I Pledge Allegiance to My Blog Pledge

After clearly identifying your target persona(s), one of the next critical steps to creating a solid inbound marketing program is to draft a Blog Pledge that will direct the style, tone, and purpose of your blog and the content you create for it.

What is a Blog Pledge?

Your Blog Pledge is an internal document that is used to guide your content strategy. It’s something the key players of your inbound marketing program must all agree on, this includes both sales and marketing, as well as any writers or contributors. 

You could almost think of it as a mission statement for your blog because most of your content decisions will be filtered through your Blog Pledge in order to determine if they line up with your goals and target persona.

For example, if a blog post is submitted by one of your writers and the topic is questionable – maybe your Blog Manager questions if it really appeals to your target persona – you can then refer to the Blog Pledge as a guide to approve or unapprove based on this agreed upon criteria.

Getting Started

To get started creating a Blog Pledge for your brand, you’ll want to start with a conversation involving those key marketing and sales players referenced above. I can’t express enough how important it is that everyone is involved in this process, as it will prevent disagreements in the future about the type of content you publish. 

Here are some of the questions to discuss at this meeting:

• Who is our target persona (include a summarized version)?
• Is our business market based? Do we need to stay geographically focused?
• What types of content will we write about? What topics will we cover?
• What will the personality of our blog be? (Maybe even create a persona for your own blog.)
• What will the tone be: serious or casual? Will we include humor or keep it professional?
• What is the purpose of our writing? To inform and educate or to entertain?

What We Will and What We Won’t

Besides the above questions you’ll really want to finish the following sentences:

We will…

We won’t…

Take this as an opportunity to really think about the things you will do as a brand and a blog. Will you focus on educating in an unbiased way? Will you incorporate specific examples and case studies as often as you can? Will you keep most posts under a certain word count?

On the same note… what won’t you do? Will you not mention your competitors by name? Will you not try to oversell your products? Will you avoid any controversial topics? 

Your Turn

What will your blog pledge look like? Once written and agreed upon by your inbound marketing and leadership teams, be certain that all of your writers and anyone on the inbound team has a copy of this to refer to when creating content or making decisions. 

Also, keep in mind that this is something that can evolve. What you start out thinking your blog personality will be could evolve as you learn more about your target persona or receive feedback as you grow.