The Creation of a blog requires proper planning and research, especially if you want it to get attention online. Breaking through the noise of competing blogs can be a challenge, but when you understand the importance of providing the right content to the right audience; it becomes at little simpler. You need strong sales and marketing alignment in order for your marketing team to produce the most relevant and interesting content for your target market.
If you haven't read our introduction into why blogging for business matters, you may want to start there by following this link.
Start by Selecting a Target and goals
Specific Audience
The power of blogging is often overlooked, yet 65% of daily internet users read blogs. (Source: address two) With such a potentially large audience you must narrow down who you are targeting in order to be the most effective. Today, every kind of person reads blogs, therefore, just about every blog topic will have a potential following of readers.
As a business blogger looking to enhance your digital content management prowess, the task of finding a specific audience is as easy as knowing your brand’s target market. The people you’re trying to sell to, and, the people who would influence the people you want to sell to, are the target audience.
Once an audience has been selected you must put yourself in their shoes. What do they want to know? Will this blog answer their questions? Is this content relatable? In order for you to know these answers you must have strong sales and marketing alignment.
Sales Reps software like adaptive sales enablement can allow marketing and sales teams to keep track of what content clients like and dislike, and which content most influenced the end-of-funnel conversion rate, so your marketers can produce the best blog content.
The Right Level
It can be a challenge to master the level of writing that blogs require. You must balance light and inviting reading with being informative and educating the reader, but also not bombarding them with too much. With blogs, you’re trying to compose a ‘catch-all’ article that adds value to any reader, whether they are well read on the subject, or brand new to the concept.
Set a Goal
Giving your blog a purpose is the key to staying on track while writing, as well as making your viewers feel accomplished after reading it. Personal blogs may tend to have a less direct topic, used more for sharing, spreading awareness, and discussing controversial topics.
Business blogs require more of a strict purpose if they are aiming to be successful. Blogs like this one have a goal of teaching the reader something. Other business blogs aim to provide the viewer with recent updates of news & trends, or to improve branding & positioning. B2B blogs are generally structured to capture leads and build email lists, B2C blogs will influence awareness and compatibility with the brand.
The combination of blogging for personal reasons and blogging for business reasons usually do not overlap, but there are a few scenarios where it can be beneficial. Bill Marriot, CEO of Marriot hotels, created a personal blog with the goal of communicating with customers on an unrelated level.
This blog allowed him to personally connect with people on a global scale, adding a human element to this juggernaut brand. People loved the use of this blog and grew to admire Bill, and by extension, admire the company differently than they had before.
The Steps of Writing a Blog Post
Step 1: Create an Outline, Research Everything
Once you have identified the direction of your blog, you’re ready to start writing your first post. Remember that you must put your ideas together in an informal (inviting) yet informative manner.
I recommend starting with a complete research of the topic until you feel you are an expert. Once you feel confident in your ability to tackle the subject, create a basic outline with key headings you want to discuss and core ideas you plan on explaining.
Step 2: Start your First Draft
Use your outline as a guide to help you populate each section with valuable information. Try to make each paragraph count for something. Don’t waste someone’s time reading nothing.
Your first paragraph should simply explain what the blog will be talking about, saying enough to capture an intriguing mind.
Once you begin writing the body, use more subheadings and paragraphs in order to make it easier for the visitor to read through the post, skim to areas of interest, and reference for the future.
Step 3: Proof Read and Optimize
Following the completion of your first draft, proof reading is the next step.
You’ll want to go over the entire blog, make sure that it makes sense, fix any spelling errors, and get it ready for posting.
Optimizing for posting includes a number of strategies for improved SEO.
First, you’ll want to add keywords to the work. It helps to add them during the writing process, but this is a skill that gets learned over time. Your keywords are short phrases that your target market would likely search when seeking your brand.
Next, you’ll want to link your blog to other posts and content on your company site. This will help a reader navigate to related content more easily, and improve search engine results.
Finally, you’ll want to add pictures to help guide along the story telling. You can actually improve your SEO by retitling pictures to an appropriate keyword combination.
The use of pictures and search engine optimizing headlines can all work towards boosting exposure of your blog and company. Images in articles tend to boost the number of views by up to 94%.
Tips and Tricks for Perfect Blogging
So, there’s your 3-steps to effective blogging. But blogging is much more than a “technical” layout. You don’t just want to write and post, you want lots of view, great reach, lead generation, and ROI.
