From Competition to Bribery: Convincing Coworkers To Blog

Many marketers have bought into the idea that blogging is a valuable part of the overall inbound marketing strategy. Blogging builds thought leadership and credibility while becoming a powerful magnet for new visitors and leads for your business. Among the roadblocks many marketers encounter, one perception seems to be nearly universal--much of the knowledge needed for the blog sits in the heads of subject matter experts outside of the marketing department.

So the major question many marketers are trying to answer when getting their corporate blog off the ground is, “How do I get experts in my company to share their knowledge on our blog?”  

The Inbound Marketing book , written by HubSpot founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, has been the number one book in the blog and blogging category on Amazon and dedicates an entire chapter to blogging. This post builds off of the great blogging startegies shared in the Inbound Marketing book .

Strategies For Building a Company of Bloggers

1. Motivate Through Competition - Depending on the culture of your business, competition can be a powerful motivating factor.  At HubSpot we use our Blog Analytics tool to publish a top 10 list every week of our top bloggers for the past 30 days.



We export and format the list in excel and then post it on one of the refrigerators in our office kitchen for everyone in the company to look at. Does this work? Absolutely. HubSpotters are extremely competitive so this ranking gets everyone thinking about articles they could contribute to make it on the list.



2. Promote Business Results - By measuring your entire marketing funnel , you can look can understand which blog articles drove leads that ultimately resulted in new customers for your business. It is really motivating for the team to know that a blog contributor brought in a new customer for the company resulting in and increase of revenue of “X”  amount.  

3. Reward Contributions - Some people respond best to rewards. A reward could be as simple as a $10 Starbucks card for any blogger whose post reaches a certain metric such as 10 comments, 500 page views or 5 leads. This type of reward set clear expectations with bloggers outside of marketing and demonstrates that the extra time they put in to write a blog post did not go unnoticed.

4. Organize Brainstorms - Pizza can be powerful. Set one day a month to order some pizza and invite employees from across the company to come and brainstorm potential blog ideas. For many bloggers, the hardest part is coming up with the initial idea for the post. These brainstorms help to solve this problem, while building excitement internally about blogging.

5. Conduct Interviews - Sometimes subject matter experts are too busy for any of our previous strategies. If this is the case, then schedule 30 minutes with each of them and interview them with a video camera or just for a Q-and-A style text blog post. This method still retrieves the thought leadership knowledge from your experts while minimizing the time needed for them to invest much effort.

With one or a combination of these strategies you should be well on your way to building a company culture around blogging, instead of relying on one or to individuals to carry the load.

Have these strategies worked for your business?

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