Tag Archive for: Blogging

Lead Liaison

Should I Write Business Blog Posts?

/0 Comments/in /by

Business blogs can be somewhat of a hot topic, as it relates to marketing investments. It might not be for every company, or every employee. Regardless, it’s important to think through the pro’s and con’s of starting (and maintaining!) a business blog before committing.

The Con’s of a Business Blog

  • It’s time consuming. You need to actually put thought into your business blog posts so that they offer value. You also want to strategically pick a topic that will drive traffic to your blog, and therefore your website. Brainstorming topics and content can take time away from other, more pressing tasks. And you’ll likely not see immediate results, so that isn’t very encouraging.
  • It can feel like busywork. Sometimes, you won’t have a fresh idea, yet you’ll still feel compelled to remain on a “content schedule” (which is important to business blog success). Content schedules are usually how marketers organize posts from team members and guest writers. It ensures that they regularly hit that goal. However, it can also lead to boring, uninspired posts if you’re not careful.
  • It goes out of date quickly. As the internet is flooded with business blog posts from companies large and small, readers are trained to look at the date of a post. If it wasn’t within the last year (give or take), and didn’t generate a lot of traffic right off the bat, it’s basically irrelevant. It feels like it was a waste of time and effort.

The Pro’s of a Business Blog

  • It increases search ranking. Google, and other search engines, have a part of their algorithm that rewards you for having lots of pages, rich with keywords, and that have been recently published. Since every blog counts as a page, there is a theory that this can help your company appear more in searches.
  • Still on the topic of search engine optimization (SEO), search engines heavily weigh the number of external sites linking to your website. External links to your business blog prove your content contains helpful, relevant information. A great blog can serve as “link bait” that other websites will be inclined to reference, creating those important external links (source). It can also help you shed light on internal links that are buried deep within your website, by linking them in your copy.
  • It’s an easy way to publish fresh content, and speak directly to your client base. And even if your clients aren’t reading blogs on a regular basis, they most likely are searching Google for answers.
  • It’s a relevant excuse to post to social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) and get your name out there, encouraging brand awareness.
  • If you put proper thought and consideration into your blog post topics and content, it can be a great way to establish your company as thought leaders in your industry. There’s always a conversation going on online, and it’s important to be a part of it. Clients and Prospects will look to you as a reliable resource for information on your industry, and will (hopefully) then come to you when they are ready to buy.
  • Blogs are a relatively cost-efficient marketing investment. Your business probably already has a website. All it really costs is time.
  • It encourages your blog contributors to research, learn, and stay on top of news and trends. What better way to facilitate learning and inspire ideas?

The Conclusion

The decision to spend time on blog posts is going to be unique to your business. If you or your team is not fully on board, it will be like pulling teeth. If your company needs help with improving its Google ratings, and you can dedicate 30-40 minutes a week to come up with fresh content, blogs are wonderful. However, if you have a strong online presence already, and are already considered thought leaders, blogging may be unlikely to show you a true ROI.

Tips

If your organization does decide to publish a company blog, here are a few tips.

  • Request contributions from your colleagues. Ask qualified people on your team to take 20 minutes out of their week to email you a few paragraphs about something they have been thinking about that week, as it relates to your business and industry. You can then do the grunt work of making it blog-ready, and your posts will have more perspective and expertise if intelligent team members agree to contribute.
  • Create a content calendar, and stick to it. Decide how many posts you’d like to do per week, when you plan to post, and where you plan on sharing (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.). Make it a part of your weekly process.
  • Actively promote your content. Your blog won’t shoot to the top of search engines overnight. It takes work, dedication, and intentional promotion.

Interested in how Lead Liaison integrates with your website? Read our post on our Squarespace integration here.

Lead Liaison

Marketing Life Hack 101: Lead Liaison Outsourced Blogs

/0 Comments/in , /by

Outsourced BlogsWhat if you could sit back and produce a blog every week with less than 30 seconds of effort? Have you considered outsourced blogs or using an outsourcing service to complement your blog content with authentic, SEO boosting content?

Here are some predictable (SALES) benefits:

  1. Drive traffic to your site.  Blogs/content drives SEO. SEO drives traffic.
  2. Thought leadership.   Think about it.  The last time you saw an article in a blog, didn’t that person/company quickly become the thought leader in your mind?   The halo principle applies here; and if you aren’t winning the blog game… you’re missing out on sales
  3. Blogs are lasting.   Not only do you drive customers to your site when you release a blog, you win prospects and customers over for the future too!

With Lead Liaison you can outsource blog content with ease. You choose the content,  outsource it to our third party writers and schedule future blog posts. It’s an end-to-end project management interface that walks a marketer (or intern) through the process of requesting content, reviewing it, approving it and automatically publishing it to your website via content management systems like Joomla!, Drupal and WordPress.

The net results:  $ 250 + 10 minutes a month could yield a blog post each week for your company if you were a Lead Liaison Customer.

For the naysayers that say people don’t read blogs anymore.  You just did.

