A blog is the best online content marketing strategy you can adopt. It can prove very beneficial to your business. Not only does it drive traffic to your website, it also helps establish your brand as an industry leader, while enabling you to develop long lasting relationships with your customers. You can make your blog, the hub of your content marketing system, by following a few simple steps given below:
Step #1: Building a Strong Foundation
The first step you need to take is set up your blog properly. You need to have your own URL. It is good to go for a self-hosted WordPress blog instead of free hosting options.
For instance, you should use http://mybusiness.com instead of http://mybusiness.wordpress.com
A better idea would to launch your blog, a part of your business website. If this is not possible, you should at least integrate your blog into your website. However, you will need ongoing technical support to make your blogging efforts a success.
Step #2: Understanding your Target Audience
Successful Blogging is not about what you want to write; it is about what your target audience wants to read. Therefore, you will have to first determine whom you are going to write for and what kind of content they expect from you.
Creating a few marketing personas would be a great way to get started. Writing for a faceless mass can be very tricky and confusing. By creating a marketing persona, you give a personality to your target audience. This can make it easier for you to determine their social media proclivities and their content consumption habits.If you have different types of audience, then you may have to create multiple marketing personas.
Step #3: Coming up with a Definite Content Marketing Plan
There are many things that go into a good content marketing plan. These include:
- Planning up your events
- Outlining your main content offerings
- Planningyour ongoing columns and other related communications
- Creating an editorial calendar
- Planning extended content usage
Step #4: Optimizing Your Content to Enhance its Effectiveness
You are not really done, once you have created your content. You have to work on enhancing its attractiveness for your readers. Here are a few things you can look into:
- Try and associate your blog post with your organization
- Focus on keyword phrases so as to make your content search-friendly
- Make your content easy to read
Step #5: Planning on promoting your content
So, you have created content, optimized it and then published it on your blog. But unless you promote it no one is going to see it. While promoting your content, your focus should be on:
- Making your readers receive your blog through feeds or emails automatically
- Leveraging social media to distribute your blog posts
- Extending the reach of your content by using third-party advertising and media
Step #6: Allocating the Necessary Resources to Your Blog
Blog is not about posting when you find the time. Unless it publishes unique content in a regular way it may not be of much use to you. There are many resources that you will have to allocate in order to make your Blog successful. You will need:
- A Creative team to work on the formatting, photography and design
- An editorial team to make sure the content is correct
- A marketing team to distribute your content
- A technical team to make it easier to upload your content and deal with the technical issues
Step #7: Tracking the Performance of your Content Marketing Efforts
Unless you measure your results regularly you will not know if your blog is working the way it should. Put a system in place… plan up your metrics… and capture the data as and when it comes in.
A blog can be the centre of your content marketing only if you know how to use it properly. These steps should help you move in the right track and take your business towards higher levels of success.
