Individual, Corporate & Media Blogs Compared [Chart]
Blogs provide a home base for content publishing and social media that’s highly useful for individuals, corporations (B2C and B2B) and media entities. While these three categories of blogs vary in their content and goals, we can benefit from examining how they’re similar and different.
Comparison of individual, corporate and media blogs
Here’s how individual, corporate and media blogs compare across a variety of attributes.
| Blog Type: |
Individual/ |
Corporate |
Media Entity |
| Definition | Provides content and a media platform. | Builds owned media entity &/or executive platform. | Extends & supplements media presented on other channels. |
| Goals | Build brand, Attract audience, Drive sales/leads. |
Extend brand, Attract audience, Drive sales/leads, Support sales, Improve SEO. |
Expand presence, Support brand, Extend coverage, Encourage community, Support SEO. |
| Revenue models | Sells services. Affiliates, Advertising, Information products, Donations. |
Lead generation, Product sales. |
Advertising, Special programs. |
| Content | Offer own insights, Share knowledge. |
Answer customer questions, Show how to use your products, Tell stories about your company, Give industry perspective. |
Add information to stories from other platforms, Offer timely trending pieces, Provide editorial point of view, Allow reader input. |
| Distribution | Email, RSS Feeds, Social media. |
Email, RSS Feeds, Website, Social media, Customer, communications, Events. |
Email, RSS Feeds Website, Social media, Other media channels. |
| Content creation | Individual. | MarCom, PR, Social media, Executives, Employees, Agency, Freelancers. | Editorial / News team. |
Source: ©2013 HeidiCohen.com
7 Actionable blogging tactics for individuals, businesses and media entities
Based on this comparison, here are seven actionable tactics where these three types of blogs can learn from each other.
- Start with specific goals for your blog. Regardless of whether you’re an individual, a company or a media entity, focus your blog efforts to support your long-term goals or your blog won’t be very effective. Go beyond saying “I need 1,000 visitors per day to my blog.” What do you want these visitors to do and how will this help you towards your objectives. Actionable Blogging Tip: Determine how you’ll measure your blog’s progress towards your goals. Make sure that you have a way to track these metrics. (Here’s a list of sixty-five blog metrics.)
- Extend your brand onto your blog. Understand that blogs reveal different attributes of a brand than other presentations. And, while corporations and media entities have already built established brands, individuals need to decide how they want to build and enhance their brands through blog design and content formats. Actionable Blogging Tip: Leverage the power of every aspect of your blog to build and reinforce your brand. Think in terms of your blog theme, design elements, language and content presentation.
- Publish content worth your audience’s time. Take a page from traditional media companies when creating blog posts for your readers. Assess which topics are most relevant or necessary to cover for your audience. To this end an editorial calendar is useful. Actionable Blogging Tip: Manage the content creation process to create the best content you can and present the information in an easy-to-consume manner. This includes writing strong headlines to pull readers into the blog posts.
- Speak human. Individuals innately incorporate their personal voice into their writing as do individual reporters and columnists. By contrast, corporate entities need to strip away the sanitized language that often pervades corporate communications. Businesses must talk to their audiences, not at them. Actionable Blogging Tip: Proactively decide on how to develop your blog’s voice. Consider the type of language (such as colloquialisms and slang) that you want to present. Outline a set of guidelines for content creators as well as providing copyediting support where necessary.
- Maximize the power of trending topics. Professional blogs like Gawker and Huffington Post are masters at this. Recognize that this activity doesn’t work for all types of blogs. Further, you can’t just write about the latest craze because it’s trending on Twitter. Your content must consistently be aligned with your key topics or you’ll attract traffic that leaves your blog in less than ten seconds and doesn’t help build a strong following for the long term. Actionable Blogging Tip: Track the latest trends and find a way to leverage these topics to find a different angle for engaging your target audience.
- Leverage the power of your other owned channels and platforms. Individual bloggers should take a lesson from businesses and media companies who can cross promote their blog content. Assess how can you do this in other aspects of your life and your business. Actionable Blogging Tip: Create a list of your various communications tools from email signature files and business cards to other media channels. Then decide how you can use each one to promote your blog content.
- Participate on non-blogging social media platforms. Social media is a critical element of every strategic blog plan. It’s important for distributing content, building a community and engaging with readers via the comment section. Actionable Blogging Tip: Create a presence for your blog on relevant social media platforms. Understand that this social media presence should be used to extend the conversation from your blog. It’s not another megaphone for shouting your business promotions. Use these outposts to curate relevant content for your audience, both your information and other people’s.
The bottom line is that no matter what type of blog you have, whether it’s an independent blog, a company blog or a media entity’s blog, you can improve it by observing what others are doing on their blogs.
What have you learned from other types of blogs? How has this improved your blog and its results?
Happy Marketing,
Heidi Cohen
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- P.S. If you’re really serious about taking your blog to the next level, download our new FREE e-book entitled, What Every Blogger Needs to Know – 101 Actionable Blogging Tips.Here are some related blogging articles.
Photo Credit:Seven by Heidi Cohen (Permission to use if you link to this post.)
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