Online Marketing Blog

As part of our continuing series on content marketing tactics, I’ll be covering a topic that is absolutely near and dear to every content marketer’s heart: business blogging.

According to a recent NM Incite report, there are over 181 million blogs around the world. The way many companies treat blogs in their content marketing mix is to incorporate blogs into their website as a section or subdomain, or host them on their own domain name as we do.

Most companies understand the benefits of a well-executed online PR strategy: improved brand visibility and industry reputation, increased traffic to the company website and even sales. It’s no wonder that companies trip over themselves to come up with a regular stream of PR related content.

Unfortunately, lower barriers to entry for publishing and distributing information have resulted in a plethora of non-news littering the web.

Is there any harm in “putting it all out there,” as in writing and distributing a press release for every event, newsworthy or not? I’d argue that yes, there is potential harm. As an industry journalist, I’ve personally become annoyed with companies or PR people sending me twice-weekly emails about everything under the sun. Whether someone has moved up internally or a company is seeking another round of funding, isn’t exactly compelling news.

Businesses of all sizes often struggle to find high impact, low cost methods of attracting and engaging customers.

While some say social media and SEO have leveled the playing field, blogging is by far one of the most effective ways for small businesses to achieve numerous business objectives.

What can you achieve with a blog? As a content management system that can be optimized for search and social shares, blogs with great content can help a company attract new customers, engage existing customers, connect with journalists and connect with potential new hires. There are many business communication goals that can be realized through blogging.

How? The fundamentals that many companies seem to gloss over include:

• Create a hub and spoke framework for blog publishing and promotion.

Content creation isn’t easy and I, for one, am very glad. I’ve been writing online content for almost a decade now and have truly enjoyed the increased emphasis on quality over quantity and targeted messaging we’ve seen over the past few years.

Companies are now fully aware that simply distributing information on a regular basis is not enough. As Lee pointed out in a recent article on the reasons companies are challenged by content creation, “Anyone with half a brain can create information, but ‘content’ implies usefulness or utility.”

At TopRank, part of my job is the creation of content for our own channels – this blog, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. I also assist clients in planning and developing engaging, interesting content for their unique audiences and business needs. As a result, my day typically goes something like this:

As new businesses are started every day across the U.S., many of those entrepreneurs are grappling with the realities of how to market their ideas, products and services.

Limited resources and an overabundance of options requires filtering and prioritization when it comes to where marketing investments are made, whether it’s content, blogging, social media, or SEO.

Common questions include: What to measure? What if it fails? What should we outsource?

Here are a few answers to those questions that I was asked as prep for an interview:

What advice do you have for business owners or entrepreneurs who are staying out of blogging and/or social because they don’t feel they can produce enough content on a regular basis to keep things interesting?

Companies all over the social web are confronted with the need for  ROI in corporate blogging.

Despite blogs being named as more influential than social networks in shaping consumers’ opinions and purchase decisions, many marketers and communicators  are falling short.

Why? A focus on self-promotion has many brands running out of content  ideas and time to show a return on their blog content investment. Tolerance for quantity of content and superficial social engagement metrics as a basis for results is diminishing.

Despite these challenges, blogs provide an incredible content marketing platform for connecting directly with prospects, the media, customers, new employees, investors and the industry at large.

To offer companies a roadmap to realizing these business blogging and content marketing benefits, I will be giving a presentation at the inaugural Social Media Marketing World conference in San Diego on Tuesday, April 9th.

With millions of blogs and other social content to compete against, the challenge of standing out can seem overwhelming for business and personal bloggers alike.

But it doesn’t have to be a mystery for customers to find your corporate blog. If you have interesting and useful things to say, there is an audience seeking that very information.

The connection between social media and blog promotion for companies is logical: Publish a blog post and then tweet it out or post a link to Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+.

But there’s more to making your business blog findable than just sharing links through social channels. That’s why focusing solely on the promotion of blog content after it’s published is like a hamster running on an exercise wheel. The ideal is to be intentional and planned yet also opportunistic. And to scale those promotion efforts, it’s essential that two or three times as much time is spent growing social networks than actually promoting content to them.

B2B and B2C blogging have their individual intricacies, but a mix of content that addresses the needs of your audience is the core of a great blog plan for both types of businesses. Timely content that capitalizes on search and social trends is certainly helpful for attracting new eyes and expanding your reach. Evergreen content has its place too, and an important one at that.

Both Lee Odden and Mike Yanke have touted the benefits of evergreen content here at Online Marketing Blog. Mike cites the SEO benefits of content that builds links and engages readers over a lengthy period of time. Compelling, engaging, original content satisfies visitors and search engines alike.

Within the blogging community there’s a substantial number of bloggers that are independent business people and even more that run a personal blog. With the rise and fall and rise again of blogging as an online communications channel there are the expected debates about best practices and such.

One of the debates is around writing content as a stream of consciousness with the assumption that it will attract the audience that it deserves, causing it to be shared and exposed to even more readers.

Then there are the opportunists that seek to scale the reach of their content though blogging by creating processes for generating topics, keyword optimization and social sharing schemes to blast the content everywhere the internet’s sun doesn’t shine.

For the past 2 years we’ve been publishing a list of the top UK focused internet marketing blogs in advance of speaking at events. This year I’ll be presenting on Creative Content Marketing at SES London February 19th.

Since bloggers do more than just write posts, I’ve shifted the focus of this list from blogs to individuals. With the increasing importance of authorship and personal brands, I think it’s important to consider individual bloggers and the content they share whether its tweets, status updates, or other useful information created online.

As a result, the people on this list are recognized for their overall social sharing about “online marketing” related topics, not just blogging.

Thanks to nominations made from some really helpful UK bloggers and the folks at Traackr we’ve created the Top 50 UK Online Marketing Influencers & Bloggers.

Retail websites are flush with product information, specs, and images of items available for purchase.  However, it may be difficult to find a way to provide detailed and engaging content for customers visiting a website when they’re just looking to purchase.

Starting a company blog provides a good opportunity to attract new customers and engage current customers with content about your products and other topics that are of importance to them.  It doesn’t matter if the items being sold are car parts, clothing, electronics or furniture, there is an opportunity to help solve pain points and arm your customers with information that encourages engagement and purchasing decisions.

Believe it or not an image can help make or break a piece of content, once your visitors reach the page.  C.C. Chapman (@cc_chapman) shared sound advice and lots of laughs with his opening session on day one of the New Media Expo with a session entitled “How To Add Photography Into Your Marketing Mix”.

Whether you’re sprinkling your content marketing with imagery or looking to make it a larger part of your strategy, C.C. suggests some best practices for letting your images shine.

#1 – Always Create An Emotional Response
When someone looks at the images that you use to help tell the story of your content, it should illicit a response or reaction.  If a follower takes a look at your photo and then stifles a yawn it’s time to go back to the camera lens and find another image that is more suited.