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Do you have a business blog?

Are you happy with the marketing role your blog plays?

Many businesses consider blogs “a cost of doing business,” or code for “We’re not sure what it does but we’re afraid to stop doing it.”

In this article I will explore why and how to make your blog the hub of your content marketing plan?

Why make your blog your content marketing hub?

To put a slightly different spin on what Chris Brogan says, blogs are your home base; they are at the center of your content marketing system.

Whether you’re a small business or a Fortune 100 company, blogs should be at the heart of your content marketing because blogs fuel social media, search optimization and the sales process.

The top five reasons to use a blog as your content hub are:

Blogs are owned media. Your blog content is yours. You’re not at the whim of changes in the rules of third-party platforms, such as the recent changes to LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. A blog has the added bonus of providing an always-on crisis management channel to get your message out 24/7.

Blogs are a form of social media. Through social sharing, comments and guest posts, blogs provide the basis for building a targeted community. In fact, HubSpot‘s research showed that blogs top other forms of social media for effectiveness.

Blogs support search optimization. Because of their structure, blogs are search-friendly. You can enhance this by focusing each article on a specific keyword phrase and link to internal and external content.

Blogs drive sales. To support sales, write blog posts about how to use your products and show them in context to provide prospects and customers with product information they need. Then link to your specific product pages to support the sales process.

Blogs incorporate a streamlined CMS (content management system). At its core, blogs are an easy-to-use, low-cost content system.

7 Tips to Make Your Blog Your Content Marketing Hub

To make your blog an accountable aspect of your content marketing plan, here are seven steps to get on track.

#1: Build a Strong Blogging Foundation to Support Your Content Marketing

In order for your blog to be the center of a strong content marketing plan, you’ll need to make sure you build your blog on a strong foundation.

One of your first decisions is how to set up your blog. Make sure you use your own URL. The best option is to use a self-hosted WordPress blog. Don’t use a free hosting option such as Blogger or WordPress

Even better, incorporate your blog into your overall business website. 

You’ll need to get technology resources to support your blogging efforts. Blogging should be integrated into your website. For most businesses, this translates to ongoing technology support, rather than a few minutes of someone’s time when they’re available

These are essential to a strong foundation.

#2: Know Your Audience

Before you begin blogging, you’ll need to know whom you’re writing for and what they’re interested in reading. One way to find out more about your audience is to use marketing personas.

Create a set of marketing personas to clarify and give a personality to the people you’re trying to reach. It’s easier to write for someone you know than a faceless mass. Incorporate their content consumption habits and their social media proclivities.

Marketing personas are important for your blog, as well as other forms of content. If you’ve got distinctly different audiences you’re trying to reach, consider creating more than one blog and related content marketing denver

#3: Develop Your Content Marketing Plan

Several components come into making a good content marketing plan. Here’s what you’ll want to include in your content marketing plan.

Map out your promotional calendar

Start by planning your organization’s marketing events for the year and use public holidays where appropriate. The objective is to create hooks around which to develop your content.

In addition to seasons and holidays, consider annual events that apply to your product offering. Include relevant tradeshows and conferences, as well as social media participation.

Outline your major content offerings

Based on the events selected in your promotional calendar, decide what major content offerings you’ll create such as conference talks, ebooks and webinars.

Plan ongoing columns and related communications

Think like a magazine and brainstorm regular offerings such as news roundups, customer of the week and interviews. Develop a set of columns to offer either weekly or every other week. This provides the basic structure for your blog’s editorial calendar. Include themes such as research. Consider how you’ll offer this content to other segments of your audience such as in your regular emails.

Create an editorial calendar

Integrate your events, major pieces of content and regular content offerings into one calendar so you can manage the creation process. It helps to make this part of someone’s job description.

Plan extended content usage

Once you’ve integrated your planned content, assess where you can extend, create or reuse content from your major content marketing offerings on your blog and vice versa.

For example, to promote Content Marketing World, Lee Odden put together an ebook, 29 Content Marketing Secrets and the Secret Agents Who Shared Them. He used the information from the ebook to write 11 separate blog posts and an overview post. In addition, he posted the ebook on SlideShare and encouraged participants to share the content.

Blogging and content marketing – when compared many people will think they’re one and the same because aren’t they both just about creating content for a website? While in a sense that may be true, blogging only scratches the surface of content creation. enterprise seo agency goes much deeper than this and should drive all of your digital marketing efforts so that you’re delivering content that is not only well-thought-out, but valuable to your audience.

In this blog, we delve into the differences between blogging and content marketing so you can get an understanding of how they work with each other, and how they fit into your marketing strategy.

