Archive for category: blog marketing

“Raise your hand if you want more website visitors,” says Corey Eridon of hubspot.com.  Now think about the way people find your website, he continues. They could type your name right in, but that’s an audience you already have. You could pay for traffic by buying an email list (don’t you dare, he adds), but that’s expensive and illegal. You could pay for traffic by placing paid ads, but even though that’s not illegal, it’s expensive.  So, how can you drive traffic? Blogging, social media, and search engines.

As a longtime blog content writer and corporate blogging trainer, I love Eridon’s very simple breakdown of the reason blogging works: “Every time you write a blog post, it’s one more indexed page on your website.  It’s also one more cue to Google and other search engines that your website is active and they should be checking in frequently to see what content you’ve published…”.

Blogging also helps keep your social media presence going, Eridon adds.  Instead of having a social media manager come up with brand new original content or creating that content yourself, your blog can serve as that repository of content.

What’s more, since the best business blogs answer common questions, consistently creating content that’s helpful to the target customers, Eridon explains, blogging helps establish the business owner or professional as an authority on the subject.

It was very interesting to me to read a comment posted on Corey Erison’s blog by a Scott de Long.  At Say It For You, I’m always talking about the “training benefit” of blogging, and while de Long doesn’t call it that, he “gets” my concept. “The purpose is to present our people as experts, or at least well informed, but the real benefit comes from the research they do to become better informed,” de Long says.

In fact, there are four unique benefits that come from blogging:

• The SEO benefit – The more relevant content you have up about your business, the greater the chance that people will find you via search engines.
• The promotional benefit – The content in the blog exists to promote your business, your products and services, and you as the business owner.
• The credibility benefit – Your blog says a lot of positive things about you and your business. It says that you are in the 21st century and interested in using the latest tools to communicate with your customers.
• The training benefit – When you blog, you are constantly providing yourself with training about how to talk effectively about your business.

It’s never too late to remind yourself just why it’s worth blogging for business!

“What’s the future of blogging?” is the intriguing question posed by Scott Yates of Hubspot. Yates admits he doesn’t know about blogging a hundred years or even twenty years from now, but he’s pretty confident that in the near future, blogging will be more important than ever for businesses.  (“Whew! Glad you said that, was our reaction here at Say It For You.)

On just what is Yates basing all this near-term confidence? What do people read? he asks. Good stories and useful information.  That’s what people have been reading for centuries and that’s what they will be demanding for centuries to come, he believes. The format can change, but as long as content continues to be valuable and entertaining, no worry needed on the part of us freelance blog content writers.

The caveats?  Yates offers a few of those:

• You don’t just need to have a blog.  You have to update it – often. Hire someone to do it for you. You can still have some input as well as the final say about what goes on your blog. The quality does matter more than the quantity, but if the quantity is small, nobody will ever find you, so the quality won’t matter.
• Keep your blog posts concise and to the point – it’s not a novel!
• Give people what they want, which is value. Provide good stories and helpful information on a regular basis.

Since, at Say It For You, we’re involved not only in marketing to consumers, but also in B2B marketing through blog writing, I was very interested in what KISSmetrics had to say about the future of content marketing business to business. Most content marketing, says KISSmetrics, focuses on industry trends, and company details, but that is going to radically change, because the focus will need to be on the target audience’s needs.

KISSmetrics has a very interesting take on blog SEO: “Blogging SEO is changing, but only in some ways.  It’s almost like a car in that the design, colors, and minor features change each year but the core remains the same.”

Seems the future vision for business blogging should engender more confidence than concern!