An effective blog can become a valuable component of your digital sales aids, allowing you to reach out to potential targets, invite them to read blog, and nurture their decision journey for a comfortable and inviting sales process.
How to Better Connect with the Reader
Focus on Achieving an Inviting Tone
Making a name for yourself through a unique writing style is important when attempting to gain followers and stand out in the world of blogs. As I’ve mentioned before, writing informally, as if you are having a conversation, will help make your blog more inviting. The more difficult and formal components of your digital content management strategy should be relegated to whitepapers and studies.
A blog should be able to assist someone no matter what stage they are at in the decision journey. It should not be too advanced or to boring, it should just be easy. Breaking up the content and writing with a quirky edge makes people actually enjoy the read. Use catch phrases, short sentences and even pose questions to make the reader think outside the box.
See What Else is Out There
When starting a blog of your own, it can be difficult to grasp how and why people write business blogs. I say explore the world of blogging, learn what to do and what not to do from fellow bloggers. There is no harm in checking out what other businesses are writing about, even what your competitors are writing about.
It’s not cheating, it’s being resourceful!
After you see the position other writers take on certain subjects, you can decide where you stand and where your readers would stand.
Be Passionate
Whether you are writing for personal reasons, or to enhance your company’s sales process, you must write with passion. Now, with personal blogs this concept is simple, you pick topics that you enjoy in order to do your best writing. If you lose interest in the topic, so will your readers, you must have passion in your writing or you will soon lose the inspiration to compose interesting blog content.
When writing for business, regardless of the topic, you can show passion for the benefit of others.
For example: Sales enablement might not be exactly what one would call a passion, but when blogging about it, your passion can be to improve business outcomes for others. You are writing to inform people of a better way to sales performance management.
Be an Expert
In order to fully educate someone on a topic, you must be very knowledgeable about it. To deliver the best writing, you should analyze it from multiple perspectives in order to avoid being bias or appear close-minded.
Remember, just because the content is business related does not mean you can’t enjoy it. Each blog you write has a purpose you can be passionate about, so start writing and get lost in it.
Consistency is Key
As mentioned in my previous blog the more active your blog is, the more recognition it receives on google as an authority. Writing anywhere from 21 – 54 posts can boost traffic to your blog by 30% or more. (Source: Trafficgenerationcafe) More blogs equals more chances to use keyword optimization and be found on search engines.
Secondly, people are creatures of habit, meaning once things get into a routine, they like to keep it that way. If your blog is being updated multiple times a week at similar times, reading your blog could become a part of your viewer’s routine. Companies that post upwards of 20 times or more per month see five times as much traffic, as opposed to those who blog five times a month or less. (Source: Hubspot)
No Blog Activity Could Mean no Business
An active blog on your website gives the appearance that your business is actively communicating with the market, and adding value to the society. But that also means that if your blog is inactive, people may get the impression that your company isn’t doing well. Even posting small news or announcements shows activity. Progress also has the potential to get a prospect to realize why they should become a customer.
How to Increase Your Consumption
More Tailored Content
Content is undeniably what gets viewers and keeps them coming back. Companies are constantly making the mistake of allowing their marketing teams to produce content without input from the sales team. This is a problem because sales teams interact with the target market on a regular basis, they know what makes them tick, and how best to influence the decision journey.
Because the blog is a key acquisition component, the manner in which things are communicated weigh heavily on the overall digital content management strategy. Sales and marketing alignment is a great way better tailor content to the decision journey, but overall, end-of-funnel consumption metrics are the key to unbiased content creation.
Check out this post for some insights into how and why sales analytics software unlocks actionable end-of-funnel digital content consumption insights.
Always Add Value with Each Interaction
Poor blog posts (and digital content in general) can detract from the effectiveness of your business. It starts with tailored content, but in order to maintain viewers, visitors have to feel like they are learning something different from you than any other source.
More than 60% of U.S. online consumers say they’ve made a purchase as a direct result of reading a blogger’s recommendation (Source: Writtent).
Because of this, it is crucial that your blog content always adds value to the readers knowledge base. If reading your blog added no value, they may feel the same about your business offerings.
