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By Hector Cisneros
You hear a lot of business people talking about blogging. Many experts are saying that you should be blogging? Why is that? Is it because it's the latest marketing trend? Is it because it's easy to do, or maybe because it’s an easy way to grow a following or is it’s that it’s just a great return on investment? In this episode of Working the Web to Win, we will explore the top 14 reasons every business should consider blogging as part of their marketing strategy. These 14 reasons will be eye-openers for some and rightful justification for others. So, take out your notepad and be ready to check these 14 reasons out as we explore “why your marketing director should be blogging.
In the past, we have written many articles about blogging. A few examples include: Blogging Secrets of the Pros, Blogging as a Business, To Autoblog, or Not to Autoblog? That is the Question, The Secrets of Blogging for Dollars and The Makings of a Great Blog Post & Other Writing Enigmas. This is just a small sample of the more than two dozen articles available on our blog. Blogging, however, does have some pre-requisites that you must adhere to. To achieve success, we believe you have to build a sizable audience, (3 to 5 thousand monthly readers within one year). To do this, you must provide your potential audience with a consistently published; high-quality, authoritative, relevant, timely, useful, entertaining and targeted articles on a weekly basis, without fail!
Secondly, we believe the best articles are of an evergreen nature, based on unchanging principles. Seasonally based articles can also be of help but are limited to one season. An article that is dated or has a single-event subjects have the least valuable and are used only once. Blogs are shared on your social networks, and if permitted, cross-promoted to other clients and lastly to our large audience of 100,000 followers. A great blog without an audience is a billboard in the desert. Without sufficient distribution, your articles will only grow an audience slowly or erratically.
Top 14 Reason Businesses Should be Blogging
- Blogs are where people get their news. Blogs are today's version of periodicals, newspapers, and magazines all rolled into one. In fact, today's blogs go beyond all previous printed media because blogs are multimedia. Periodicals, Newspaper, and magazine could only dream of providing content like a blog does. Radio and Television also wish they could provide the same synergy a blog does. Today’s Radio and TV has lost so much market share that they have given up hope of ever getting it back. Now, these old analog mediums are forced to evolve into web versions of themselves. Many have added blogs to their mix in order to draw larger market share. Today, blogs are read by more people that all newspapers and magazines combined. And for good reason, they are not slaves to the search markets like Google, Yahoo, Bing or even Facebook. They build their own following (like TV and Radio use to). They can be easily shared and found on all social nets, and yes, they can be found on the search directories as well.
- Blogging is Content marketing. You often hear the adage that content is king well blogging
can incorporate every type of content. It can provide text, any kind of images, video, and audio. It can be used like a high-end magazine, providing top-shelf comprehensive content or it can also provide short copy designed to give ad-copy maximum exposure. It can be embedded with all manner of multimedia content and thus can appeal to a broader audience.
Courtesy of Flicker - Blogging is very cost effective. Blogging is a bargain by any measure, who can argue with FREE! It costs zero to set up a Google Blogger site (just your time and knowledge). WordPress blogs can also be set up for free. Your only real costs are time spent learning how to set it up and writing blogs. Obviously, you can spend more by buying a custom domain name or purchasing fancy templates, but the fact is you don’t have to.
- Blogging is multimedia. The world is full of people who have different learning styles, and they also have a preference for certain kinds of media. Although most love video, a blog can provide additional background material with the video embedded and surrounded by the added text or even sound. Photo, diagrams, animated images, music and podcast are all easily embedded in blogs. Plus, you have the added capability of just printing or saving the article.
- Blogs are websites. Almost anything you can do on a regular website, you can do on a blog site. Inform, entertain, generate leads, capture contact information, sell products and services. It’s a website and can have multiple pages. It can even have landing pages that are tied to pay per click or other types of web advertising. But unlike a regular website, your blog gives people a reason to come back every week, your latest article!
