Drive Sales with an Active Blogging Strategy
A Guide to Doing Marketing Better with Your Blog
You know that blogging is important, but it’s also time-consuming – so why bother? The short answer: Because blogging never stops working for your business.
A blog is a sure-fire way to build your business and deliver fresh, consistent content that is tailored to your audience and creates a path to conversion.
5 benefits of having an active blog on your website:
It brings people to your website (increase traffic)
It helps you regularly publish content (SEO value)
It creates fodder for social media and email sharing
It attracts and engages visitors
It introduces educational content that helps visitors in buying process
Our friends at HubSpot outlined some key statistics outlining the value of blogs:
71% of buyers said that blogs affect their purchasing decisions.
57% of companies publishing blogs have acquired a customer from a blog-generated lead.
23% of marketers invested in blogging and social media this year, up 9% year over year.
Companies who blog 15x’s a month generate 5x’s the traffic
B2B companies that blog twice a month generate 70% more leads than those who don’t.
Your blog introduces solutions to readers who are actively seeking answers. By educating the reader, you are empowering them to make a buying decision.
Defining your Blogging Strategy
First, we must recognize who we are blogging for. To do this, we examine three types of readers/buyers who may be coming to your blog:
Understanding the Buyer Persona/Journey (FROM HUBSPOT):
1. Awareness Stage: Prospect is experiencing or expressing symptoms of a problem or opportunity. (Typically doing educational research to clearly understand, frame and give a name to their problem) Fact based blogging.
70% of web queries are just that – queries – people trying to find an answer online.
2. Consideration Stage: Prospect has now clearly defined and given a name to their problem or opportunity. (Now they’re committed to researching and understanding the ways to solve their problem or opportunity.) Solution based blogging.
3. Decision Stage: Prospect has now decided on their solution strategy, method, or approach. (Now they’re compiling a long list of available vendors and products that fit their solution. They want to whittle the long list down to a short list and ultimately make a purchasing decision.) Comparison blogging. (Fewest blogs in this category)
Serve the buyer persona, and you will delight the reader.
Always write numerous posts about every topic you would like to be seen as experts on.
Your blogging strategy should be centered on keywords (mostly long-tailed keywords) that fit your business.
The Good News: Google’s algorithms always pay more attention to quality (based off of clicks, time spent on page, user engagement, etc.) rather than following a technical checklist or keyword stuffing to get ahead.
The Result: Google cares more about context than keywords (just like people).
Your TAKEAWAY: Short-tailed keywords matter less; long-tailed keywords matter more.
Understanding Blog Best Practices
Here are 15 standard blog requirements to get ahead of the game:
Each blog should contain 500 words or more
Place a business specific keyword in the title
The post should be designed to be found in search
The post should ALSO be designed to be shared among peers
Including Social sharing buttons generates 7x more social mentions.
Share your blog across all of your social media networks.
Limit topic tags to 5 for best results.
Avoid low quality content.
Use images that enhance the reading experience.
Provide conversion pathways. (relevant CTAs)
Make it easy to subscribe to your blog
White space is your friend
Your blog (and website) should use responsive design.
Format matters. Use visual differentiators like short paragraphs, bullets, headers, images, etc. (People tend to dislike reading so don’t make it hard for them).
Grab their attention. Write introductions that tap into reader’s emotions so they keep going
HubSpot studies show that you can’t afford to misstep with web prospects:
61% of mobile visitors return to Google to find a site that is more readable if they can’t find information on their mobile device right away
Most people only read 60% of your blog post so get better at hooking them.
But don’t hang on too tightly to salacious, topical blog posts…
Publishing Topical vs. Evergreen Blogs
Topical is short-term traffic boost, top-of-mind posting (News Jacking, for example).
Evergreen is timeless and typically the best blogging strategy because benefits are reaped in perpetuity (examples include “Top 5 Reasons, How To’s, etc.”).
About 85% of your blog posts should be evergreen blog posts, according to HubSpot.
So, are your ready to make an impact with your blogging strategy? We’ve compiled a couple checklists to ensure you’re following best practices every time you post an article.
STLCW’s Quality Blog Content Checklist:
Is your blog original?
Does it provide substantial value compared to competitors?
Does it have any spelling, grammatical, or stylistic errors?
Is it driven by genuine interest of readers or an attempt to rank well?
Is this something you would bookmark or share with friends?
STLCW’s Quality Blog SEO Checklist:
Write for people who use search engines - not just search engines.
Focus on 1-2 long-tailed keywords (this should be included in the title, body, URL and meta description – but used in moderation)
Use responsive design.
Include meta optimizations (include long-tailed keywords)
Use canonical tags for similar or duplicate content (these tell Google what to index)
Optimize your images (add alt text so Google knows what it is)
Avoid using too many topic tags (this can cause duplicate content)
Use URL structures that help and make sense for visitors (helps with navigation)
Link internally where possible (shows validity & authority plus helps retain visitors)
Use the Google Keyword Planner tool to find relevant topics (and answer additional questions)
BLOGGING REMINDERS FOR AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT:
Make the topic broad so you can write a series or try different ways to look at it.
Make it evidence-based, useful, and original while also being shareable.
Remember, sharing should come naturally – it should make an impact on your readers.
The ultimate goal: Generate engagement with your audience, and ultimately, your business.
READY TO GET STARTED?
Define a strategy. Attract the right people. Then give them what they want!
St. Louis Copywriters has proven, industry-agnostic blogging experts ready to capture your brand voice and use it to drive conversions with your audience. Contact us to get started today.