Online Marketing Blog

At the SES conference this week I gave several presentations on Content Marketing: “Content Marketing Optimization” and “The Convergence of Search, Social & Content Marketing”.  In the CMO session, I provided SEO tips for each spoke in a hub and spoke model. The hub in this situation was a blog and one of the most common issues with business blog success is fresh content. In fact, one of the most common reasons companies don’t start a blog is over their concerns with creating useful content.

I can empathize with that concern and have addressed it with many companies over the past 7+ years that I’ve been blogging here on TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog. To help anyone interested in ideas for creating business blog content, check out the following 8 tips. They’ve worked for us and for many of our clients and may very well work for you too.

It happens to all of us. We sit in front of our computers, stare at the screen and have no idea what to write about. It should be so easy, yet nothing comes to mind. Chances are, we’re thinking to hard.

If you do have bloggers block, here are 10 topics to help you come up with an idea to blog about.

Frequently Asked Questions – FAQs

Every business gets asked the same questions over and over again. These could come from prospects or clients and are great topics for blog posts. Chances are, if they are a FAQ, they’re also searched on a lot too.

B2B marketers have always been in the business of “content marketing“ with white papers, case studies, webinars, demos, free consultations, ebooks and the like. Longer sales cycles due to more complex products and services and business purchasing processes often require more information. The content used to educate buyers of B2B products and services can be a very valuable asset when it comes to content optimization and acquiring leads via organic search.

When assessing B2B client resources for optimization, most marketers focus on web pages and increasingly, digital assets and social media content.  Web pages are more often directly linked to by other sites vs images or video, so it makes sense to start optimizing a B2B site’s web pages.  The operative word in that last sentence is “start”.

Yesterday, Junta 42 announced their latest list of top content marketing focused blogs (Online Marketing Blog came in at #2 in between Copyblogger and PR 2.0) and it reminded me yet again of how important content is for SEO. It used to be when discussing search engine optimization services 5-6 years ago, we’d focus on keyword optimization of content and getting links as independent tactics. Today, it’s a different story.

Of course many of the basics of SEO still apply, such as keyword research, on-page optimization of existing content and solving crawling issues. But attracting links and creating new content are no longer separate tasks. They’re interdependent.

The success formula for content centered link building is simple:

• Establish distribution channels such as blog/RSS, email list, social networks, social content

A common problem with many web sites that need improved rankings is a lack of fresh content. If you don’t have a dedicated writer in-house, where can you get good content? Here are a few suggestions:

• Archive your newsletters
• Archive and syndicate your own press releases and media coverage
• Add syndicated news
• Add press releases content syndicated from other sources
• Use articles open for re-use from article directories
• Use Yahoo Creative Commons search to find available content
• Publish a glossary
• Publish client testimonials
• Publish product/service demos
• Publish a Q & A and/or FAQ

Organize your content according to relevant keyword themes. Include important keywords in the text links between content files, in title tags and on-page headings.