The road to success in a new area is always long. And building content marketing capabilities takes time.

Japanese who invented Lean Manufacturing call this Kaizen, continuous improvement. If you are not driven by small improvements, your game is sure to get bit more rusty every day.

Here is a picture I took from a startup’s wall that shows what this all means:

If you can improve your game 1% every day, you end up upping your game by 3780% in a year (if you are a startup founder working 365 days a year). And if you are taking it easy your game is getting weaker and you end up close to zero in a year.

Take easy things to decent level, then eliminate the missing links

You know the proverb that chain is as strong as it’s weakest link. The same applies here. But your chain is weak in so many places when you have just started business blogging. There is so many things to learn and master that you and your team are easily really confused running...

In the world of startups, there is one concept over everything else: That’s mystic Product - Market Fit. Some have found it. Others are still searching for it. And those who run out of money before finding it will die.

The same applies to business blogging and content marketing where the Content - Audience Fit divides those who are still searching for success with those who have already found it and are scaling fast. For all, it’s whether you will find the Content - Audience Fit before you run out of motivation and managerial support. Or money, if you are a startup.

The Product - Market Fit was introduced by Marc Andresseen, the founder of Netscape (Still remember the first web browser before Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer? Well, that was Netscape) and now a famous venture capitalist. Product - Market Fit is achieved when a startup finds large unserved market AND satisfy its need with their product. Until the Fit, everything is just so difficult. Does the market have a need that it is willing to solve? Is the need so well understood that the product is actually solving the need? A startup’s life until the Fit is full of experimentation. The whole business plan...

For an average company blogging is hard to start. It’s good to remember, it is very much a volume sport. The more your post, the better you succeed. Thus it’s important to invest time and energy into getting your process as smooth as possible.

There are essentially three reasons why volume matters and why you should get your blogging engine running as smoothly as possible.

Social Media

In social media you need to have something new to share every day. You can promote each of your posts couple of times and entertain your followers with curated content, but if you write new content only once a month promoting the same piece every weeks starts to feel like a stuck turntable (if you can still remember those LP-records).

Search Traffic

There are quite a many keywords to cover. The competition is hardest in the few top keywords in your field and it may even be impossible to get to first page on Google in any of those. Actually the quality of traffic is also the poorest in those top keywords where people are using very common keywords without any limiting keywords to filter out irrelevant content. The real game is to be found outside the top 10 keywords in your industry. The...

This is the fourth post on The Company Blogging Success Formula Series.

All audience building and promotion efforts are lost if your content is not up to the expectations. Getting your blog post creation process right helps a lot to the quality and reduce the effort.

Content creation itself is out of this paper’s scope. I assume the post itself is written and concentrate on the editorial process as a quality control as well as finishing process.

1. The copy

Once the writer has finished writing, it’s time for a quality assurance. If you have written it, take some distance, maybe couple of days, before reading it.

The first question to answer is whether the text is good enough and secondly whether it fits to the blog’s style and topic. Sometimes you just have to scrap a post.

A second opinion and a bit of discussion with your team might be in place.

Also check that the story is flowing, everything is understandable by your audience and there is nothing that can really be taken off. There is really no right length for a post. It can be just four lines if you are Seth Godin, or it can be 20 pages if you are Neil Patel or Brian...

This is the third post on The Company Blogging Success Formula Series.

Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, George Foreman, Larry Holmes, Mike Tyson, Evander Holyfield...

You know these names, don’t you? Legendary boxers. And behind each of them is the same great promoter. Don King. Not the most honest guy, it seems, but then boxing is not the most honest business anyway.

Legends are made. By promoters.

Same applies to blogging.

Great content deserves equally great promotion.

Sharing is caring

When you publish a new blog post, the next thing is to share it to social media. But first you need to think when is the best time to share. It depends of your audience as well as of your competition. Many share during the first business hours, yet it seems the best times are late week afternoons and weekends, also for business posts. More on the subject.

You should be sharing to your company’s or brand’s Facebook Page, Twitter Account and LinkedIn Company Page. The writer should share it...