Innovation is one of the wonders of the human world.
For some reason, people have the ability to come up with ways to make the world better.
There is a dangerous flipside to that, but for now we’ll focus on the positives. Some people’s ability to make the world a better place has led us to some great things.
Just in the last 100 years or so innovations have included flying (okay, so other beings besides humans figured that out first), the Internet, iPhones and the Callaway Great Big Bertha.
For many businesses (all businesses?), innovation is required for survival. If you’re not innovating another business will likely pass you by and you’ll be struggling just to keep the doors open.
That’s why many business leaders place a high importance on innovation. They try to foster a culture that is looking for ways to make the world a better place.
And that’s where IdeaScale comes in. They’ve created software that helps businesses and organizations to innovate.
Today we’re going to look at their blogging strategy.
1. Consistent Weekly Schedule
It looks like for the last 4+ years that IdeaScale has been blogging at least weekly. And from a quick look all the way back to the beginning it looks like they’ve had an established schedule to pretty much post on the same day of the week each week.
It’s changed a bit, but usually they would only miss a day or two and then get right back on schedule. And if they go off schedule at other times it’s only to supplement with additional posts during the week.
That gives you about 4-6 blog posts per week. That gives IdeaScale about 200+ posts at least since they started the blog. This is an interesting number because research has found that businesses with over 200 total blog articles get 4.6 times more traffic than those with under 20 posts.
I’ve previously written about the fact that we are all what we do every day.
If your business wants to commit to more traffic and more organic traffic you have to commit to a content strategy. We recommend at least weekly like IdeaScale. You can see that they’ve done it for years and are now sitting on more than 200 posts. And I think it’s actually closer to 380+.
2. Building On Press Mentions
Here is a recent post from IdeaScale with a slightly different approach.
In the post, IdeaScale shares that they were mentioned in a New York Times article that discussed the NYPD’s use of the IdeaScale platform to encourage innovation of the quality of life of NYC.
If you look at some business blogs you’ll see these posts often, but many of those posts are no more than one or two sentences linking to the original article.
IdeaScale goes beyond that and adds more content to the article. They obviously have insider info on how the NYPD is using their platform and that is interesting to other potential clients.
Plus this post is an opportunity to brag a little bit without coming off that way to readers.
3. Guest Authors
We’ve mentioned guest authors in business blogs before.
It can be a great way to get more content and in some cases better content for your site. But your blog has to be appealing to great writers if you want great guest posts.
That usually means offering a good size audience for the writer. You don’t want the author really to include links to their posts and spammy products and things like that.
But guest posting can be done well and IdeaScale does that including with this recent post.
It’s a great topic: Creativity. But the real benefit is that the guest author provides some great actionable information: where to be creative. And it’s backed by science and studies that are linked to.
It’s a very believable post. It’s hard to argue with science.
If you want to supplement your business blog with guest posts you’ll need to make it appealing to great writers. But if you can attract good writers it can be wonderful for your site.
Setup guidelines. Be picky with titles and topics and formatting. It’s okay to edit the posts too before publishing them. You can work back and forth with the writer to finalize things.
4. Mixing Website Content
Sometimes a blog post can serve as a way to mix or promote other types of content. That’s what IdeaScale did with this post on fostering a culture of innovation.
The blog post gives some good tidbits like the fact that research shows that employees often work harder to come up with more ideas if their initial ideas are rejected (to a point). But the main point of the post was to promote a white paper and webinar on the same topic.
A blog can be part of a larger content marketing strategy that might involve guest blogging, publishing guides and PDFs, webinars, videos and more.
You can mix those things together to help promote each of them.
5. Promoting New Tools
I just thought this was a cool survey or tool that IdeaScale mentioned in a post.
Again, a blog is a good place to promote and provide official details on things happening with your company. Many companies, large and small and in between, do this and people look to the blog for the official information on the company blog even more than major news sites.
So if you’re doing things as a business that you want to share you can use your blog.
These types of posts would be good to supplement your regular blogging schedule of other posts that might provide how-to posts for readers and things like that.
Conclusion
IdeaScale is doing a lot of good things with their business blog. I really like that they have committed to a long-term blogging strategy. It would seem obvious that they perhaps have a blogging calendar that helps them to publish at least once a week. A calendar is a great tool for helping with that commitment.
Are there little nitpicks with the blog? Sure, but that’s true with every blog. They could narrow the width of the blog for easier reading and things like that, but those are small things. When it comes to the content on the blog this is a great example of a successful business blog.