This is the first in a series of articles about business blogging. The foundation of any successful inbound marketing program is remarkable content. It’s the reason why people will pay attention to you and the motivation to hand over their email address and opt into your messages. Downloadable content is certainly an important part of a content marketing strategy but blogging is its lifeblood. The data is irrefutable; more blogging equals more quality traffic and higher conversion rates.
Overview
I think of blogs as the perfect food for a content marketing program. In order to be successful at inbound marketing, you need to establish yourself as a “benevolent thought leader.” This is the polar opposite of traditional marketing, which tended to rely on finding channels where they could corner prospects and attempt to force, coerce or otherwise trick them into listening to a marketing message. This doesn’t necessarily make outbound marketers malevolent but it certainly doesn’t put them at the top of anyone’s list. In fact, I recently read about a survey that indicated people trust bankers and politicians more than they do marketers!
This is the reason I’m so passionate about inbound marketing. It has the opportunity to change that perception and be viewed as a profession that is raising the bar instead of lowering it. For a whole basket full of reasons, blogging is the most versatile and effective tool in accomplishing this goal. Before we talk about those specific benefits, I want to spend a little time talking about a very important word.
Remarkable
This is the one word that will determine whether or not your blog is successful. Is it remarkable? Will people read your blog and find it valuable enough to share it with others? To be truly remarkable, your content must be audience-focused and “gifty.”
How many times have you gone to the “News” page on a website and scanned down the list of articles and noticed that nearly every one of them starts with the name of the company. “Acme Software announces a new and wonderful version of its paradigm-shifting, industry-leading, butt-kicking product.” Or “Acme Software completes implementation of awesome software solution for impressive Fortune 500 client.” Is that remarkable? Does it make you want to email your friends or share on your Facebook wall? Probably not. That’s primarily because those posts are internally focused on telling everyone how wonderful they are instead of audience-focused on things their prospective customers do care about.
Neither are those sorts of posts “gifty.” By that I mean, does it provide some sort of value to the reader? Are they smarter after having read it? Did it inspire them to do something that will improve their career or their life? Did it make them laugh or cry? Bottom line; are they better off after having read it? If not, it’s not remarkable.
Blogging Goals
The reason blogging is the perfect content marketing food is because of all the benefits is brings to your overall marketing efforts and website. These benefits should all be considered goals for your blogging efforts and monitored as such.
Thought Leadership
One of the more subjective goals (and most difficult to measure) is thought leadership. There are some indirect metrics you can look at in terms of audience size and engagement levels. If you have access to more sophisticated tools, you can measure brand sentiment through social media.
If you’re creating remarkable content, the thought leadership should come along for the ride. Many businesses find it difficult to understand how they can become thought leaders because they can’t think of enough interesting ideas that are connected with their products or services. But that’s because they’re usually thinking too narrowly. Instead of blogging about your products and/or services, blog about things your prospective customers would be interesting in reading. For example, a homeowner’s insurance business can certainly educate its readership about important aspects of properly insuring their home. However, they would find more success by expanding the scope of their blog to be subjects that any homeowner would find valuable like home improvement, landscaping, mortgage refinancing, etc… If you don’t have the expertise on staff to write about some of these subjects, you can reach out to guest bloggers who could provide that expertise and benefit from the back links.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engines love websites with lots of pages that change frequently. If you have a 10-page website that hasn’t been updated in two years, Google thinks you’re boring and won’t take you as seriously as a website this is adding pages all of the time. This is one reason why blogging is so beneficial to search engine optimization efforts. Every time you publish a new post, you create a new page on your website and the search engines see that.
Marketing software company Hubspot analyzed over 7,000 of its customers and published a report of marketing benchmarks. The following chart shows the rather dramatic effect that the number of pages on a website has on inbound traffic.
Image courtesy of Hubspot’s “Marketing Benchmarks from 7,000+ Businesses“
In order to be most effective, you should conduct some formal keyword research and determine which phrases you want to rank for. These keywords should then feed an editorial calendar that drives your content topics. When crafting the individual blog posts, it’s important to observe good on-page optimization practices:
- Use the keyword phrase in the title of the article. For example, let’s say our focus keyword phrase for the article is “hydraulic piston.” Your article title might be something like “The 10 Most Important Specs When Purchasing a Hydraulic Piston.”
- Use the keyword in the URL of the page. If you’re using a modern blogging platform like WordPress, it will default to using your page title for the URL. Using the previous example, your URL might be, www.yoursite.com/the-10-most-important-specs-when-purchasing-a-hydraulic-pistion.
- Use the keyword a few times in the body of the post. Keyword density – the percentage of words on a page comprised of keywords – used to be an important (if not controversial) SEO tactic. Its importance had been largely diminished but it’s still important to mention your focus keywords in the body of your page.
- Create hub pages for important keywords. Not all keywords are created equal. Some will be more important to you than others. You should create hub pages for those that are most important. A hub page is one that is optimized for a particular keyword and then has multiple other pages pointing to it from around your website. Extending our hydraulic piston example, if you sold and serviced them you’d likely have a hub page that’s optimized for hydraulic pistons. Therefore, in your blog article you’d want to create a hyperlink to that page any time you mention “hydraulic pistons.”
Create Links
All of the SEO tactics I just mentioned are “on page” techniques. Another, more important aspect of SEO involved “off page” techniques. This primarily involves something called “link building,” which means getting other websites to create links to yours. There are lots of unethical tactics for doing this, and Google has really been trying to crack down on these practices that violate their webmaster guidelines. If you’re creating truly remarkable content and working hard to promote it via social media, then the link building will largely take care of itself. People will share your content on social media channels and other websites and blogs will point back to your content because of its awesomeness.
Drive Conversions
The bottom line for businesses is that they need their marketing efforts to lead to additional customers and additional sales. Blogging may seem like a roundabout way to do this, but that could be because you’re not seeing the conversion connection. In order to maximize the value of your posts, they need to contain calls to action that will drive readers to landing pages that offer something; free ebooks, webinars, newsletters, etc… This will provide you with a steady stream of new leads for your business.
As you can see, there are lots of considerations before you begin blogging. You need to perform your keyword research and use that to drive a content strategy. You’ll also want to know what your conversion goals are so that you can craft articles that will drive readers to corresponding landing pages.
Read the next article in the series: Business Blogging 101: Planning
