By Hector Cisneros
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| Photo Credit: blogger.com |
When we started our journey in
content marketing, we never envisioned our blog would grow to 35,000-plus page
views on average each month. We wrote
articles because we wanted consumers and businesses to understand the sea
change that was taking place in Internet marketing. From our humble beginning of one blog a week
to the phenomenal following our blog has acquired, we’re amazed and grateful
for what has transpired.
Understand that our blog’s growth is not some random, viral occurrence. Its remarkable growth is based on excellence, consistency and science. We measure everything we try and we keep the elements that works.
Understand that our blog’s growth is not some random, viral occurrence. Its remarkable growth is based on excellence, consistency and science. We measure everything we try and we keep the elements that works.
To access and read the other three articles in this series, type
the word "marketing" in the search bar at the above right of this
page.
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| Photo Credit: examtime.com |
There is no doubt that blogging
is now becoming the new go-to medium on the Internet for printed content. More and more people are turning to blogs for
their information. There are numerous
routes to access these blogs: search engine news services, social media,
curated posts, RSS feeds, and of course, all the major news networks, reporters
and columnists provide blogs. Blogs also
provide more credibility than search ads, banner ads, and in-column news ads. Yet many businesses are slow to adopt this
dynamic medium. Whether it’s because it’s
time-consuming or requires specific skills to pursue, nonetheless, there’s no
doubt blogging will be in every business's future in one way or another. This article provides the lessons learned and
best practices we’ve developed in 15 years of writing articles and blogs. More importantly, it covers the marketing
secrets we’ve developed over the last five years during the explosion of information
that blogging has provided. So read on to
learn Working the Web to Win’s lessons
and best practices about blogging.
Blogging and Current Content
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| Photo Credit: dnbsmallbusiness.com.au |
If you’re not providing a unique,
authoritative blog post/article each week, you’re missing out on a huge
audience and tons of visitor traffic. Google
and other search engines place a significant value on this kind of
authoritative content. More importantly,
most people do, too.
Unique content is king. A newly written, high-quality, relevant,
timely and published article/blog post will outperform most curated blogs or
other recycled articles both on your blog site and in your social nets. This unique, authoritative content is the most
valuable item you can post to your social networks. It proves you‘re adding value to the world
and that you’re sharing your knowledge and expertise, thus making you a
credible source of information.
You Need to Check out Blogger
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| Photo Credit: nairaland.com |
If you’re going to use a blogging
platform, we recommend Google’s Blogger for three important reasons. First,
it’s owned by Google, and we believe Google likes, understands, and knows how
to index its own properties. Secondly,
Google indexes Blogger every day, which means your blog content will be entered
into its search engines daily. And
third, it’s easy to use, has built in analytics, and has wide industry support
for plugins and add-ons that work very well.
Long Copy is Better than Short
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| Photo Credit: cooperativeindividualism.org |
For the longest time, I was told
that people only read short blogs and articles. However, my current research and that of others directly
contradicts this idea. We’ve found that
the key elements to getting your article read are its “quality,” “relevance,”
“timeliness,” and “usefulness.” Also,
your ability to get your message out through various distribution channels
plays an important role. Articles of any
length will be read and shared if they are of good quality. If they contain all four of the previously
mentioned elements, all the more so.
I
can tell you from our own experience that medium to long-length articles
receive as many, if not more, reads than their shorter counterparts. Especially if they are of an “evergreen”
nature and provide a comprehensive view of a given subject. I believe this occurs because long articles
are like getting a free eBook without having to pay for it. As a matter of fact, longer articles lend
themselves to the production of a full sized eBook. It doesn’t take long to produce enough content
to create a full-sized eBook, if you consistently write high-quality articles
in related subject areas over a years’ time. If you wrote 52 articles in a year (that’s one
per week, you’d have enough content to create a book of 100 pages or more. You can then use this book as a money maker on
Amazon.com, or at Barnes and Nobles, or
as an incentive to get prospects to give you their contact information.
Consistency Wins in Audience/Follower Development
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| Photo Credit: plus.google.com |
Consistency is extremely
important. We’ve found that our clients who
are able to consistently meet social media postings and blog publishing
deadlines out-perform clients who don’t ― as much as four to tenfold. When a client drags their feet on approving
an article (that we’ve ghost written for them), or they try to micromanage the
creative process by being too restrictive about the content, the production
process comes to a stop. This also stunts
their audience growth and their fan base’s perception about the company’s
consistency and credibility. Readers
like regularity.