Learn More About Outsourced Blogs
Lead Liaison

How Often Should I Blog for My Business?

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Blogging for your BusinessWhen people ask questions like, “How often should I blog?” or “Should I blog for my business?” they’re typically expecting a concrete answer. Truly, the amount of blogging you do for your business is based on two critical areas. The first is time constraint – as in, how much you’re able to produce for your company site and on what schedule. The second is a question of metrics. If you aren’t able to examine your website and social media data to determine what people want to see from you, this is the first problem you must fix in order to get your site rankings up. Don’t worry about how much you blog if you don’t have the tools to analyze your traffic.

Analyzing the Metrics

If you’re asking yourself “how often should I blog” without any real indicators of what your audience wants to see, you could be wasting your time. You’ll also want to know what keywords people are typing in to find your website so you can evaluable specific opportunities to move up in the Google rankings for those keywords.

For instance, if you run a data analysis business, your website could be popping up for keywords like “risk data analysis” or “web company data analysis.” If you’re ignoring how people get to your site, you could be glossing over information that will tell you more about your core audience. In this case, not only would be losing a valuable opportunity to determine what your content should be about, you’re also losing the opportunity to market on keywords that reach niche demographics.

For this reason, the first step is figuring out whether or not your audience is niched in a way you might not realize – and analyzing your data is the only way to do that.

How Often Should I Blog?

The next factor is time. You have to be realistic here – if you only have two hours of free time a week and you’d rather spend that time drinking coffee and looking out your office window than blogging, you should ask yourself if you’re realistically going to want to devote that time to blogging.

Is blogging important for your business? Absolutely. It gives you something to share on social media, it gives your audience content to relate to, helping you establish trust. It also gives your site an SEO boost if you’re using your keywords properly.

We all have good intentions when it comes to blogging, but if you’re just not going to get 1-2 blogs a week finished – or even a month –it might be time to bring in some reinforcements. Once your site analysis starts to produce some additional data, take a look at what pages or current blog posts your audience is spending the most time on or sharing the most. You can find all this info in your Lead Liaison metrics dashboard.

If you don’t have any content to track yet, create some random content based on your business offerings and track your site visits, social shares and whatever data feedback you can get. If you already know what direction you’d like to go in and can’t fathom creating at least a weekly blog for your business, it might be time to look into some assistance options.

Lead Liaison developed a sophisticated, streamlined approach to content assistance you won’t find elsewhere. Take a look at our content creation services and stop asking, “How often should I blog?” … we’ll take care of it all for you!

Lead Liaison

Blogging as an Inbound Marketing Tool

/0 Comments/in /by

Blog Inbound MarketingWe spotted some research done by Marketing Sherpa and HubSpot highlighting why blogging is a very effective inbound marketing tool. The research sparked the thought of sharing results of our own blogging efforts. At Lead Liaison, we’ve seen tremendous benefit in our blogging campaign. We launched our blogging strategy at the beginning of 2011. Our goal is “blog 104”, blogging twice per week every week of the year (52 weeks x 2 = 104 blogs). We’ve already seen a huge increase in organic SEO website visits because of our strategy. Our website traffic has increased by 243% since we started. Our approach is simple. We’d like to share five things we’ve done and hope this will help your blogging efforts:

5 Rules of Blogging to Increase Inbound Marketing:

1. Use a content management system (CMS) such as Word Press or Drupal for your blogging platform. Many tools are included out of the box to help you optimize every blog page for optimal traffic. For example, tools to link keywords to other pages (something viewed positive by the search engines), defining keywords and description, and more. Lead Liaison uses Word Press. 2. Use Google’s Keyword Tool and pick one keyword per blog page. Optimize your article around the keyword. 3. Blog frequently, keep a “blog 104” or “blog 52” rule in mind. 4. Keep blog posts short. Try to limit blog posts to four paragraphs or less. 5. You don’t always have to write new content. Use 3rd party articles and comment on them in your blog post.

Benefits of Blogging:

As mentioned, blogging has increased Lead Liaison’s traffic considerably. Marketing Sherpa and HubSpot shared a few highlights from their survey on why blogging is an effective inbound marketing tool: • Companies who blog get 55% more visitors on the site. • 55% of companies that blog have acquired a new client because of that. • Blogging is the most effective social marketing tactic. This is directly linked to the popularity of blogs as platforms for optimized organic searches, as well as the blog’s inherent ability to retain the attention of the public. • Most B2B marketing professionals search for key-words and create pertinent content, in line with the subject matter that surrounds them. One of the most popular content platforms is the blog. It’s a given that blogging isn’t easy, but B2B companies should do it (because it works). Blogging will increase website visits, help acquire new clients and boost your social media strategy. For a free consultation on how you can increase ROI of blogging contact Lead Liaison. How has blogging helped your company? Sources: 2011 Survey research by HubSpot (76% of respondents were B2B professionals) and Marketing Sherpa 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report To be alerted of future posts, please click on the RSS button.