date blog is live | What words are you focusing on for SEO optimization | This is the description that comes up underneath your blog title in a search | Where is this blog pipeline? |
| Example | 12/1/12 | Partner Marketing Support | Helping partners market to end customers | Solution providers: stay top of mind with your customers | Written Blog | Jane Smith | Channel Partners | 12/5/12 | 12/7/12 | 12/12/12 | Vendor Name, channel partners, channel sales | 5 tips to help Vendor X’s Partners marketing easily to your end customer and increase your channel sales. | Live |
How do you use your blog? What has worked and what has not worked? Comment on these questions or others below. Get even more resources in Channel Maven Consulting’s quarterly newsletter
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