It's no secret that blogs are quickly becoming one of the most important elements of any company's brand presence. Blogs are a great place to establish who you are as a company and what you can offer potential customers, which is why it's crucial to reach as many people as possible.
If you're looking to start a blog, or if you already have one that you're trying to take to the next level, you need a strategy for scaling your blog.
In this guide, we're going to take a look at what scaling your blog means, the four key elements for effective scaling, and why scaling your blog is essential. When all is said and done, you'll have all the information you need to grow like a pro.
What Does it Mean to Scale Your Blog?
Scaling your blog, simply put, is the act of taking things to the next level.
When you set out to scale your blog, you're working to establish your own brand and voice that people look to for answers, while also generating revenue for your own business. Basically, you can grow your personal brand, your brand's recognition, and increase your revenue through scaling.
If you want to create a blog that reaches more readers and potential customers, you have to make sure your blog is prepared for all the changes and challenges that come with growth. Scaling your blog will do just that.
How Do I Scale My Blog?
According to Marcus Sheridan's "They Ask, You Answer" methodology for content marketing, there are four important steps for ensuring your blog is prepared for scale. They are:
- Ensuring Buy-In from All Teams
- Insourcing for Content
- Bringing a Content Manager Onboard
- Finding the Right Tools to Use
Let's go ahead and break these steps down so you can see how each will help you scale your blog.
Ensuring Buy-In from All Teams
Before you begin working on scaling your blog, you need to be sure that everyone involved in your blogging efforts understands and accepts the content marketing methodology that you will be implementing.
The best way to ensure buy-in from all team members is by creating internal documents that explain the purpose of your blog and their role in its ongoing creative process. These documents should include everything from style guides to optimization guides. They should give your team a thorough picture of how this new process will work.
When you do begin scaling up your blog, making sure every employee involved has access to these documents is essential. With complete buy-in from all members of the blog team, scaling your blog will be a smooth process.
Insourcing for Content
Many companies think that the best way to grow a blog is to create more content with more writers. Even though this is the right mentality, those companies usually carry out this growth the wrong way.
While hiring freelancers to fill out your content team to increase your output can help grow your brand's depth of resources, it may not be the most effective way to scale your blog effectively.
According to IMPACT's guide on insourcing, there are five main reasons that insourcing your content creation really works:
- Nobody knows your buyers better than you
- In-house content managers will become experts
- Not restricted to deliverables
- Builds company culture
- Google prefers expert written content
While outsourcing content creation might be more cost-effective (at least initially) than insourcing, having your blogs created by an internal team will drive better results. After all, the members of your team know more about your brand and who you're creating content for than anyone else.
Insourcing will also help create expert content creators within your organization, who can then train and instruct future content creators. This is so important for scaling your blog. Effective creators make effective teachers, who then teach other creators to become experts themselves. That cycle is instrumental to the sustainable scaling of your blog.
When planning to grow your blogging team, insourcing will end up being invaluable to your scaling efforts. If you are working to establish a brand and voice for your company, insourcing ensures that you can do just that.
Bringing a Content Manager Onboard
With all the growth that will occur, it's essential to have someone who can manage and guide your content. That's where a content manager comes in.
There are many qualities that make an effective content manager, but the most important elements are that they know your brand and are wholly committed to growing it through content.
A content manager can go by many names (inbound marketing manager, chief content officer, etc.), but their role should remain about the same: overseeing content creation, promotion, and how it's optimized. They should also maintain and update style guides and editorial calendars to ensure all content produced by your blog team is up to your standards and on time.
When scaling your blog, you are trying to drive two things: brand awareness and growth. With a content manager overseeing your blog production, you can be sure that both are addressed and handled correctly.
For more information on the role content managers play on your blogging team, as well as some helpful tips for growing your organization, check out our comprehensive guide!
Finding the Right Tools to Use
Even if you follow these steps right down to the letter, your blog scaling efforts will be in vain if you can't track how your content is performing.
Being able to see the return on investment (ROI) of your scaling efforts is crucial to ensuring its long-term success. Otherwise, how will you know if the scaling techniques and content you are producing are resulting in increased business for your company?
Luckily, there are plenty of analytics tools you can use to track ROI, as well as other important metrics such as SEO and search traffic. One of the best platforms for tracking and analyzing these metrics is HubSpot, which allows users to track all of these data points and more. For a list of other tools that track content marketing ROI, check out Hubstaff's guide on the topic.
When looking to scale your blog, having the right analytics tools in place for your needs is essential. With your chosen tools, you can track results and make changes accordingly to ensure your blog continues to scale effectively.
Why Should I Scale My Blog?
To make a long story short, scaling your blog allows you to grow your business' revenue and brand awareness through the creation of content.
By making sure you have complete buy-in from your team, establishing insourcing expectations, bringing someone to manage your content onboard, and finding the right tools to track your content, you can grow your brand with remarkable returns. You also can ensure that your blog sees continued success.
With this guide, you can take those steps with confidence and begin your journey to becoming the most trusted voice in your field. All you need is a strong strategy and some insightful content.