Originating in the mid-90s, the first blog to be created is widely considered to be links.net – a website created by college student Justin Hall where he could share web links and photos he found interesting.¹ Fun fact; if you google links.net you’ll find that the site is still active!

From then on many other blogs started to appear and as websites like WordPress and TypePad were created, the popularity of blogging grew. Nowadays blogging is still a popular medium for many people to publish their content, whether it be personal or professional – but what exactly is blogging?

HubSpot defines a blog as:

A section of your business's website but, unlike the rest of your website, you need to update the blog section frequently by adding new posts. Additionally, your blog is a tool that allows you to engage more with an audience, either by analysing how many readers share your blog posts on social or by allowing readers to comment on your individual posts. In this way, a blog is more like a two-way conversation than the rest of your website. However, a blog can also be an entire website, and often is, if the blog is for personal use alone – for instance, a travel blog.²

A blog or ‘blogging’ is a great way to connect more with your target audience and provide them with the information they’re searching for whether that be in answer to a question they have, or additional information on their topic of interest.

Content Marketing

sticky_notesContent marketing has been around since the mid-80s with the launch of John Deere’s agricultural specific magazine ‘The Furrow’ – you can read more about this here. Since then many brands and businesses alike have gotten on board with content marketing and see the value that it delivers to their marketing strategies.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is the creation and sharing of images, videos, blogs that are informational in nature and garner interest in a product or service without being salesy.

The Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as:

A strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.³

Content marketing is all about a focussed approach to marketing and centres on creating content that will attract the right type of audience for your business or brand, and ultimately drive them to take the desired action. Content marketing consists of many different forms of marketing and can include blogging. Other types of content marketing include:

Case studies

Project features

How-to videos

Infographics

Guides

Whitepapers/studies

What does this mean for your marketing strategy?

Now that we know the difference between blogging and content marketing denver, how does this affect your marketing strategy and the activities you choose to do? Blogging is a great way of getting your message across however it shouldn’t be your sole method of marketing – it should fit into your overall content marketing strategy.

Understand your buyer’s journey

When you start looking at a content strategy for your business it’s important to first consider your buyer’s journey.

The buyer’s journey consists of a three-step process:

Awareness Stage: The buyer realises they have a problem.

Consideration Stage: The buyer defines their problem and researches options to solve it.

Decision Stage: The buyer chooses a solution.⁴

Everyday the SEO field is becoming more and more competitive, So the results of this study well give us a more clear idea of which strategies are working well for enterprise-level SEO teams, which ones are failing and how companies are preparing for mobile-first search.

The spending budget on SEO

a monthly budget for SEO activity

The figure above shows how much companies spend on SEO. Here are some surprising finds on the enterprise level:

11% of enterprise SEOs had a monthly SEO budget of less than $1,000

20% of enterprise SEOs had a budget of $5,000 to $10,000 per month

45% of enterprise SEOs had a budget of $20K+

Most important activities for enterprise seo company

A chart of the most important SEO activities companies focuses on.

Companies are mainly focusing on these four categories:

Technical SEO – Back-end optimization, including DNS settings, structure, indexability, processing speed, caching, site security, and mobile functionality.

Content Development – Ensuring that the site has an abundance of unique, easy-to-navigate information that is rich in keywords and is refreshed on a regular basis.

Traffic Analysis – Examining search traffic, site performance relative to competitors, search intent, visitors per keyword, time on site, bounce rate, and other usage patterns.

Link-building – Earning off-page backlinks, social media traction, and brand mentions from influencers and authoritative sites.

The survey question asked respondents to rank the four categories in order of priority, from 1 (most important) to 4 (least important). Although the weighted responses were consistent across all business sizes, looking at the actual answers reveals that there is still some disagreement among our SEO specialists. For instance, although they were the minority, 10.6% of the respondents ranked link-building highest.

The most critical issues facing enterprise SEOs

A chart of issues enterprise SEOs face

According to the data, it seems like developing content was the top issue since nearly 40% of all responses chose that. However, enterprise-level companies are less concerned with outreach and link-building than small and medium sized businesses. For enterprise-level SEOs, mobile responsiveness and user experience are more urgent.

However, that does not mean link-building is not an issue to enterprise-level companies; all of the SEOs are feeling the same pain when it comes to link-building. When asked which strategy is most difficult to execute, each group chose getting high-quality links by a substantial margin.

So what is the most successful strategy? All of our respondents agreed that technical onsite optimization was their most successful SEO strategy over the past 12 months. However, after that, small and large businesses had very different experiences. Enterprise SEOs found focusing on user experience and evergreen content to be most effective. Small businesses got bigger boosts from blogging and link-building.