My company wants to set up some blogs - what's best practice in getting started from scratch?

[Martin_S]

My company wants to set up two or three blogs (on previously unused domains) with the idea being to disseminate good content that gets picked up in SERPs and acts as a lead generator, shows us to be authorities in our market, creates brand (or individual employee who's doing the blogging) awareness etc...

From scratch, what are all the boxes that should be ticked to make this work from the outset? What are the must haves?With all the ideals in place, how long could it realistically take to make this work? What are some pitfalls to look out for? Any advice in general will be appreciated.

Thanks, M

[EGOL]

I would make one blog on the main domain and put all of my efforts into that.   If you already have a blog on the main domain I would keep that running but put twice as much work into every post and post a little more often.  Quality over quantity wins.  Content that is twice as good gets ten times the attention.

If you split your efforts into three outhouse blogs you will not have much and all of that effort could have been used to increase the authority and impressiveness of your main site.

[David-Kley]

"Quality over quantity wins"

All day, every day. I agree on using the main blog to grab the attention of users and search engines. The only way I can see the effort being rewarded on setting up additional blogs on the other domains is if they speak about something very specific that doesn't fit into your main blog.

Whatever route you decide to go, make sure you are setting up canonical URLs and the proper SEO structure from the beginning. It's much harder to correct later on down the road.

[Martin_S]

thanks Egol and David,

Any suggestions as to how to get promoting the blog/s off the ground?

[EGOL]

I do the following...

Feature your popular and most recent blog posts prominently on every page of your site.  Show them to all of your visitors.

Set up Feedburner so people can subscribe by email or RSS feed.  Get AddThis sharing buttons.

If you have great content then your visitors will promote it for you.

[David-Kley]

Make them pretty to look at, and informative. People love articles that are well laid out, pages that are pretty to look at, and helpful / fun to read. If you make your articles snore-worthy, your user response will be.

Also make sure that your users can easily share the articles. If you rely on a user to manually copy and paste a link to share it, you will be waiting a long time. For marketing, think of what audience would be searching for your articles, and where they would go looking for it. Putting content in place where users are actively searching for it = blog success.

[DonnaDuncan]

I agree with the earlier responses left by EGOL and David-Kley.

You asked about must-have's and best practices for creating a blog. Coincidentally, one of our fellow-Mozers wrote and pubished a how-to-launch-a-successful-blog post on October 13 that I think will answer your questions and work as a great how-to example at the same time.

That same post talks about blog promotion. Neil Paten and Aaron Agius at Sprout Social have also written a very helpful (and free!) Complete Guide To Building Your Blog Audience that you might find helpful.

Good luck.