Blogging is a great way to get additional content into your website that both your visitors and the search engines will like. But there are a few things to keep in mind when starting this kind of content creation endeavor. Below, I explain how my internet marketing company does it for (and explains it to) our own clients. First, you need to set goals.
Goal Setting
Determining your marketing goals will help you in many ways, such as, giving you the ability to measure the impact of your effort. It is crucial in the development and maintenance of a content strategy. Goal setting can help you in better tracking and measure those desirable actions of your website visitors and can even lead to helping you understand from where your best visitors are coming.
With marketing online, an integral part of the process is tracking ROI. I know… OVERUSED BUZZWORD ALERT! But it’s true; one of the ways that you are going to see the return on your investment and understand what your money or effort is really doing for you is to have a clear goal in mind before embarking on Internet marketing.
Creating a marketing goal will ensure there is always something in mind that you are working towards – other than just increasing traffic to your website. All of this might involve additional prep work in tracking leads such as emails or phone calls received in the period of a month or tracking the number of sales that are produced from quarter to quarter. As you can see, there are a few things to keep in mind when setting goals.
A good Internet marketing company should be able to assist with the goal-setting and progress-tracking process. In goal setting, you should be specific. Your goal should be something that’s measurable, something attainable and relevant. For example, when we’re talking about search engine optimization and about getting leads from your website, we would want to make sure that the goal is something that’s actually going to impact your business. The goal could be to increase business in a specific service area. For example, “Increase the number of leads received through our online quote request form by 20% within the next 12 month through content creation and promotion, in order to increase revenue by $100,000.”
The goal should be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
In the case above, we are talking about increase business through lead generation, by getting more people to the website or by creating more relevant content in order to attract people to take some kind of an action on the website. The goal you create can certainly be refined with input from other stakeholder in your company or organization, but at least getting something written down will start you on your way to communicating exactly what the final goal should look like from a marketing perspective.
You don’t necessarily just have to have one goal. What some of these goals could look like could be having a website visitor subscribe to a newsletter, download a PDF, view a case study, or fill out the contact form. One way to start measuring these goals is to figure out how many people are contacting you each month and how many of those are actually turning into sales over a period of time. For example, you might have received 13 contacts from the website in 2013. In 2014, you might receive 20. Knowing these kinds of numbers is only going to help you stay on target and help you meet your goal.
Understanding Your Audience: Developing a Buyer Persona
Once you’ve defined your goals, the next thing to hone in on is who your buyer is –who your clients are. Developing a buyer persona is an important part of creating your blogging strategy. If you are a business owner or marketing manager for a company, you probably already have ideas on what your best prospects and best clients looks like, but it is a good practice to determine what their demographic is, what their attitude is, what their needs are, and how they behave. It’s just a wise thing to do. After setting your goals, define your audience (Now, it doesn’t have to be in that particular order… so long as it gets done!)
Part of the benefit of developing a buyer persona is that it can help everyone to get on the same page. Your agency, your sales teams and interns will all be able to understand who your target market is. All of this contributes to guiding how you write the content for your website. It affects what you write about and also helps you in creating the various calls to action that you’ll put into the content. The buyer persona ensures the content that we’re writing and our marketing efforts are targeting the right people. We want everybody on the same page.
In the creation of a buyer persona there’s always some brainstorming required. Ideally what we want to come up with is two or three various buyer personas. Imagining hypothetical situations can aid in profiling those prospects who are early in the buying process or further along. If they’re early in the buying process, they might just be doing research; trying to figure out if your company offers the services that they’re looking for, if you’re a good match for them, or if they’re a good match for you. If they are later in the process they might be thinking, “I don’t care what it’s going to cost, I just need a solution right now!” Every prospect is at a different level of readiness. Creating a persona will help you to target your audience where they’re at in the buying process.
There are many ways to get started. One action you could take is to ask yourself a few questions. Like, “What would a prospect type into the search engines when looking for a solution to a problem?” Knowing the phrases that your prospects are searching with can give you insight into what their needs are and can aid in categorizing and segmenting your buyers according to their level of readiness to purchase. Other questions to ask are, “Where are these people? What are they doing? What are they thinking? What do they need when they’re looking for my services? Who are they?”
Once you have developed your buyer persona, keep with it with you at all times so you are constantly reminded of what your potential buyer looks like.
Creating Compelling Content
Compelling content is something that’s going to help your website visitors to take an action. Creating compelling content is not just a goal, it’s also an Internet marketing tactic in itself. We want the content that we write to be shareable and maybe even entertaining at times. Compelling content is not just informational, but content that someone might be willing to share with their friends, saying, “Hey, I saw this great resource. Why don’t you go check it out on their website?” We’re talking about content that a friend or neighbor might find and pass along.
Content that is compelling will elicit a response. In order to elicit a response, there needs to be calls to action throughout the content. In its simplest form, this might looking like “visit our store” or “set an appointment,” or “contact us now through email” or whatever it might be. It might not be appropriate with every industry or niche, but there’s content that you can produce that’s very factual and content that is more light-hearted. All of this content could help to contribute in getting the search engines to recognize your website, bringing your website higher in the search engines and getting you more website visitors. We want to increase the potential of your website being found in the search engines.