- Blogging is highly quantifiable. It can be tracked in many ways. Blogger blogs come with basic page view analytics built in. Both WordPress and Blogger can have Google analytics added for free. Other blogging platforms can also add other measurement programs as well. You can easily tell if your content marketing is working with your analytics installed.
- Blogging can provide credibility and Trust. If you are an expert in your field, blogging
allows you to codify your expertise into the written word. People trust print (especially quality print). They trust it, even more, when it’s published in a professional manner and in a multimedia format. If you can write a dozen articles on any subject in a coherent way, you have built a marketing tool that shows off your expertise by example. Blogs contribute to the knowledge of the world. An easy way to prove you are an expert is to add knowledge to the World Wide Web, (aka the blogosphere).
Courtesy of Pixabay - Blogging helps you build a loyal following. There is a saying by Zig Ziggler that goes; “you can get anything you want as long as you help a lot of others get what they want”. Helping people understand your industry and how to solve its problems is a great way to woo a following. If your content helps people understand your industry and then helps solve their problems – it will almost always build a loyal audience.
- Blogging can be Evergreen! If you write your content in a way that explains the unchanging principles of your industry, its evergreen. That is, it never goes out of style. It will always be useful, generation after generation. This can easily lower your cost of marketing, (zero additional production is needed).
- Blogging is the perfect fodder for the social nets. Lots of studies have shown that people like stories, articles, and news of all kinds. A good multimedia blog can attract a social following with every kind of media. Video, podcast, live streams, pictures and of course great stories and news. And the best news is that the blog does not have to depend on organic search engines.
- Blogs can be recycled on the social nets. As mentioned earlier, blogs that are written as
evergreen content can be used many times. Recycling your blog content on the social nets is easy. All you have to do is create multiple curated headlines for each article and then space out the posts so that they only show up once every 30 days or so, the wider the space of time, the more effective the recycled post.
Courtesy of Pixabay - Blogs can be repurposed and re-published. You can create blogs from content you have already created. This includes books, live video feeds, YouTube or Vimeo videos, podcasts, ezine and print articles. On top of this, the reverse is true as well. Blogs can be used to create books, videos, podcast and print articles.
- Blogging on a regular basis is a great way to grow a book. Have you always wanted to write a book? One of the best ways to accomplish this is to write a weekly blog article. At the end of a year, you have 52 articles on subjects that you understand and have expertise in. Now all you have to do is organize the material into coherent chapters and tie the related articles together as content in those chapters. It’s not instant but being consistent does grow a book.
- Blogging can be easily outsourced. Many business owners don’t have the writing skill or the inclination to write. This is a good reason to outsource this type of marketing. However, so is the low cost to participate in this medium. Blogging is not an expensive marketing medium. Unlike Radio or TV, it doesn’t cost thousands of dollars a month. My company has packages starting as low as $350 a month where we copy edit the authors content, teach them how to publish their blog and then push it out to their following and ours, giving them instant distribution. We also offer turnkey ghostwritten blogging programs for clients starting at $550 a month. Our top end package which includes a 1000 word blog a week, full social media management and guaranteed growth coming in at $1,250.
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The bottom line for any business is that blogging can be a highly productive marketing venture for those who are willing to make the commitment to do it on a weekly basis. Publishing and sharing a blog monthly or erratically will only lead to frustration and a minimal audience. If you’re not willing to make the commitment, then outsourcing your blogging efforts is your best bet. This is especially true if the outfit you chose has a large audience, this way your blog will be found and read as well. Blogging can be the quickest way to build a positive reputation as an expert in your field. Halfhearted efforts could hurt your reputation, especially if your quality control slips and your final product is not what the audience is expecting.
That's my opinion; I look forward to reading yours.
This article provides our top 14 must-know reasons why every marketing director should be using blogging as part of their overall marketing strategy. This article also provides links to dozens of other related articles on blogging offering the reader a more comprehensive view of this subject matter. It also provides a link to the BlogTalkRadio show that goes with this article.
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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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