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Corporate blog: how not to abandon it

Most corporate blogs stop at the third article. Why a company needs a blog, who writes it, where topics come from and what the admin panel should be able to do.

Almost everyone starts a blog on their corporate website, but for most it stops at the second or third article. After that the section hangs there with a two-year-old publication date and works against the company: visitors see that nothing has happened here in a long time. Here's why that happens and what needs to be set up for a blog to survive its first month.

Why a company needs a blog

There are exactly two reasons, and both are practical.

Search traffic. Service pages answer queries from people who already know what they need. There are fewer of those people than of those still putting their problem into words. A person searches not for "online store development" but for "does a store need its own website if it's on a marketplace". Only an article can answer that, not a service page. Each article covers its own set of queries, and over a year enough accumulate for the blog to account for a noticeable share of all visits.

Trust. This doesn't work the way people usually think. A client rarely reads a blog from start to finish. But when they're choosing between several contractors and see that one of them has written about exactly the problem they're thinking about, that's a strong argument. A blog shows a way of thinking, and that's something generic words on the home page can't fake.

Neither reason delivers quick results. Articles build search traffic over months, and the first few bring almost nothing. Hence the main trap: the results arrive later than the enthusiasm runs out.

Why blogs die at the third article

The scenario repeats almost word for word.

The first article is written by the owner or a manager — on enthusiasm, over a weekend, on a topic that has long been on their mind. It turns out well. The second is written by the same person two weeks later, with more difficulty. By the third it turns out the obvious topics have run out, and there's no less work to do. The fourth is put off until "things calm down". They don't.

Broken down, the causes are:

  1. No list of topics. Every article starts with the agonising question "what do we write about". It's the most draining stage, and it repeats every single time.
  2. No one responsible. "We'll all take turns" means nobody writes: a task without a specific name has no owner.
  3. The bar is set too high. The first article came out long and detailed, and now every next one has to match. A short 400-word breakdown feels unworthy, and there's no time for a long one.
  4. Publishing is painful. The formatted text has to be sent to a developer, who adds it a week later with the images out of place. After the second time, the desire to publish is gone.
  5. No feedback. Articles go out, nothing visible happens, because nobody checks how many people read them and what they did next.

A blog doesn't die from a lack of ideas or a lack of time, but from the absence of a process that doesn't depend on mood.

Who writes and on what schedule

There aren't many realistic setups.

An in-house expert writes. The best option for quality and the worst for consistency: the expert has a main job. It works if writing is needed rarely and is part of their responsibilities rather than added on top.

The expert talks, an editor writes. An hour of recorded conversation is turned into an article by someone for whom this is the job. For the expert it's the cheapest format in terms of time, and the substance stays real. Usually the most viable setup.

An external writer covers the topic. Cheap and consistent, but without in-house expertise you get a retelling of what's publicly available. Fine for basic topics, not for the reason the blog was started.

Schedule matters more than volume. One article every two weeks, published consistently, is more useful than four in a good month and none for the next three. Search engines and readers respond to regularity alike, and the team gets used to a rhythm that doesn't require heroics.

In practice this means: choose a frequency you can definitely sustain in a bad month, not a good one. Once a month is a normal frequency. Once a week is a commitment that needs a dedicated person.

Topics: where to get them without inventing

The most reliable source of topics is the questions clients ask in emails and meetings. They're already phrased in plain language, they definitely matter to someone, and you already have the answer — you give it out loud several times a month.

How to set up collection:

  • Keep a shared list where any employee adds a question they heard from a client. One line, no processing.
  • Once a month, review the list and mark the questions that came up repeatedly.
  • Separately, note situations where you had to explain why you're not doing what the client asked. These are ready-made topics with conflict built in — they get read the most.
  • Look at which search queries already bring people to you. It shows what people are looking for and what the site is missing.

What not to do: mix company news with useful materials. "We moved to a new office" and a breakdown of a work problem serve different purposes and are addressed to different people. Keep news in a separate section, or don't have one at all.

The connection to the rest of the site matters too: an article should lead somewhere further. A breakdown of a task logically ends with a link to the relevant services page, not by breaking off at the last paragraph.

What the admin panel should be able to do

The technical side affects a blog's survival more than it seems. If publishing takes half a day and needs a developer, the blog will stop no matter how good the topics are.

The minimum set:

  1. An editor where the text looks as it will on the site. Headings, lists, quotes, images, links — without manual markup.
  2. Drafts and preview. The ability to set something aside, come back and see how it will look before publishing.
  3. Scheduled publishing by date. Wrote three articles in a good week — they go out on schedule, not all on one day.
  4. Search result fields. Tab title, description, article URL — editable, with clear hints about length.
  5. A cover with automatic processing. An uploaded photo is resized and compressed automatically instead of going up as a multi-megabyte original.
  6. Categories and tags — exactly as many as are actually used. Fifteen categories for ten articles make the feed meaningless.
  7. Clear view statistics. Without them there's no feedback, and without feedback motivation rests on faith alone.

Anything more complex than this list isn't needed at the start and only raises the barrier for whoever will be publishing.

Pre-launch checklist for a blog

  1. Define who you're writing for and which questions you're answering.
  2. Collect a list of at least ten topics before publishing the first article.
  3. Assign one named person responsible for getting materials out.
  4. Choose a frequency you can sustain in a bad month, and commit to it.
  5. Agree on a reasonable article length and don't raise the bar.
  6. Check that publishing takes the author no more than half an hour and doesn't need a developer.
  7. Set up collection of client questions into a shared list.
  8. Once a quarter, look at which articles bring people in, and write more like them.

If these eight points are covered, the blog will survive its third article. If even the fourth or sixth isn't — almost certainly not. More about how we set up editorial sections is on the blogs and media page.