If you like a product
(a blog is a product) and you anti-up for it either by subscribing to it or
just looking for it on Twitter, and then suddenly it doesn’t show up, the news
medium itself loses credibility. In
other words, if I put money in a vending machine and nothing comes out, I’ll go
to a different (better) machine. Also,
consider the fact that your blog articles are authoritative content for all
your social networks. No blog, no
authoritative content. And no authoritative content means you’re not
adding much value to what your are posting. Adding value increases your credibility in
your clients’ and prospects’ eyes. One
last benefit of consistency, it facilitates building a larger library of
published articles that will keep on working for you years into the future. The larger your library, the more recyclable
content you have to work with.
Principles Outperforms Trendiness
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| Photo Credit: realsmo.com |
Clients who have a large number
of evergreen articles in their library can take advantage of recycled posting
in a big way. The articles still need to
be high-quality, timely and be relevant to their fan base. Once a client reaches around 28 evergreen
articles, they can begin recycling their previous articles in their social
posts. This will easily double the
number of blog page views they’ll receive. When their library of evergreen articles
reaches 90+ posts, they can recycle them daily. This will make a really big impact on their
total page views and can produce 10 times the page views than their previous
efforts.
Multimedia is the Smart Bomb
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| Photo Credit: patheos.com |
Combination campaigns that use
lots of multimedia venues (at least five elements) coupled with lots of social
posts, will more easily produce Page One organic position than any single, dual
or triple element campaign. We design
our campaigns to attack the competition’s weaknesses. If they’re weak in video, we produce more quality relevant videos. If the completion is weak in social posts or
blogging, we attack those venues. However,
we will always do this with a multimedia approach with at least four elements
in play at once (assuming the client can afford four elements).
Email Marketing = Touch Marketing When Implemented the Right Way
Don’t neglect direct email
marketing. This is one of the best touch
marketing elements you can engage in. It’s
very important that you don’t spam people by sending them unsolicited email. It can not only get you branded as a spammer
(which can carry hefty fines) it can also get your domain name blacklisted as
well. If you use email as an informational
touch piece (i.e., an email newsletter) you can use it to build credibility and
to remain top-of-mind with your customers and prospects. Make sure that the bulk of your newsletters
and email contain useful information, not just a sales pitch of your latest
specials. Build trust by creating content that is 90 % informational and
entertaining, with the last 10% including product and service specials.
Video Content Marketing Adds Sizzle to Your Blog
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| Photo Credit: linkedin.com |
Today, video is more important on
the Web than ever. YouTube has become a
social network with billions of views per day. Now that people can leave comments and share
their videos, it has become more viral than ever before. Many businesses are ignoring this venue
because of the perceived time and cost it takes for quality video production. This means it’s also a huge opportunity for
many businesses to out-position their competition because many just aren’t
posting video content. A great way to
create videos is to make short vignettes (90 seconds to three minutes long) that
follow the content in your blogs. This
makes your video a “vlog” and a great add-in for your blog. This type of cross pollination expands the
effectiveness of your articles and also give you a new social network and
medium to grow an audience with.
Facebook believes in the
importance of video and has spent a considerable amount of time and money
revving up their infrastructure to handle video. Facebook’s video views are now starting to
rival YouTube’s and surpass other video portals such as Vimeo.
Our "Social Slam Dunk" ... Check it Out.
In this article, I provided many
examples of the lessons learned and best practices we’ve discovered in our many
years of Internet publishing, blogging and content marketing. Using these best practices will help businesses
avoid the most common mistakes and allow them to take advantages of tips and
techniques that produce the most bang for the time invested.
You can find more than a dozen
articles about Internet marketing and how it has evolved on our blog site by
entering “Blogging” or “Content Marketing” in the search box, at the top of this blog.
I also recommend reading the “How
to Use Storytelling to Save the Day - 3 Secrets to Content Marketing Success,”
“Blogging
Secrets of the Pros,” and the “The
Magic Formula for Blogging Success: a Training Series for Bloggers,” just
to name a few. Thanks for sharing your
valuable time with us.To access the other articles in this four-part series, simply click on the
following direct links: Part 1 – The Big Picture, Part 2 – Website and SEO Principles, Part 3 – The Social Media Dynamic, and Part 4 – Content is King. Thanks for sharing your
valuable time with us.
If you'd like a free copy of our eBook, "Internet Marketing Tips for the 21st Century," please fill in the form below and we'll email it to you. Your information is always kept private and is never sold.
Hector Cisneros is COO and
director of Social Media Marketing at Working the Web to Win, an
award-winning Internet marketing company based in Jacksonville, Florida. He is also co-host of the weekly Internet
radio show, "Working
the Web To Win" on BlogTalkRadio.com, which airs every Tuesday at 4
p.m. Eastern. Hector is a syndicated writer and published author of “60 Seconds to Success.”
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