1. Find your evangelist
Is there someone in your organization who can’t stop talking about the great work you do? Bring everyone in your organization to mind. Have a Cinderella moment, and grab even those folks who scrub the kitchen floor and crawl around connecting cables. This person could be anywhere in your organization.
2. Give your evangelist time
Find someone else who can do what they do for five hours a week. Really. Offer to scrub the kitchen floor for them. Have them go around your office and ask everyone what they are doing. “What’s the most interesting thing you did this week?” “what’s coming down the pipe?” “what are you thinking about doing in the future?” Have them make a list of 10 interesting stories per week. Per week! They can do it. Have them record or write down direct quotes from your employees. Your organization has a lot more news than you think it does. It just takes a passionate person to go around and collect it.
3. Find your writer
You need a great writer. I can’t emphasize this enough. You need to hire a freelance writer who is looking for a little extra income while they finish their next novel. He or she needs to be funny. He or she needs to be charming. He or she needs to be a digital native so they know how to write for the web. If your organization is comfortable with it, I’d say find someone who is a little incendiary. Give them the by-line so they get professional cred for their work.
4. Pay your writer
Pay them $5 to write a sample blog post for you. If you like it, negotiate a rate that’s manageable for you. The very best professional bloggers make about $12 per post. Hire them to write 10 posts per week. (OMG! That’s expensive! Yes! How much do you spend on publishing and mailing the newsletter that no one reads? More than $480 a month? Hire a blogger.) Have them pick five of the evangelist’s ten weekly stories and write them up. (Yes, you are throwing away five stories! Chaff/wheat. Think about it.) Post one every weekday. Also have them find one news story or post from another blog every weekday that has to do with your organization, and post an excerpt from it and a linkback to it. Pay them the same rate to do this, even though it’s less writing. It’s important to have continuity of authorship, and other blogs will notice you faster if you link back to them. So, that makes two posts every weekday.
And that’s it. The technical aspects of setting up a blog are easy. If you don’t have a tech team who can install blogging software for you, just go to wordpress.com, buy the premium account ($15/year) so you can use your own domain name, and pick a theme. It’s that easy.
[Edited to add: Disclosure is hugely important to regular blog readers. A disclosure page, like this one or this one helps build trust with your readers. Tell them outright that your blogger is a paid contractor, not a volunteer supporter. Always make a note in your post if the author or the organization has personal or financial connections to the subject of the blog post. Hat tip to Jesse's comment below for the suggestion.]
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online stock trading guru
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Jesse Weinstein
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Michael
