“You should have a blog.” If this advice sounds familiar to you, you’re not alone. Having a blog seems to be everyone’s solution to every business challenge from upping your SEO to improving the office coffee.
True, substantive blog posts improve SEO by providing Google with fresh content. They give visibility to your company as a thought leader and the best choice to solve your customers’ problems. Blogs bring eyeballs to your site and dollars to your bottom line. “Companies who blog receive 97 percent more links to their website, according to Hubspot. In addition, Hubspot reports that “Marketers who prioritize blogging are 13 times more likely to achieve a positive ROI on their efforts. For those of you who are still not convinced, you’ll find many, many more juicy stats that prove the value of blogs in Hubspot’s report ‘State of Inbound 2017’.”
But not every blog post has that power. Those that offer consumable content that drives ROI are:
- Long enough to be engaging. The average word count of top-ranking content (in Google) is between 1,140-1,285 words.
- Interesting enough to make readers feel like they’ve invested their time wisely and making them want to share it with others.
- Unique enough that they feel they’ve learned something new.
- Snackable enough that they remember a few choice phrases or points. I love the concept of “snackable content.” This is content that includes a few memorable ideas that people want to chew up and digest. It’s also content they’ll want to share with their friends to make them look smart.
So, you’ve written your interesting, unique and snackable 1200 word post. Now what? Are you done? No. You are not. We’ve found that the blog is just the start of things. We’re big believers in putting well-crafted blog content to work in other ways. Here’s how:
1) Eblasts – As soon as one of our blog posts hits our site, we promote it with an eblast to our ever-growing Constant Contact list. Those on the list include clients (yes, clients); prospects; referrals sources; people we meet at networking functions and people we’d like to know. This is NOT the old school newsletter. These blasts focus on news these folks can use. So, instead of an eblast that says, “Hey, we’ve got a new blog post you’ll want to read,” we offer a bit of the blog’s content to make them want to read it. These eblasts are designed to draw people into the site. They contain a sample of the blog post and a link to the full post on our site.
2) Traditional media – We take the contents of our blogs and repurpose it as feature stories for news media like business publications and websites. We’ve also found the contents have generated requests for us to serve as guest bloggers and conference presenters. Everyone’s looking for good, substantive content. Why shouldn’t it come from us?
3) Social media – We push a blog’s most snackable content through our firm’s social media, positioning us as thought leaders. Once a blog is posted, we schedule a series of social media posts built around the gems it contains and linking to the post on our site.
The bottom line is this: The concept of blogs as SEO magnets is well-documented and well-proven. But, don’t overlook the other things posts can do for your organization. Why not promote the posts in the same way you support your products? Why not use their contents in different ways to solidify relationships with your customers and entice prospects?
If your blogs are informative enough, you can expect readers to pass them along to others. These pass-alongs serve as endorsements of your company and incentives to do business with you.
Well-crafted blogs should do more than sit on your site waiting for a nice search engine to ask them to dance. They should go over and ask a new partner to party. Heck, they should lead!
