A corporate blog can be a key component of any marketing strategy. It can help generate leads via search engines, demonstrate your team's customer-centric culture, and engage your target audience by providing them information they need and allowing them to interact with thought leaders in your organization.

Rather than placing the responsibility of blogging solely on the CEO or VP of Marketing, however, you can involve nearly every employee; the result will be to nurture thought leadership throughout the company.

But your coworkers may be initially hesitant to jump on the blogging bandwagon. Perhaps they are completely new to blogging and don't know where to start. Or maybe they simply don't know what to write.

Here is a list of 30 ideas sure to help get everyone's blogging fingers typing:

  1. Your company's elevator pitch. Most companies have a 30-60-second pitch. Quickly explain via a blog post who you are and why you are in business.
  2. Interview with industry experts. Identify a key industry expert, and email him or her 5-7 questions; you can later use the answers to form a Q&A blog post.
  3. Interview with a customer. Has one of your customers ever emailed you with feedback about your product or service? Interview that customer about his or her experience, and make a blog post out if it.
  4. Interview with a partner. Send along 5-7 questions for your partner to answer, and turn it into a Q&A-style post.
  5. Interview with the CEO. Interview your CEO on an industry hot topic or about upcoming news for your company.
  6. Meet and greet with the management teams. Interview your CEO on a casual level so that your audience can really get to know key people in your company.
  7. Share your viewpoint on hot industry topics. Express your unique viewpoints rather than regurgitating what everyone else is saying.
  8. Discuss your company's mission. Explain why you are in business.
  9. Address your company's vision. Explain what your company hopes to become in five or 10 years.
  10. Share your company's values. Explain the guiding principles by which you conduct business.
  11. Give a history or a timeline of your company.
  12. Identify your company's "one word." Is there one word that best describes your company? Some call this a dumbwaiter pitch.
  13. Reveal your aspirations. Write down your mission, vision, values, and priorities as a company in an all-encompassing post.
  14. Write an overview of your product suite. Just be sure to explain how your products or services provide value to your customers.
  15. Post screencasts of your products. Give a guided tour of your products to show how easy they are to use.
  16. Explain the features/benefits of your products. Explain the pain point that each feature solves, rather than simply spewing off what your product can do.
  17. Point out tips and tricks for using your product. Has a customer ever shared insight about your product? Why not include this great info in a blog post?
  18. Map out your company's competitive positioning. Explain how your company compares with competitors.
  19. Post a case study showcasing your customers' success stories. Share a few stories on how you helped your customers achieve their goals.
  20. Share written testimonials. Copy and paste all of your testimonials into a digestible blog post. Later, your sales team will be able to send it to prospects.
  21. Write a controversial post. Take a stand. Write something that you know will get people talking. For example, one of my colleagues wrote a post on why all SaaS companies' products suck.
  22. Rewrite a popular song's lyrics to match your business (include, as a bonus, a video in which members of the company belt it out). Hubspot has created a few videos based on popular songs. Take a cue, and go a step further by blogging about it.
  23. Post a funny comic. Can you or someone on your team draw cartoons? Collaborate and draft up a quirky comic, and include it in your blog.
  24. Create an infographic. Clever infographics or graphical representations of data are a great way to drive traffic to your blog. Team up with another brand in your space to really attract a lot of attention.
  25. Give photo tours of your office space. People like to understand the culture and personality behind the company they do business with. If you have an interesting space, show it off with a few pictures in your next blog post.
  26. Repurpose content. Turn successful written content (blogs, whitepapers, eBooks) into a shorter, more digestible blog post.
  27. Report on the most popular bloggers in your space. Lists, such as this directory of global VC blogs, get passed around like crazy. Create your own directory, and start sharing it among your network.
  28. Ask someone to write a guest post. Ask others to do the work for you entirely! If people have expressed interest in contributing to your blog, take them up on the offer as long as they promise to write about something relevant to your audience.
  29. List common mistakes. People generally don't like to fail, so any blog that shares insight on avoiding failure typically gets a lot of traffic.
  30. Be honest about your mistakes. Did you make a mistake that made its way into the public eye? Address it straight-on, as doing so will make your company seem real.

Still need more ideas?

OpenView Labs has packaged a complete guide to help you start a corporate blogging program. This e-book includes an introduction on corporate blogging, checklists, quick-start guides for each person responsible for kicking off a successful blogging initiative, and 50 or so ideas for blog posts. It also features tips from content marketing experts Ann Handley, Jonathan Kranz, and Joe Pulizzi.

You can also grab a copy of Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business authored by Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman. It's chockfull of content-creation know-how.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Amanda Maksymiw helps implement content-marketing strategies for OpenView Venture Partners, an expansion stage venture capital fund based in Boston, with a focus on high-growth software, Internet, and technology-enabled companies. Contact her via her blog, The Open Marketer, and @amandamaks on Twitter.