Building a blogging team: 6 steps

Building a blogging team isn’t easy; it takes strategy, time and a lot of effort.

However, there are tremendous benefits that result from implementing a content editorial calendar and establishing a team of bloggers.

Within 13 months of implementing a content marketing strategy at the Buffalo Niagara Partnership, we saw our website traffic grow by more than 150%.

It took months of strategic planning to create a detailed content editorial calendar that included our content topics, individual bloggers and schedule.

Why did we do it?

Why is building a blogging team important for an organization?

When you distribute the responsibility of content creation across a team of individuals, it reduces the burden of blogging.

Building a blogging team also leads to a meatier, more diverse calendar that encompasses of a variety of subjects, voices and viewpoints.

There’s no “right” way to build a blogging team, but below are a few critical building blocks to help you get started:

1. Pick people with passion: The first step is to pick your bloggers, and the easiest way to do that is to find the people within (or outside of) your organization that actually enjoy writing. Being a content contributor is a commitment; it takes time. You want to pick people who see the value in blogging. This way, you have a passionate team of storytellers who see blogging as beneficial, not burdensome.
2. Have a kick-off celebration: Once you have your team established, you want to celebrate the launch of the blog. One way is to have a kick-off meeting to present the content marketing strategy to the organization and showcase your team of bloggers. Making your bloggers feel important is crucial if you want them to feel a sense of commitment to content creation. A kick-off celebration will help unite and excite your team around a common goal. Finally, the kick-off is the opportunity to get everyone on the same page. This way, everyone knows what their individual roles and responsibilities are before you start creating content.
3. Make a mission: There will be a point down the road when your bloggers are tired; they’ve run out of ideas and/or are too busy to write a post. This is exactly why you need a mission and vision. The strongest missions are not created by the CEO, they are created by the blogging team. Letting the bloggers make their own vision, that they all buy in to, will make them feel more engaged in the process.
4. Map out the process: It’s important to map out the blogging process so that your bloggers know how a blog is created from start to finish. Process and/or how-to guides should clearly state who is responsible for which part in the process. I recommend creating a process guide and a best-practices guide for word count, images, tone and flow. These documents should be accessible by every member of the blogging team.
5. Meet regularly: If you want to keep your blogging team engaged, it’s important to stay in constant communication with them. Meetings keep up the team camaraderie. Meetings also help everyone stay on the same page as the blog grows, and goals change. Finally, bringing the group together regularly helps facilitate the exchange of ideas and insights among the team of bloggers.
6. Report results: If you want your blog to continue to grow, you have to keep an eye on how each post performs. It’s important to not only track the results, but communicate them back to your blogging team. Reporting lets you see which topics and/or bloggers lead to the highest views; you can use that data to shape your content editorial calendar. Reporting back to your bloggers to let them know how their posts are performing, and which of their posts was the most popular, helps keep them engaged. Setting a performance goal for each blogger, and the blog as a whole, is a great way to keep the team motivated.

Have you ever launched a blogging team? What building blocks did you find particularly helpful?

Comment below!