What is common between blogging and designing of business processes?
They both take time and effort, and this is why many small businesses do not do either or both.
Yet, we all know that the two are essential for a business to grow. How?
Blogging ensures that a business communicates its brand promise and creates demand, while business processes ensure delivery in line with brand promise.
Are we surprised by the culling of South Africa’s SMME businesses during COVID-19 thus far?
Here are the stats in Graph 1 below:
Clearly then, investment in both business processes and blogging is a necessary evil.
But, what if there is a way to do the two together?
Let us show you how we do it.
Table of Contents
Inspiration for this eNsight
Our founder – Bra Willy Seyama – has been a member of a business accelerator for close to 2 years now.
While talking to his facilitator at the accelerator – by the name Sandiso Ncube – about documenting of a certain business process, he [Bra Willy] indicated that there is an eNsight detailing such a process on our platform already, and they both agreed that documenting it all over again is double handling and thus inefficient.
The discussion above inspired this eNsight.
The rationale for combining design of business processes with blogging
We have indicated in the opening section that the two activities are time-consuming.
Therefore, if there is a way to combined them, then this option must be explored.
[Writing] is one of the most difficult things in the world... Shakespear can't write all day. It's torture... [But] it's a game of tonnage.
We do acknowledge that this cannot be done with every single business process without compromising quality and/or intellectual property.
Therefore, common sense must be applied for each case.
How we design and document our business processes through blogging
With us being a digital content marketing company, we also consume our own services.Â
This puts us in a very unique position, where we experiment with the various digital content solutions, and we have been actively documenting and sharing many of our learnings through blogging, for over 9 years now.
The documentation process has not only concentrated on the results, but the associated processes we used, the insights we gained, and also how we plan to use them.
Clearly, blogging, which we call development of eNsights, is on its own an intense process; and we have blogged about this very process.
So, what is our blogging process?
This is a great place to start, as it will demonstrate how we go about developing our eNsights – a major marketing and sales activity at eNitiate.
A blog idea
The idea can come from any source.Â
The only condition is that it must relate, in some way, to what we do.
While we do not always win, we are happy that 98% of the more than 560 published blogs on our platform meet this condition.
A blogging framework
Here is demonstrating that blogging itself is made effective by designing a process.
Our blogging framework, which was introduced in January when we published our upgraded Website, and has since been progressively improved over time, is based on the need to develop eNsights that have high UX factor and are search engine optimised; both factors which contribute to the strengthening of our digital real estate.
A completed blog must have the following elements:
- the opening section that introduces the eNsight;
- a table of contents;
- an indication of the inspiration for the eNsight where possible;
- a combination of H2, H3 and H4 titles throughout the blog, with inclusion of the main key phrase in at least one of them;
- citing of minimum 1 relevant external link and as many related internal links as possible;
- where possible, inclusion of quotes, embeded tweets and youtube videos;
- incorporation of at least one relevant image;
- a conclusion;
- in total, text must ideally have minimum 600 hundred words; and
- a segment at the bottom that encourages our readers to share the blog on social media
Elements in RED FONT are mandatory.
All the blogs that we published since January have most of the elements above, including this one.
It is worth noting though, that many of the blogs that were published before January 2020 followed a different framework, thus they do not have all of the elements above.Â
However, the process of updating the old blogs that have evergreen content, and/or are traffic magnets, is ongoing.
Crafting of a blog title
A blog title gets crafted initially, mainly to ground the idea, but it is normally finalised after the blog has been completed.
Finalisation of the title itself follows a search engine optimisation process.
Here are title options we played with for this eNsight, starting with the first one at the bottom of Figure 1 that had lowest search engine score (48), and we ketp iterating until we arrived at the one with the highest search engine score out 100 at the top of Figure 1:
Business processes that we have designed and/or documented through blogging in the past?
An average business has 6 levers to pull in order to grow and thrive – marketing, sales, fulfillment, customer service, finance and human resources.
The business processes we have been blogging about have predominantly been related to marketing, followed by sales, fulfillment, customer service, finance and human resources; in that order.
We are in the marketing services business. This explains the skew.
Here are the links to the 11 business processes that are core to our business, and which we have blogged about to date:
Over to you
We shared with you how we kill two birds with one stone.
How do you do it?
