Online Marketing & Communications Agency, Stockholm Sweden
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.
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Great copywriting is meant to prompt visitors to your website to take action like sign-up for an email newsletter or purchase a product on a landing page.
Content marketing, on the other hand, is copywriting’s big brother; it’s blogs, podcasts, ebooks, white papers and video that are created directly for the purpose of marketing.
If you’re new to digital marketing, a first time business owner or just setting yourself up as a consultant, before you think about investing in professional copywriting services to tighten up or even create the copy on your website, it’s important to understand that online marketing is not just an online CV or newspaper ad.
Online content marketing, for example, is NOT:
A PR executive was asking me the other day about the time it takes for a content marketing campaign to yield results. Especially when it involves social media.
I know firsthand that it can take a long time – but a lot of it depends on what outposts you’ve already got established on the Net.
For example, if you’ve already got a relatively successful and search engine optimised blog that’s already doing well in search engine results pages you can quickly generate organic traffic and funnel it to your content marketing efforts.
Not getting the results you want?
If you’re still not convinced about the value a blog can bring to your business, check out HubSpot’s recent study of 1,400 customers’ inbound marketing activities: The State of Inbound Lead Generation (free download).
The report reveals that businesses that blog regularly generate more leads than those that don’t blog.
Have you got enough leads
The tipping point seems to be 24+ articles published for leads to start coming in. And, unsurprisingly, the more articles you publish, the more leads seem to come along.
The reason blogs work better than “ordinary” websites is partly because they help your business increase the number of pages it has indexed in Google. With more pages indexed, and more keywords ranking in Google, you’re more likely to be found.
Blogs are also typically very good at Search Engine Optimization (SEO) straight out of the box, although there are things you can to do improve them even more.
Finally, blogs can be a great way of building and sustaining relationships with visitors to your site – although Facebook Pages seem to be increasingly popular places for this now.
Although you might be tempted to rush out and start blogging right away on the basis of the HubSpot report, it’s important to bear in mind a few things to begin with:
1. www.yourdomain.com
Host your blog yourself. Don’t run a business blog on one of the free services like www.wordpress.com or blogger.com. You want all the google juice for yourself! It’s even better if your blog name / domain name includes your keyword: E.g. A dog trainer’s dream domain would be www.dogtrainer.com because people look for “dog trainer” in Google.
2. Design Matters
Although you don’t have to spend masses of money on getting a custom design, the more professional it looks the better. Appearances count, especially in B2B business blogging. Don’t just take my word for it.
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by Beth Hrusch, Senior Editor at Interact Media, a business blog writing service that teaches writing tips and best practices.
Many of you who write business blogs to promote your company already know that your blog should be search engine optimized. As part of a content marketing strategy, business blogs are just another content type that can be used to get the word out, generate buzz and demonstrate your authority. So, if you want people to find them, you need help from the search engines.
However, the rules of SEO have changed over the years, in response to the increasing sophistication of search engines and the growing demand of Internet users for high-quality content that answers their needs. This means no more keyword-stuffed fluff and salesy verbiage. It also means that when you write your blogs, you need to be aware of the changing nature of SEO, and stay up-to-date with the latest wisdom.
Here are 5 SEO tips for optimizing your business blogs for better search engine rankings:
Target your market by researching the best keywords for your business (obvious, yes!). But, when you’re done choosing your primary keywords, make sure to create a list of related, secondary terms that will help search engines index your blogs properly. For example, a pet groomer might want “pet grooming†as a primary keyword, and words such as “dogâ€, “catâ€, “paws’ and “claws†as secondary words, to be scattered throughout the content.
These secondary keywords usually occur naturally in your text, but it’s a good idea to make a mental list first, then check to make sure you’ve incorporated them into your content. Without secondary keywords, your content runs the risk of being indexed improperly.
Market Samurai is a great tool for researching keywords.
There are varying opinions regarding what kind of title is best for SEO purposes. Some feel that a clever, catchy title grabs more attention, while others like to stick to strictly SEO optimized titles for business blogs—ones that include the keyword but can be dull. The ideal solution is, of course, to combine both concepts. The best business blog titles are both attention-grabbing and search engine optimized.
Titles are important to the search engines, so spend some time on them. Interesting titles, and ones that are SEO-friendly, are not mutually exclusive!
