Der Beitrag 10 Proven Tools and Plugins for Corporate Blogs in 2026 to Streamline Workflows and Boost Results erschien zuerst auf Blog2Social Blog – Tips for social media marketing, sharing, scheduling, cross-posting.

A corporate blog can meet many corporate goals. A successful blog increases the visibility and reputation of a company and supports lead generation and conversion. According to DemandMetric, 59% of B2B marketers consider their business blogs the most valuable content channel. Companies with blogs produce 67% more leads per month than those without.

Business blogs can serve customer acquisition and customer loyalty, but they can also serve recruiting, customer support and social media marketing. According to a recent DemandGenReport, 47% of B2B buyers read 3-5 blog posts or content pieces prior to even talking to a salesperson.

A content marketing strategy with a business blog as a central hub for internal and external communication can provide multi-purpose content. This multi-purpose content can be re-used and syndicated for various marketing campaigns and activities. A content-centered blog strategy will save you valuable time and resources, and also boost efficiency, sustainability, and visibility.

7 Strategies to make your blog a success for your business

1. Create quality content for your customers

Valuable content is the currency of a successful business blog. A corporate blog is neither an advertising channel nor a press center for company and product news.

Only content that matches the interest of your specific customers and prospects the is likely to receive likes, shares, and engagement from your target audience.

What makes a corporate blog interesting for your customers?

• Authenticity, transparency, and personality
• Value and usefulness of the contents
• Up-to-date facts and statistics
• Images, photos, and infographics
• Screenshots, screencasts, videos
• Interaction, engagement and vivid discussions

In the age of the social web, customers expect corporate communication to be transparent and authentic. A corporate blog provides a great marketing tool for companies to present themselves with a human voice, with faces and stories that encourages engagement and connect directly with customers and targets.

The better you know your target audience, the better you can create content that really matches their interests.

• Audit your customer communication for frequently asked questions and business challenges your customers and prospects are faced with. Create help content, tips, and guidelines that your target audience will remember as a useful resource of information.
• Look out for topics that get much engagement on social media. Audit your social media followers, comments, but also social communities and discussions on your topics. Look for frequent questions and challenges that come up and look for gaps in coverage. Is there anything you can add to your posts, that will make your content stand out?
• Ask your sales and support people about frequently asked questions and business challenges they discuss with your clients.

Checklist: Idea collection for corporate blog topics

• Insider knowledge, industry news and trends
• Solutions for common problems and challenges in the industry
• Instructions and tutorials for products and services
• Reports, reviews and case studies from other customers
• User-generated content: Contents and guest posts from customers, partners and influencers on your topics.
• Events: trade fairs, webinars, etc.
• Team Interviews
• Recruiting: Current job offers and experience from employees and trainees
• Support: FAQs – answers to frequently asked questions and business challenges
• Off-topic content that is witty, funny and personal and adds a personal touch

Tools that help you with basic blog ideas

• The Easy Blog Ideas plugin to analyze top performing content for your keywords and topics.
• Buzzsumo is a content marketing search engine. You can search for your keywords and see which topics get the most engagement on social media sites.

2. Optimize your posts for SEO and readability

Today, SEO is all about content. The quality of content has become a key factor for search engine ranking and web visibility. The quality of content is reflected in terms of content relevance, semantic context, and keywords. Keywords are key elements of optimizing your pages and posts for the search engines as well as for your audience.

If your content matches the interest of your target readers and you are using the keywords and topics they are searching for, this will help you to get a better ranking and more visibility in search engines and social media.

But also the structure and readability of the content provide important factors for the evaluation of text quality. This also applies to both readers and search engines.

Make sure your blog posts are easy to understand and fun to read:  

Checklist: Structure and SEO of blog posts

• Divide your text into easily digestible sections with less than 300 words and paragraphs with less than 150 words.
• Use strong headings and subheadings.
• Include lists with bullet points to make your posts easy to skim and scan.
• Create graphics and infographics to make facts and processes easier to understand.
• Analyze how your audience refers to the topic you are covering, what search terms or hashtags they use.  Do a thorough keyword-research.
• Include your keywords in your meta tags and descriptions as well as in your copy, headlines, introduction, anchor text , and in your image descriptions and ALT tags.  

Useful tools to help you optimize your blog content

• Check your spelling and grammar with Grammarly, cross-check your headlines and copy with the Hemmingway App for readability.
• Use the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress to help you with basic SEO and check your posts for focus keywords, meta tags, and descriptions, as well as readability for search engines.
• Use keyword tools like Google Keyword Planner or Long Tail Keywords for your keyword research.

