Three critical components that should be considered for any blog marketing campaign include: content, frequency and distribution.
Content must be interesting and useful to your readers. Develop your unique voice and don’t be afraid to post things others will not agree to.
Frequency of posts are important as there is a direct correlation to blog popularity and the number of times it’s updated. When we started posting 2-4 times per day, our SEO blog traffic increased by 50% the first week and has continued to improve since.
Distribution of your blog is important. A common issue I hear from people new to blogs and RSS is where to find them. What’s great about blog marketing is that you can promote a blog and your RSS/Atom feed within the blogoshpere via linking in/out, through directories and blog/feed search engines. You can also promote your blog through traditional directories, search engines and web site linking. The opportunity for blog exposure is much greater than a regular web site alone.
I thought it would be useful to point to a Marketing Sherpa case study on “7 Practical Tactics to Turn Your Blog Into a Sales Machine” as well. The article is open until 3/18. I’ve posted the seven tactic titles below with my own comments.
- Seed your blog posts with keywords – Use keywords in your post titles and then update your blog software template so that those keywords are used in text links to the post, in the title tag and meta description tag.
- Report exclusive news and insight – Pay attention to your industry and keep up to date with trends and events so you can post about them.
- Post your own thoughts – Show your industry expertise by creating original content in the form of short articles. You can create a teaser article with a link to the full document on your web site.
- Link out – It’s important you link to thematically similar web sites/blogs. Other blogs that notice your link may often link back.
- Link in – Submit your blog to all the search engines and directories that you would submit a web site to. Also submit to blog/RSS specific directories and search engines.
- You don’t need to blog daily (this was relevant for the case study, but in most cases, if you want repeat visitors, frequent blog posts are critical)
- Add easy contact links to every single post – This is appropriate for the case study, but isn’t for all blogs. If your blog is editorial in nature and not an explicit sales tool, posting obvious contact information in the heading or sidebar is enough.
- Jump on incoming leads super-swiftly – Critical for any sales web site.
- Measure by qualified prospects, not total traffic (again, relevant for the case study, but if you are serving AdSense, you want quality AND quantity traffic)
- Blog elsewhere – I have just started to explore this tactic and will be “guest blogging” on at least one other SEO blog and possibly with another very high traffic tech site that is creating a new online marketing channel.
- Make comments – Monitor posts on thought leader blogs and other centers of influence and post relevant comments. You may get noticed and added to a blogroll or better, develop a dialogue with the blogger, whom you might not otherwise have communicated with.
Effective content marketing requires a commitment in time, ideas and collaboration. Work smart and hard with your business blog and you’ll see benefits in the form of: improved customer relations, search engine visibility, increased sales and improved brand reputation on the web.
