Content Marketing Through Blogging; an Investment That Can Pay off in your Company’s Future
Content Marketing is a valuable investment in your company. One of our favorite ways to use content marketing for TCW is (obviously) through blogging . Blogging is very much like an online version of a 401k, the more you blog and the earlier you start, the more links you get to other sites. The more connections to your site, the more traffic you drive. The more traffic you drive, the more you show up in search results. The more you show up in search results, the higher you ranking. Phew! That is a lot of steps but the bottom line is blogging helps people find you and the earlier you do it and the more you blog, the more people will find you.
Content Marketing and Me
About one year ago my friend Kirk Drake introduced me to the sales lion and the idea of proactively answering clients questions. Since then we have been blogging two to three time a week with solid results. When we started, we had ten keywords in which we ranked in the top ten. After blogging for a year, we ranked in the top ten for over 300 keywords and the top three for over 200 keywords. My team and I carefully selected the terms for which we were ranked.
Blogging is a Long-term Commitment.
To be clear, blogging is not for everyone. It is a major commitment of time, money and resources that you really should not start unless you intend on doing it for a long time. In short, blogging is not a sprint it is a marathon.
Don’t Blog Alone
Blogging is a team sport, using incentives, group blogging, building a blog calendar, encouraging guest posting and hiring outside writers and editors are all ways to stay on a steady diet of blogging, but unless you get your team ready and some outside help you won't be able to capitalize on your investment.
Blog Bank
Prior to publishing our blog we wrote for three months and had enough posts to keep us three months ahead. If you are going to blog three times per week, you will need 36 posts for three months worth of blogging. If you have all of your employees blogging, you can do that pretty quickly; however, proofing and loading blogs takes a lot of time to so make sure you think about how that will happen.
Get Professional Help.
If writing is not your business (or even if it is), having the discipline to write and edit posts is not easy. Hiring editors or writers is definitely an option, but make sure you work with them to identify topics based on keywords and to teach them about your work.
Be a Guest.
Guest posting is a great way to get traffic to your site. It is also a great way to get folks to write posts for you. Even if you decide that a blog is too labor intensive, working with a staffer or a freelance writer to draft guest posts is a great way to drive traffic to your site. But remember, to get folks to stay on your site you need new and interesting content, and a blog can do that for you.
Use Tools.
There are some amazing tools out there to work with your blog. Yoast SEO is a great word press optimization tool. Hubspot is a tool that allows you to know what pages folks are looking at on your site, where your competitors rank and many other functions. It is an expensive tool, but it is well worth the price. I also like Long Tail Pro to research potential keywords.
Bottom Line...
Having a blog can be an investment that pays off in the long run, but it only works if you put the time and effort into it.
The original article was posted in My Staff Now blog.