3. Use the power of visual content

Photos, infographics, diagrams, charts, tables, screenshots, slides, and videos will help your readers to understand abstract ideas or complex topics much faster and easier. Images and videos also help you grab a lot of traffic from image search engines like Google image search or YouTube. And, they will compel users to share your content on their social networks. Images and videos also help you to drive more traffic from social media sites to your blog or website.

How to use images and videos for your blog post

• Include at least one image near to the top of your post.
• Make sure your images are relevant to your topic and directly relate to the context in which they appear.  
• Always include keywords in image names or video titles, image’s Alt tags and description.
• Define your featured image with a strong and descriptive visual

Tools for creating visual content

• Canva enables your team to easily create visuals and infographics for your blog posts. Canva offers a huge variety of templates, layouts, photos and icons you can use to create professional looking images. (free & premium) 
• The free tool Visme helps you create visuals like infographics or social media posts. With Visme you can also create entire presentations using their templates, photos and icons.
• Movely helps to create animated videos and screencasts.
• TheSEO friendly images plugin for your blog to automatically update all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes for SEO purposes. Additionally, this makes the post W3C/xHTML valid as well. (free & premium).
• The EWWW image compressor as a web app or as a plugin to compress your images in order to reduce the impact on page speed.

4. Adapt your posting frequency

Frequency matters!

82% of marketers who blog consistently see positive ROI from inbound efforts (Source: State of Inbound). Consistency in publishing new blog posts is a key strategy to increase blog traffic and retain readers.

But, how many blog posts should you publish?

To quote Dan Zarrella in The Science of Marketing the answer is most probably “More than you are right now“.

Take a look at the following stats to get a couple of figures to play with:

• Once you write 24-51 posts, your blog traffic generation starts to grow. 52 or more blog posts will increase blog traffic by up to 77%. (Source: Traffic Generation Cafe)
• Companies that blog more than 4 times a week see the biggest increase in traffic and leads. (Source: PWB)
• Businesses who blog 16 to 20 times per month get over two times more traffic than those who blog less than four times per month. (Source: HubSpot)
• 89% of companies that update their blogs multiple times a day have acquired a customer from their blog. (Source: HubSpot)
• 60% of marketers create at least one blog or content piece per day (Source: eMarketer)
  

Checklist: Organize your editorial calendar

A prerequisite for the regular planning and publishing of blog posts is a good organization and an editorial calendar for the corporate blog.

• Assign authors and responsibilities.
• Define a uniform style of writing (formal/informal).
• Determine the frequency for publishing so that new posts can be planned and prepared in good time. Start with the baseline of one post per week and look at your analytics for:
  • unique visitors
  • pages per visit
  • time for reading
  • time on site
  • reader to lead ratio
  • lead to customer ratio

After some time, add more than one post per week and compare results. If these numbers are promising, repeat the experiment until you find your perfect frequency.

Useful tools to help you manage your editorial calendar

• WithTrello you can easily manage the planning and organization of your projects. The tool enables projects to be organized in flexible boards, lists, and maps and provided with tasks, responsibilities and timelines to make workflows as clear as possible.
• With Evernote, One Drive or Google Drive blog posts can be easily written both online and offline and edited, coordinated and approved in a collaborative environment.
• The Editorial Calendar plugin helps you keep track of the drafting and publishing processes of your blog. You can easily manage, plan, edit and change your posts by drag-and-drop.

5. Recycle your content

A good strategy for the regular publication of posts is to maximize the use of content using a variety of media formats, post sequences and to regularly update posts. This also saves resources for creating new content.

Nearly 60% of marketers reuse blog content 2-5 times (Source: OzContent)

To establish your corporate blog as a useful resource source for customers and targets, provide a combination of posts for the basics (Evergreen-Content / Cornerstone-Content), as well as series and current news, which are linked to an encyclopedic structure. Google loves such blog structures. Define a couple of keywords for your basic topics and create basic articles on these topics. By a look at your blog statistics and your readers’ feedback, you can analyze your best performing content or pick up questions that provide material to follow-up with a new post or a series, or in other media formats.

Checklist: Content recycling

• Take a post from your blog that received a lot of clicks and engagement, and check the comments. Do you notice any aspects or questions that could be followed up? If there are several interesting aspects, create a series of them.
• Create different media formats for your content:
  • Create graphics and infographics from the most important facts and figures.
  • Turn your graphics and images into a screencast or video clip, or add a video for interviews and tutorials.
  • Add voice to your post and create a podcast.
  • Convert series and long-form posts in a white paper or e-books to download. This also helps you to generate leads.
  • Turn the most important facts into a checklist for download.
• Update older Evergreen posts with current information and figures, e.g. basic articles, statistics, lists, and re-post them with a current date.