The content that your agency creates for you or that you create for your own website is going to be helpful in many ways. First, it’s going to get your website found in the search engines. Second, it’s going to inform your prospects and get them closer to trusting you and doing business with you.
Blogging
Compelling content can take many shapes and forms. There are podcasts, case studies, testimonials, whitepapers, and blogging. Blogging is a common practice in recent years. Blogging is a tangible and a flexible way to get fresh content onto a website and almost anyone can contribute. With blogging though, it’s not necessarily just about you or me writing a blog post. We want to get all of the major influencers in your company involved.
As an example, we send out an email newsletter to our clients and some of our prospects every month. In that newsletter, we include links to our website where we feature blog posts that we all wrote. Even our bookkeeper writes! Recently, she blogged about closing out your books at the end of the year. That’s something that’s very practical to our clients, who as business owners, might find it enjoyable to receive some last minute year-end accounting advice because they don’t have a bookkeeper of their own to help them. I wrote a blog post recently about Google Analytics, and Herb (one of our analysts) wrote one about WordPress development.
Everyone in your company has a unique perspective. Maybe one of your office administrators has a lot of experience in fielding your prospect’s questions –questions that people don’t often ask the senior staff because they’ve already been answered by somebody else in the company.
Another example is if you can create a short video series where your staff explain what their roles are in the company. Something like that could give a personal face to your company. Then, when a prospect walks into your office for the first time, they might have a feeling that they already know you. If your prospects understand how your company is structured and the different people they might encounter and what their roles are, it’s going to help educate them and also help them to trust you more. And besides that, it’s even more content for the search engines to latch onto!
Other tips to help you come up with content is to create a Top Ten list of hot topics to write about, so you don’t get a good idea and forget about it the next day. A really useful tool is a voice recorder. If you are giving presentations to other people, if you record that, either video tape it or audio record it, that can be transcribed. Some of that content can be very easily created as a blog post or valuable content to add elsewhere on your website. This type of content is going to be relevant to some people who are looking for your services.
Now, regarding blogging, you’ll need to ensure that when people go to your website, it’s not going to say the “last blog post was published six months ago.” Ideally, you’ll want to be publishing a new blog at least once a month. At Orion Group, maybe eight to ten people writing blog posts. I asked everybody to write something once a month. Because the responsibility is spread out, if everyone sticks to the schedule, that’s a lot of content every month for very small investment of effort.
You might ask, “How does that help Orion?” As we discussed earlier, it helps in many ways. It provides content for the search engines to find, which means more traffic to our website and it gives us relevant content to share with our customers.We have seen an increase in organic traffic to our website that is directly related to our blogging efforts. Before I came on board, we had very little traffic on our website. As soon as we started blogging about our expertise and the various services we offer and making our content more conversational, our traffic went way up. You might be wondering if any of that traffic turns into prospects and if so, did they turn into clients? The answer is, “YES!”
An Example From Our Own Content Creation Efforts
An example of content creation through blogging can be seen in our NAP (Name Address, Phone Number) Listing Correction Services. My brother, Russell, was responsible writing most of the content on our website that explains how to fix your online business listings. It’s a complicated process and not everyone wants to do it themselves or they just don’t have the time or technical skills to get it done on their own. So, over the last year we had been researching how to improve the rankings of our clients’ websites through structured online citations. Whenever we learned something new, we’d explain it onto our blog. We wanted to be a resource. We knew we were learning things that not many other Internet marketing professionals know how to do. We started develop a solid process for identifying and correcting bad NAP information. At the end of each blog, we wrote something, “We can do this for you. Fill out the form and we’ll get right back to you.”
Over about the next six months, we started getting random phone calls and emails from people telling us that they were having similar issues as we had described in our blog posts. “My phone number’s wrong and I can’t get it right.” Or, “I tried fixing it myself, but it reverted back to the old phone number. I need help!” Now, we probably have ten blog posts on our website all about that process of correct online business listings. They talk about issues people run into and how complicated it is to fix it yourself and how we have the solution. Now we get emails and phone calls regularly from frustrated business owners who are looking for help. Our blogging efforts were getting qualified leads to our website and we are now known as an authority in the niche of NAP correction services.
Creating this kind of content and getting your thoughts recorded online makes you look like an expert. It helps to demonstrate your knowledge and it can help you get leads and sales!
Taking Action: Getting Involved and Getting Others to Participate
There’s some research that goes into it; there’s some preparation, but what does it look like to actually implement it? I’d say at least somebody at this company would need to be in charge or a champion of this project, so that we have somebody to work with; somebody at your company to help perpetuate it. It doesn’t necessarily have to be you, but somebody that at least knows the topic and is good with English, and can help guide people or even edit the content. Somebody that might have a final say before something’s published live. We can help you with that, either way.
