How Did I Start a Company Blog?

I joined the company that I currently work with, in May 2015. It is a great company to work it, I must say and it was in operation since 1999. It was recently demerged from another company and had decided to start on focusing on marketing and communications, and thus, I was hired. I was the only person then, in the marketing team, assisted by a graphic designer and ad-hoc user interface or website developer.

I wanted to start a blog that can be used both professionally to talk IT topics, trends, and articles related to the technology offerings that the company offers; and personally to talk about employee engagement, highlighting employee of the month and make it personalize so that the CTE employees are also engaged. So how did I go about it:

Step 1 – Finalizing the category: Make a list of category, that I wanted the blog to cover, basically the scope of articles or in technical terms the site map. I broadly chose – Business and Technology. Under Business, we have generic stuff such as trends, strategy, leadership, employee, and productivity, while under Technology we have big data, cloud, and applications.

Step 2 – Elements to add: I then finalized what are the other items that I want to add to the blog, such as Twitter feeds, individual author pages, and call to action columns.

Step 3 – Developing forms or formats and wireframe development: I created three forms, first an author form to capture the author details; second, a blog post template; and third a blog post optimization form. Hand-in-hand, I explained the sitemap to the designer and detailed him what I want on the home screen and how the inner pages should be structured. http://utah.cleantalk.org/

Step 4 – Designing and Information collection – The designer designs the PSD screens of the pages at this stage. The screens are shared with the UX lead for his comments and suggestions and post iterations the screens are approved. In parallel, information about the authors and topics are collected.

Step 5 – Development and planning the pre-launch engagement strategy – The site is developed at this stage and the information collected is given to the developer to be inserted into the blog.

As a pre launch plan, I started a photography contest for the CTE employees to gain their interest and attention to the blog.

Step 6 – Testing and installation: This is a typical yet an extremely important step prior to launching your blog. We carried out a few days of testing and iterations to make the blog responsive and free from any bugs or errors. Also, we scheduled to upload the files live to the server on a Sunday.

Step 7 – Blog Launch: Finally the blog was launched and it took us 21 days to think through, plan, test and launch which I think was a great demonstration of team work.

Step 8 – Blog syndication and article promotion: Post launch we syndicated the articles to article directories while submitting the blog URL to website submission directories.