More tips & tools for content recycling

6. Publish at the best times to blog for business

Most blog readers are “morning people” and tend to read blogs early in the morning. If you publish your content during AM hours, you have good chances of getting more attention for your content.

Dan Zarrella found the following patterns about blog publishing and sharing.

• Blog readers are 79% more likely to read in the morning.
• Blog reading peaks around 10 am.
• the best time to blog for pageviews is Monday between 8 and 11 am
• the best time to blog for increased engagement is Saturday between 8 and 11 am

According to The Science of Social Timing by Kissmetrics the average blog statistics will show the following patterns:

• The average blog post receives the most traffic on a Monday.
• Morning: The hours of 7 a.m. – 9 a.m. tend to be high-traffic before work.
• Lunch: The most traffic hits around 11 a.m. – as lunchtime approaches, with another brief spike between 12 p.m. – 2 p.m. as people take a quick break, plus B2B decision-makers can be viewing your blog for work.
• After Work: Traffic spikes again between 4 p.m. – 6. p.m. before tapering off.
• Blogs are most likely to get comments on Saturday morning when people have more time for their weekly blog reading, writing, and social engagement.

Take these average high-traffic times as a point to start. This will boosts effectiveness even if you leave it at that. However, the best times to blog for your business can be different. So, if you want to take the next step, take a look at your stats and analyze your blog traffic.

Checklist: Best times to post on your business blog

• Take a look at your blog statistics to get a sense of your traffic patterns throughout the day by checking out hours and days of the week.
• Find out your peak times in terms of raw traffic and also cross-reference conversions to identify best performance hours.

Useful tools to help you with your blog stats

• Google Analytics enables you to review post-performance by tracking traffic and conversions per day and hour. You can open Google Analytics in your browser or use plugins, such as the Google Analytics Dashboard plugin or Google Analyticator plugin to put those stats right on your WordPress dashboard.

7. Cross-promote your blog posts on social media

However great your content is, you need to promote your blog consistently. Social media help your content to build authority, incoming links and reach. The better the engagement you receive for your content on social media the more this will help your ranking and visibility. Sharing your content on social media helps you drive more traffic to your site. There are multiple social sites to share your content as well as your visuals.

Checklist: Social Media Cross-Promotion

• Select social networks your customers and targets are most likely to to be found, e.g.
  • Share your content on Twitter, Facebook, but also think of Google+, Reddit, Instagram, Pinterest, and Flickr, and also on LinkedIn, if your content is business-related.
  • Also, share your content on relevant Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn Groups or Reddit Subreddits.
  • Share your content on Social Bookmark communities such as Diigo, Delicious or Digg.
  • Re-publish and syndicate your content on platforms like Medium, Tumblr, Bloglovin’, Quora, and LinkedIn Pulse.
• Cross-promote your content at different times and days across social networks and customize your comments with personal comments, hashtags or handles for each channel.
• Set up a social media cross-promotion plan to schedule and share your blog posts on social media. Click here for a free guide and checklist for your social media sharing plan.
• Share your content at the best time on each network.
• Use social media automation for scheduling and consistency.  

Tools for Social Media Automation

• Blog2Social is a comprehensive social media plugin for scheduling and sharing blog posts and other contents with fully customizable social media posts on a wide range of social platforms. This allows you to automatically cross-promote our blog posts directly from the WordPress dashboard. A social media calendar helps with scheduling and re-sharing content regularly across multiple channels.

Wrap up

Valuable content is key to making your blog a success for your business. By turning your content into multiple formats, you have the opportunity to re-purpose and re-share your new posts as well as your evergreen content across channels. The right timing is important, but even more vital is the consistency of sharing valuable content on a regular basis. A content calendar will help you to keep your content production on track. And social media automation will assist you in sharing your content consistently. Every new blog post will add to your content structure and grow traffic from backlinks, comments, and shares. As your content grows, your blog will contribute a greater share of total traffic for your business.

Melanie Tamblé

Melanie Tamblé is co-founder and co-CEO of Adenion GmbH. She is an experienced expert in content marketing and social media.
Adenion GmbH specializes in online services and tools for bloggers, businesses and agencies of any size to support their online marketing and content seeding tasks on the web.

Blog2Social as WordPress Plugin and WebApp enable fast and easy auto-posting, scheduling and cross-promotion of blog posts, articles, links, images, videos and documents across multiple social media sites.
Social media posts will be automatically turned into a customized format for each social platform and auto-scheduled for the best time. Social media post can be previewed and tailored with individual post formats, images or personal comments – all in one easy step.

www.blog2social.com

Der Beitrag 7 Success Strategies for Business Blogs erschien zuerst auf Blog2Social Blog – Tips for social media marketing, sharing, scheduling, cross-posting.