Successful Blogs Start with Solid Content Strategy
Make Developing Blog Content Easier
You know you need fresh content on your blog, but keeping a consistent content flow is hard. A blog content strategy and content development process helps to lighten the load.
We help companies establish and maintain blogs to bring in new leads for business. If you need help, please complete our information request form
Why Blogs Still Matter
Some folks claim blogs are no longer an important content marketing channel. The “blog-is-dead” crowd argue that social media channels have totally replaced a corporate blog.
With a wink to Twain, we say “the report of the blog’s death is greatly exaggerated”.
Blogs are a still very useful for content marketing because with your own blog, you:
- Control the Message and Format. If you use a social media channel (such as LinkedIn) to publish your content, you are confined by their rules. Also, the social media channel may place a competitor’s ad right next to your content.
- Get Full SEO Benefit. When you place your content on another website, that website captures all the ranking potential for the content. Some channels, such as Facebook, wall off the content from the search engines, which limits your content’s business-building potential.
- Can Measure Results Directly. When the traffic comes to your website, you can deploy measurement tools to monitor referring traffic, visitor path, bounce rates conversions, etc. Third-party social channels will not provide anything close in analytic tools and granularity. Measuring is important because if you cannot measure you cannot improve.
While the blog is not dead, its role has changed.
Gone are the days when you would post long-form content on your blog as your single content marketing tactic. In the past, a company could develop a following to its blog and keep followers informed through rss feeds.
Today, companies successfully employing content marketing for lead generation use a hub and spoke approach. We like to use the analogy of snackable content and bread crumb trails.
In this scenario, you post one great piece of content then place content snacks (snippets of your main content) in your social media channels. Within each content snack, you place links (bread crumbs) back to the main content on your blog.
Key Factors In Building A Successful Blog
To develop a blog, which successfully brings in business-building new visitors, you need to adhere to a few basics:
- Develop a content strategy. You should develop goals for your blog content. Each post you publish should move a step closer to meeting your goals. For example, if you want to build an in-house email list, one goal for blog content could be bringing in 100 new sign-ups/month for your email newsletter
- Listen to your market. Pay attention to common questions your clients or prospects ask. Use these questions as a basis for developing content.
- Provide useful and timely information. Think about timing. We work with a few CPA firms. You can readily predict when people are seeking information on filing taxes. Our editorial schedules for our CPA’s reflect that timing. What topics have a regular season in your industry?
- Create a schedule. One of the easiest ways to keep a blog’s momentum is to create an editorial calendar.
- Develop a promotion plan. Posting great content in your blog is only the start of the process. You must promote your content through an outreach program. For more information, visit our section on content marketing. (NOTE: link to content marketing)