Taking an Inventory of Your Existing Content
One of the first things you’ll want to do is a content inventory. You’ll want to determine what assets you already possess and what you don’t. This includes more than just your website. You might also consider brochures, technical documentation, and any other related marketing materials used in the past. With a content inventory, you’ll then be able to see what’s good, what’s not good, what might need to be replaced because it’s outdated and what might be able to be repurposed on your website. When recording all of this information, you’ll want to create a simple spreadsheet that lists all the pages of our website or all of the various assets you’ve gathered up. Once you’ve taken that inventory, you’ll be closer to being able to determine what you’d like to add to your website in the coming months.
Creating an Editorial Calendar
The editorial calendar is really the crux of the creation content and publishing process because it’s going to help guide everybody who’s involved. It will be the go-to source for the next six to twelve months. Your whole team can look at it, your agency can review it and hopefully, it will be made available in a place where it can be edited and viewed online. For example, we use a Google Spreadsheet, where we’ve already defined the topics we’d like to write about, who’s going to be responsible for fleshing that content out, and when that content is due for publication. At the very least, you should aim to get something published once a month.
Notes About Writing and Editing
There are a few things to consider when actually going about the writing process or the editing process. You just want to make sure that you’re thinking of topics that are shareable, topics that might get people excited or simple just educate people. One thing to keep in mind is that anything you write can is ultimately a resource. Even if it doesn’t speak to them right at that moment, the website visitor might come back in the future because of something they saw six months ago. They might come to your website again when they are closer to a buying decision.
Don’t Depend on Google Results Alone
There are other ways to get traffic to your website. Just publishing the blog post and hoping that people are going to find it is one way, and its plausible. However, there is much more that can be done to get your great content in front of the right people.
Distributing and Promoting Content
There are many ways to get the word out about the content that you’ve published. For instance, you might send an email blast out to your customers. Or, perhaps if you are a larger company, you have a quarterly newsletter that you send out to internal team members. These are great opportunities to include links to the content you’ve published on your website. It helps get the word out and also builds a sense of community within the company.
Other promotional methods include participating in online discussion forums and sharing links to your content when appropriate, for instance, to answer a forum member’s question by pointing to an existing resource you have on your website. Also there is LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter where you can share an update to let your followers know that you wrote a new blog post, and you’d that you’d appreciate their comments. As the title of this section mentions, don’t just rely on the Google rankings alone. In promoting your website, there might some things you don’t have the time to do yourself and that’s where we come in handy. Nonetheless, promotion through social media, email marketing, of online discussion forum participation are all fairly simple ways for you to promote your content.
Maintaining a Culture of Participation
Of course, there is ongoing maintenance involved with any website or marketing initiative. And this is why it’s important to try to maintain a culture of participation in your company. Part of maintaining participation might come through encouragement provided by your agency. They can help to hold you accountable, perhaps, by choosing topics, setting deadlines, writing a few starter paragraph, or even editing the content before it goes live to the public. Another part of maintaining this type of marketing effort will be putting a system in place internally that encourages your team to continue participating. For example, you could reward your staff with gift cards or even just a quick, “Thanks for your help!” Either way, recognizing people’s efforts will help.
Getting others to participate is going to be key in maintaining your blogging efforts, so be sure to give them praise and encouragement through celebrating small victories.
Holding a “Why Blogging” Workshop
We hold workshops on various topics every few weeks that are geared towards educating our clients on the things they can be doing to continually improve their own websites. Some workshops touch on creating content, how to create landing pages with good calls to action, using social media to promote your website, and more.
Especially relevant to the topic at hand, we hold a workshop titled, “Why Blogging”, which allows our clients and their staff to learn, in a non-threatening manner, about the why’s and how’s of creating compelling content in the form of blogging. As a part of the workshop we conduct a brainstorm session that helps in the creation of an editorial calendar.
Holding a workshop like this will assist in getting your team to buy in. It’s a way to explain the objective to the rest of your staff and to allow them to see the importance of blog. The workshop would be focused specifically on educating and then generating ideas for content. A workshop like this could be adapted to suite a small or a large team. If the group is large, it might be better to break into smaller groups to allow for more intimate environment that promotes maximum participation. We would start by focusing the brainstorming around the buyer persona that has already been defined. From there, we can determine what kind of content might be needed and what topics are timely. Really, the goal with this workshop is just to sit down and think about what people might find important. At this type of workshop, you might also have a question and answer exchange about the industry in order to generate ideas for new content.
Interested in attending our “Why Blogging” workshop? Contact Orion Group to set up a private session with your company.
Conclusion
As you can see, blogging is not only a great way to get fresh, relevant content onto your website, it also helps your website visitors by providing information they can use in their research or buying process AND the search engines love it too! When you go to write your next blog post, keep these steps in mind. 1) Define your goals, 2) Develop a buyer persona, 3) Create compelling content, 4) Get others involved, and 5) Maintain a culture of participation.
Best of luck on your next post!
