“82% of marketers who blog see positive ROI for their inbound marketing” – Hubspot State of Inbound Marketing 2013
Quality blog content generation in a regular fashion generates leads & sales from online communities, social media & search. In fact, 82% of marketers who blog see positive ROI from their efforts. Here are 4 ways that will solidify your brand as a thought leader and drive more target audience members to your blog.
Dependable Content Publication
Sporadic blog content will not build communities or enable your blog to become popular. It is essential to develop articles daily or at least a few times per week. According to a survey by Hubspot, the biggest gap between successful ROI is developing daily blog posts. Scaling your blog content to these levels is challenging, but can be done efficiently by being organized and integrating curated content.
Organizing your content development means maintaining a content calendar and a backlog of content. An editorial calendar will take off some of the pressure for developing ideas for content. There is nothing worse than facing an upcoming deadline with no idea what to write!
Maintaining a backlog of content also takes some of the pressure off of deadlines. However, backlogs can sometimes develop a lackadaisical attitude towards deadlines and erode your backlog like a sandbar in a hurricane. Discipline in this area will ensure that your blog content is generated in a reliable fashion.
If your organization is still challenged in these areas then considering a reliable blogging solution might be your best route.
Quality Content
This obvious first step is an easily-overlooked precursor to setting up your blog for success. Too many brands generate blog content just to get fresh content on the website. This outdated tactic misses the mark for both users and search engines, so putting up content that isn’t high quality is simply a waste of your time. The constant stream of content on the web is so wide and deep that only quality content rises to the top.
However, a silver lining exists in that very few organizations actually do take the time to develop great content. Therefore, an enormous opportunity exists if your team is willing to develop great content on a regular basis. Great content is a necessary pre-requisite to making your blog a well-known leader in your industry
Relevant Industry Syndication
Getting your blog syndicated on relevant industry resources is a great way to start to gain traction in your market. Some marketers worry about duplicating their content or not getting credit for originality. This is simply a non-issue for a couple reasons.
From the search engine perspective – technology like Google’s Pubsubhubub and canonical tags ensure that search engines understand that your blog is the original content resource. Marketers worrying about the SEO credit are missing the larger picture of using their blog content to earn referrals from high-quality websites.
From a user perspective – worrying about getting credit for the originality of your content is only an issue for publishers that monetize their content through ads or payment gates. Unless your brand is in the business of making money in one of these two forms, then the value of getting your branded content posted all over the web is vastly greater than hoarding your content on your website to call it your very own. As an organization that needs to increase blog popularity, the latter will slow your goal achievement to a halt.
Submit your blog to popular syndicators & news aggregators in your industry. Find these opportunities by using relevant keywords in Google News Search or Google Blog Search. Sort by date released or relevance to your search query. The most popular syndicators and aggregators in your industry will rise to the top of these searches.
Finally, you need to find out how to submit your blog’s RSS feed to these websites. Look in the footer of the article page for words like “add/submit your blog”. This information can sometimes be found in the author profile page, which you can typically get to by clicking on the author’s name or photo. If all else fails, contact a few of the authors through social networks and ask them directly how they got onto the platform.
Genuine Promotional Messaging
Promoting blog content via social channels is another overlooked area for most brands. Sure, anyone can program their blog to automatically post social network updates in a mass-messaging fashion. But in today’s nearly infinite stream of content, mass-messaging really means mediocre-messaging. Posting the same message across social networks will be unremarkable at best and annoying or offensive at worst.
Social networks are real communities of people with genuine engagement. Mass-messaging is not genuine, so always remember that when developing messages promoting your blog content on social networks.
Develop a unique message for each social network that is relevant and valuable to each unique audience. Make sure that your timing, context and call to action is unique and targeted for each social network. Doing so will develop real engagement with these community members.
Quality, Dependability & Authenticity
Gaining traction for your blog requires quality, dependability and authenticity. Follow these four steps to build your blog community and gain traction for your brand in your industry.