As for the question of blog length, each blog post should be long enough to fully educate the reader on a topic in question, but not so long as to be a waste of time. We’ve noticed more success with longer blog posts of 2000 words, but short posts have also worked, depending on the topic. This is about balancing digital content management with relative importance to the target market.
Hyperlinking & Sharing
Hyperlinking and sharing are essential components of effective blogging. Once you have valuable and tailored content, you need to focus on reach. Linking helps a number of ways.
You can internally link to help drive visitors to related content. You can also link externally to help support partners and influencers. If you regularly interact with and support influencers in your industry, they may return the favour. Blogging is very much a social interaction across brands.
Shares are the use of social media and email to branch out the reach of a blog. Without effective outreach, it is going to be a difficult, if not impossible, challenge to capture readership and growth. Social media can take a humble post to global scales in seconds.
For example: a share on LinkedIn can carry some heavy weight, as LinkedIn is 277% more effective at generating leads than any other network. (Source: Inbound marketing agents)
Sharing should not be overlooked as it is a simple way to find new customers to connect with. A great place to start is to find groups and communities online and on social media to share your content insights with. These groups will lead you to many new avenues of interaction.
Use Keywords Everywhere
Using Keywords is another simple yet effective method of improving viewership. The goal is to find out which keywords your target market would use to search and find your type of solution. The increased use of these phrases in your blog will gradually improve your SEO placement.
Use keywords in your blog body, headings, metadata, pictures, and blog post title. Remember not to be awkward, use keywords as normal parts of any paragraph.
Be careful not to overuse keywords, as search engines may actually avoid a blog that appears to be nothing more than a keyword repository. Depending on the length of the post, 5 or so is a good rule of thumb for maximum use of keywords.
How to Optimize Older Blog Posts
Why Revamp Old Content
Referred to as ‘Historical Optimization’, this is a relatively new strategy of revamping old blog posts and reposting them.
The volume of content on the internet can be overwhelming for customers as they look for their desired content. It is estimated that 50% of content on the internet is completely unused (Source: HubSpot).
Historical optimization has proven to increase conversion rates by 240%, as well as generate 3X more leads, according to a recent blog post by the folks at HubSpot.
The reason this works is because search engines also apply dates and age to the quality of SEO results. If you had a post from 3 years ago that was always popular, the likeliness of this blog staying on top will decline on a day-to-day basis.
Which Old Blogs to Optimize
Historical optimization has the potential to do great things for your company, but only if you are doing it right.
First, you must optimize the blogs that get the most attention and leads, and are also still relevant. Just because revamping old blogs has shown some success does not mean you should stop producing new content all together.
How to Optimize Old Blogs
The easiest and first thing to enhance is your title. Remember to use keywords and phrase the title in a way that will summarize the content and intrigue an inquisitive visitor.
Calls to action (CTA) are the next part of your blog to be revamped. A CTA is like a white paper or ebook that you offer to the reader in order to capture lead contact details and further a decision journey. Going back and replacing old CTAs with newer, more interesting, or more relevant CTAs is a great strategy to revamp an old blog.
Finally, ensure that all the information in the content is still relevant and important. Stats may need to be changed, and even entire paragraphs may need to be updated in order to bring the content piece back to modern standards.
The Key to Optimizing
Going back and adding keywords is probably one of the most important parts of historical optimization. In the example provided by HubSpot, of the 75 blogs updated, each one experienced an improvement in SEO due to keyword opimization. You must identify which keywords each post is getting found with, prioritize these keywords, and use one or two that the most traffic came from (Source: HubSpot).
Blogging for the Target
As discussed in the previous post, the two most important things about a blog are the right content towards the right audience. Both of these enablers are right at your fingertips but only when you have effective sales and marketing alignment.
In many situations, marketing teams are left out of the sales process when trying to create the content they think is most relevant. When Marketing teams fail to optimize blog creation for the consumers at the end of the sales funnel, they miss the mark on capturing high quality leads that may actually want to buy.
Worse still, the blog content is less likely to be among your real sales enablement solutions, and may risk being sales inhibitor. This is because the information in the blog will influence the decision journey and educate the lead in ways which do not adequately position them for selling. The general result of this is poor MQL acceptance ratios by the Sales team.
As these blogs have taught us, the concept of blogging can do wonders for your company but not if there is a missing link between your customer facing teams. A simple and obvious solution is to bridge the gap between marketing and sales to make sure you put the right content towards the right audience.