Many people still don’t recognize that search engines reward sites that produce fresh, updated content. The nature of blogging lends itself to this, but if you think that posting just once to your business blog every couple of weeks is going to help you rank, you may be disappointed with your results. Yes, blogging takes time and maintenance. Many companies assign the business blog to an employee or group of employees who can continuously product new material. Others outsource their blogs to professional copywriters.
Whoever is responsible for your company blog, they should be aware that the more often a blog is updated with new content, the more often the search engines will come around to index you. Each post is another opportunity for you to rank for your keywords, and fresh content also tells search engines that your site is active and interested in staying up-to-date, so make sure to keep up with it.
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Last month I wrote about Scribe – literally a month and a day ago.
Since buying this useful WordPress plugin I’ve striven to make sure the majority of my posts here at Jon Buscall.com hit the 100 percent mark, following Scribe’s recommendations.
I haven’t really spent much time checking my keywords in Google since I started working with Scribe (NB. No affiliate links anywhere on Jon Buscall.com), but low and behold, today, I discovered that one of my keyword phrases had gone from absolutely nowhere (page 7) to Number 2 in Google’s search results.
I’m not going to share exactly which words I’m talking about here, obviously, and having checked the number of projected daily hits I’ll get from this with Market Samurai (a keyword tool I also shelled out for a month ago), I doubt it will make me rich. But I wanted to give some feedback on some of the key data I’m seeing in my first month of using Scribe (in conjunction with Market Samurai) after discussing its merits with other marcom folks.
As well as my main keywords and phrases performing better, in the last 30 days I’ve witnessed:
Facebook surpassed Google in the USA in terms of user traffic for the week ending March 13.
According to the boffins at analytics firm Hitwise, Facebook picked up 7.07 percent of all U.S. web traffic, whilst Google snagged 7.03 percent.
Looking at the figures another way, Facebook increased 185 percent compared to the same week last year, whereas visits to Google increased only 9 percent.
Although Facebook has overtaken Google before, this is the first week that the search engine giant has been beaten into second place for seven days.
See what else is going on!
I wasn’t sure if this was because Facebook has been talked up so much in marketing and communication circles or because people are genuinely using Facebook as a regular part of their lives.
Whilst I do think there’s a lot of value in having an active Facebook Fan Page, it’s important that we don’t focus solely on putting our energies as businesses into building a presence on one site. Particularly a site that we don’t own and don’t really have much control over.
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As the owner of a Toyota Verso I’ve watched the latest crisis to hit the motor industry with more than a passing interest.
Based in Sweden I haven’t really heard very much from my Toyota dealer but from surfing the web I’ve seen Toyota respond in different ways to the crisis.
Toyota USA went on YouTube which struck me as particularly shrewd. It made me think about how:
With YouTube now the second biggest search engine online, it makes sense to put your crisis management communications on the site.
In times of crisis you need to communicate your message out there, no matter what.
Your online channels should include:
or which ever social media site your target audience / customers are hanging out at online.
Don’t you agree?
Creating cool online content isn’t worth a thing if no one’s reading your business blog.
Enter Scribe – the new WordPress plugin from Brian Clark and his team.
Geared to WordPress users who run themes like Thesis, Headway and Hybrid or the indispensable All in One SEO plugin, Scribe sits in your dashboard and tells you how to improve your writing for search engines.
As Brian Clark puts it “it’s like having an SEO expert as an editorial assistant.”
The idea is that now you can write your daily blog posts with an online buddy there to whisper SEO tips as you write.
Neat, huh?
After struggling with some silly sign-up issues (I’m based in Stockholm, Sweden, after all), I managed to get hold of a copy today and my first impression is that this is a game-changer.
Once you’ve signed up you get a plugin that you upload to your Plugin directory in your installation of WordPress.
After that’s done you activate the plugin and enter the API Key you received when your subscription was confirmed.
Then all you have to do fire up a new post and you’ll immediately notice a new field on the right of the WordPress composition window geared to SEO.
To test things out, I analysed yesterday’s post: 5 Reasons Your Business Blog is Failing.
My initial SEO score was a measly 72%, even though I’m pretty adept at writing SEO copy if Google SERPs are anything to go on.
Anyway, my pride intact and my interest high, I glanced through Scribe’s summary.
Not quite a perfect score, eh?
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