Consider the 80/20 rule for blogging… Focus 80% of posts on “you, you, you” topics (helping the customer), rather than “us, us, us” content (talking about yourself).
Blogs are super-simple structurally. The platform gives non-technical folks a way to express themselves as they accumulate customer-centered content for their business. They can do this anytime they want, without help from a web developer or PR person. This content can be referred and linked in subsequent sales activity and can boost their website’s rank in search engines like Google, which often favor blogs in their listings. Combined with FAQ and Q&A marketing, this can be a potential vehicle that’s relatively easy to manage.
Often readers of a blog will only visit the one post they’re interested in and leave. From an analytics point of view, this looks like a “bounce” or single page visit. But with retargeting and remarketing strategies, we can advertise to those who have read even one post.
Blogging provides an important hub for your Social Media campaigns. Posts are ideal for sharing and promoting social content and driving subsequent traffic into your sales process. But as with all social media, selling inside the vehicle is rarely a good idea. Authenticity and reputation building is the focus – using valuable content that people are glad they spent time reading. Selling can come later.
Useful posts can be really good for link building – an essential off-page SEO factor – much better than other pages of your site. If a post offers substance and unique content, other posts in relevant sites are much more likely to link to it than to a sales page. The resulting link profile can then boost all elements of your site at once. You can also use blogging to shore up areas of your business where you are not ranking well, by researching the areas of information need.
Most importantly, you should understand the purpose of blogging and the commitment it requires. Once comfortable with that, we can set your company up on one of the powerful open-source blogging platforms and offer some basic blogging training – mostly on how to find great topics (because the software is extremely easy to use.)
Loosely categorize who you’d like to visit your blog, and what kinds of things they are needing to know. Then consider when they are likely to use the Internet to search for this and review what phrases seem to be popular.
Blogs are outstanding vehicles for supporting social media marketing. By sharing blog posts, you not only get the exposure on the social networks, but you also benefit from the click through to your site. You must consider the differences between social networks, timing, and what kind of posts seem to encourage readership and sharing.
Using “big data” and some state of the art tools, we will define a topic roadmap. This shared document, which belongs to you, helps shine a light on where the opportunities are and where topics are somewhat saturated. It also gives us a chance to guide the team in how to choose their own topics in the future.
Choose and configure a CMS that works for your team. Each company has their own preferred workflow with different levels of approval required. We will show you how to configure meta and Open Graph elements so that the posts look great on social media, as well as how to choose headlines and title tags to increase click through rates.
As posts are distributed, the Internet will react. Coaching a team on how best to engage with the different responses you’ll see can be very helpful. Knowing how to monitor for responses across the web and where to respond can enhance public perception of your company.
With the pieces in place, and the team blogging, we will want to review the effectiveness of the posts and paid promotion, especially remarketing traffic. Measuring click through traffic on the website, shares, and engagement can help us decide where to steer the blogging effort and budgets.