This is the fourth 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.
Without question, the most intimidating thing that holds people back from blogging is not knowing what they’re going to write about. It gets particularly daunting in the B2B space. As discussed earlier, it’s very important to consume lots and lots of raw materials in order to help feed your creativity. However, those raw materials will be much more effective when they can be applied to a framework for different content types that you’ve already defined.
Understand Your Audience
“Who is going to read a bunch of articles about my boring widget?”
Well, the answer is “Probably no one.” And that’s a mistake many companies make when considering starting a blog. They think that they need to write specifically about their products and/or services. In the majority of instances, that’s a much too narrow scope. Instead, think about your target marketing personas and come up with ideas that will be of interest to them.
Rather than writing blog posts about your widget, write posts about subjects that would be interesting to the people who are most likely to buy your widgets. Here are some specific examples:
- Statistical Software – A statistics blog may be something that could generate a decent readership, but opening up the scope to include (for example) quality assurance specialists might be even more effective.
- Homeowner’s Insurance – There are a limited number of insurance topics that would hold homeowners’ attention. Creating a blog for homeowners and providing tips about home improvement and security would be more interesting.
- Control Valves – This is a fairly specialized industrial product and would be a pretty narrow topic. But writing about process control and focusing on the engineers who specify, purchase and install those valves has a much wider appeal.
Content Topic Ideas
When it comes to blog content, there are two general categories; original and curated. Original content is stuff you develop yourself. Curated content is stuff that other people wrote, which you share with your audience.
Original content is the heart and soul of any business blog. It’s what will differentiate you from everyone else and provide the most value to your audience. The curated content will keep people engaged and interested in between those high value, original posts. Here are some ideas and tips for generating original content:
- Blog to eBook and Vice Versa – Downloadable content is the engine that drives inbound marketing and eBooks are the most common form of downloadable content. There are two different approaches that you can use eBooks and blog posts together. One is to create a series of blog posts that – when completed – will become an eBook. This post you’re reading is one such example. I am writing a “Business Blogging 101” eBook, one blog post at a time. Once the series is complete, I will take all of the posts, reformat them, add a little additional content and publish them as an eBook. But you can also go in the opposite direction by creating an eBook and then breaking it up into multiple blog posts and publishing them over a period of time.
- Case Studies – This is one is something every company can employ. It’s particularly useful because it provides two important components in one: By definition, it’s a story and stories are powerful marketing devices. They also provide social proof, especially if you can throw in some customer quotes.
- “101” and “Dummies” – Every company has subject matter experts who can put together introductory and instructional posts about how to configure, install, design, select, specify, hack, replicate, update, reconfigure, repurpose, etc. The trick is that it’s frequently difficult for experts to know what they know. In other words, they take much of their knowledge for granted.
- Top X Lists – Lists are great posts for a number of reasons. First, they’re frequently pretty easy to create. Many companies will have the information already lying around and it simply needs to be dusted off and published. Other times, a small amount of research is all that’s needed. The other reason these make great posts is that they work really well for back links.
- Presentations – Presentations are also a great source of blog posts. Once again, this series of blogging posts come from a training presentation I use for clients. Each blog post equates to anywhere from one to a half-dozen slides.
Content curation is something that is becoming more and more familiar to content marketers. It involves sharing other original content with your own audience. It’s been getting a bit of a bad rap recently because, as Gary Vaynerchuck is fond of saying, marketers ruin everything. There are lots of people doing it because it can be highly automated. But done properly, it’s something that your audience will appreciate and value. Here are a couple of tips for doing it well.
- Blog Hacking – This is a technique that I adapted from Lifehacker. Their blog creates a relatively low percentage of original content. Instead, they find helpful, insightful and innovative content from around the web and then post it to their website. This is a technique that can work really well as a blogging strategy. It works like this… Set up Google searches so that you can be notified of new content. When an article strikes you as something that is a match for your audience, craft a post that follows this general template: Start with an introductory paragraph that summarizes the article. Include a relevant quote from the article and then write up a summary that tells your audience why the article matters to them and wrap up with a link to the original publication.
- Weekly Roundups – If you’re spending time each week consuming and sharing social media content (and you should be), this is a really simple technique that works for blog posts and newsletters alike. Simply review your social media streams once a week and put together a wrap-up of your favorites.
Editorial Calendar
This is a tool that’s very for all bloggers and if you’re part of a team, then it’s indispensible. It helps with planning and organizing your posts in a way that makes sure they’re aligned with your business goals and marketing strategies. Here are the components I include in my clients’ editorial calendars:
- Title – This doesn’t need to be the final, published title. It just needs to convey the subject matter.
- Focus Keyword – Your keyword research should already have identified foundation and long tail keywords and this column identifies which of those is used for the post. It will affect the title, heading tags, meta keywords and content of the post.
- Persona – Your marketing strategy should include the marketing personae you’re targeting and each blog post should be matched against one of them.
- Date – The date you plan to publish the post. It’s important to consider holidays and other timing factors like marketing events or product releases.
- Offer – Each blog post should be linked to a particular goal. This column indicates which call to action will be matched with the blog post.
- Author – If you’re working with a team of content creators, this is obviously important.
Read the previous post in this series – Business Blogging 101: Preparation
