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Let Sitecore Power Your Blogging Platform

Blogging runs the gauntlet from personal to professional, and somewhere in the middle, it ends up being a great tool for engaging customers. In larger companies, it may seem challenging to juggle multiple blogs, find a common audience, and be a trusted voice to customers. With numerous blogging platforms available (with some great, others not quite so) – I want to help answer the question “How can Sitecore help me overcome those challenges?”

Extend Your Sitecore Investment
“Why Sitecore?” can usually be answered fairly easily if your company has already invested in Sitecore. A well-built Sitecore infrastructure is definitely worth the time and money spent, so why not utilize that investment for a blogging platform? This allows your existing content authors to manage blog content alongside website content, which brings up an important point: blog content is typically siloed to the platform it was created in, but not necessarily with Sitecore.
While a WordPress blog requires a separate set of users, a separate database, and a separate front-end, Sitecore-based content can be made available across your entire multi-site setup without much work. This is where the really cool stuff comes in to play…
The Right Content at The Right Time
With customization and personalization of content a de-facto standard on today’s web, Sitecore’s Experience Marketing platform can help blog content shine. The extensive personalization options of the xDB tools allows for blog content to be served based upon a user’s location, interests, browsing history, etc. This personalized content might be a simple summary of a blog post in a sidebar somewhere on a site, or links to blog articles relevant to a product page on an e-commerce site. The Sitecore Federated Experience Manager (FXM) even helps Sitecore-native content be served, personalized, and tracked on non-Sitecore driven sites, which frees blog content to be used outside of Sitecore with little effort. For a little more reading on the FXM, check out this blog post.
The ultimate goal of personalization is to serve the right content at the right time to visitors, which should help keep them engaged with your site.
Find the Right Voice
So by now, your blog content is managed in Sitecore, made available across all your sites, and personalized for visitors – a great start, but unfortunately for naught if content isn’t interesting! Knowledge becomes more powerful the more it is shared, so strive to write creatively. Tell a great story, especially one from experience (for example, take a look at all the articles our Sitecore developers write every month – lots of learning and sharing going on!). Website visitors don’t necessarily want to be treated like customers – that is, they don’t want to be sold to – so don’t write like you’re selling something. Natural conversation is the best way to get a point across (and yes, this is oddly self-serving advice), so keep your tone relaxed, content informational, and overall message easily digestible.

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Brandon Bruno

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