How to Get Your Employees to Blog for Your Business
This podcast audio served as the source for the blog post “How to Get Your Employees to Create Blog Posts.”
The transcript was rewritten to produce the blog post, which is the cornerstone of the Shortcut Content system.
Shayla: Thank you for joining us for the Shortcut Content podcast. I’m talking with founder Dave Young today. Dave, how might a business owner get their employees involved in creating content?
Dave: That’s a really good question and in my experience, it’s really a difficult thing to do to get your employees really excited about creating content for your site. The problem is that if you have a marketing meeting and you’re like, “Alright, we’ve decided to have a blog and Jane I’d like you to write three blog posts and Bob, you’re good at your blog area of work, and we’re like you to write blog posts about what you do.” And you get this kind of cold stare back at you, like, “uhhhhh, I don’t know how or why I would do that.” And so it’s a challenge.
And we’ve seen that with a lot of our customers. The owner, the person that founded the company, might be a really deep expert, and he’s got people that work for him, him or her, that are also experts at what they do. The challenge is that they’re not going to write with the same voice, if they will write for you at all.
And so what we do is we tell our clients, look, why don’t you have them come up with a few topics that they’d be comfortable at least talking about, that they could talk about for five or ten minutes, without having to go do a lot of research and figuring out exactly what it is that they know, because these will be topics that they already know, that they’re already experts in.
And then when it comes time for your recording session with us, you just sit them down in front of the microphone and we interview them for five minutes. Voila! They’ve created a new blog post and they’ve done it under their name, with their voice. It’ll be them on the podcast. And it’ll be their name when you publish the post. And what we’ve found is that those employees, they don’t have any problem just sitting down and talking about what they do. They don’t have to write. So we’re really asking them to take five minutes to half hour out of their day to just sit down at a microphone and talk to us about it.
Because we’re doing interviews where you’re not going out and doing a lot of research, it’s only going to work really well for people that are already experts at what they do. So getting content out of the mouth of an expert about what they know and what they can do is much easier than saying to someone, “Hey, I’m going to interview you about this topic that you know nothing about. And I need you to go out and learn about it before you sit down for this interview.” Nobody wants to do that. I wouldn’t want to be interviewed about that. You wouldn’t want to be interviewed that. But if it’s something that I already know something about, I’m happy to just sit down and ramble about that for five or ten minutes. So the fact that their experts matters in the ease in which we can create the content, and it also matters in the credibility and the feel for what that content is. It’s pretty easy to tell when somebody’s out of their realm and talking about things that they really don’t know anything about.
Shayla: So if someone’s listening and thinking, “Okay I do have a few employees, at least, that really know what they’re doing, have some expertise in their field,” how do they get a hold of you to start creating that content with their team?
Dave: We’re easy to find, either on Facebook or Twitter and it will all lead you back to our website, ShortcutContent.com, where we’ve got contact forms and phone numbers, pretty easy to get ahold of, and we’d be happy to talk about how we can help you and your business.
Shayla: Alrighty. Thanks so much, Dave.