The better your editorial calendar template, the better the implementation of your business blog strategy is likely to be.
Developing a successful editorial calendar, however, is not always easy. What’s more it is often much more complex than just putting a bunch of dates and preliminary titles for blog posts together.
[Read more...]
It takes time to for online content marketing to yield results. Despite what those marketing snake oil salesmen might tell you.
In the old days before the internet you could grab an audience’s attention by the throat with a 30 second ad on TV that literally burst onto the screens, propelling them to your store.
Showing commitment
Trouble is that intrinsically valuable content that connects with your target audience, showing your key value proposition, takes time to bubble to the surface of Google’s search engine results. It’s not found easily if you haven’t already built plenty of online equity. That’s why there are so many search engine optimization (SEO) experts out there, peddling their wares of “Get to the Top of Google Search”.
So beware. Agencies that promise an all-bells-and-whistles blog marketing campaign will yield quick results are either world leaders in online marketing and communications or planning to move country the minute your organization has handed over the cash for the work they’ve done.
For example, an online content marketing campaign aimed at generating more traffic to your site is not something to bash out in a week. Sure, unique visitors sent to your site via Google when searching for your keyword phrases have a good chance of converting to sales. Trouble is, the new blog you’ve just started writing as part of your latest marketing campaign, in all likelihood, isn’t going to help you capture the kind of search traffic you need to keep you in business if you’re struggling to take care of payroll. Blogs can take 3 – 6 months of careful business blogging with a WordPress theme optimised for SEO and cleverly worked-out keywords to really start converting visitors – and that’s assuming you’ve invested in great landing pages and call-to-actions across your site. [Read more...]
My company have been lucky enough to run a Facebook campaign for Internationella Engelska Gymnasiet this academic year. As I’ve written before it’s really been a key part of helping them achieve their goals.
It’s also been a great lesson for me.
The brief was to build a community through social media (Yes, we ran a blog, a Twitter account AND a Formspring.me account too) and get students from the company’s junior high schools to opt to study at their senior high school.
Schools in Sweden are funded by the income generated by each student. Effectively, the local authorities give schools a certain amount of money per student to cover their running costs. It is not possible to charge fees in Sweden.
The blog helped improve the school increase web traffic, generate more traffic from Google search and performed very well for the keywords we targeted. But it was Facebook that did the most to build community.
Talking to the management team at Internationella Engelska Gymnasiet they were surprised Facebook was such a success. Especially as the school didn’t even allow access to the site on campus, initially continuing to block sites that they perceived as time-wasters at the start of term. [Read more...]
If you’re starting a new online business – or transitioning your existing business to the web – and have decided to use online content marketing to promote your business and build your brand, you’re probably hoping it will yield results very quickly. Or even immediately!
Build for success
Online content marketing takes time because your business is coming out of nowhere. Google simple won’t put you on the first page of their search results – unless you’ve got money to throw at a pay-per-click campaign.
My personal recommendation for building your presence online is to start a blog as blogs do pretty well in terms of search engine optimisation (SEO). However, no matter what blog marketing gurus might tell you, even though blogs are great for SEO, you don’t get to the top of Google’s search results overnight.
It takes time and commitment, regular writing, a bit of tweaking to your code, and bloody-mindedness. I could also add a unique voice, an ability to vary your content with different media (text, video, audio) but I don’t want to scare you away.
[Read more...]
