Your blog writing services should make the rest of your marketing goals dance!
We get a lot of requests for blog writing services delivered in a vacuum. Like social media management, businesses are seeing blogging as more of a necessity than ever, but there are gaps in the approach by many that are making it more difficult than they realize.
It puts a lot of pressure on blogging to ask for "engagement" or "thought leadership," because those things by themselves are immeasurable, and really, they don't do anything to move the needle.
Simply put, blogging should lead to sales, and we should be thinking about it in those terms first, middle, and last, so we can determine whether the strategy is working. Thought leadership and engagement will inevitably follow, but are not where we should be placing any emphasis so early in the game.
Here are 7 ways to harness the power of blog writing services so your sales has something to smile about:
Your blogging strategy should encompass the bigger picture.
Blogging should not occur in a silo, meaning, it should be part of a bigger picture strategy
1. Say "NO" to freelancers
I've been a freelancer. I know the ropes... and I've worked WITH freelancers. I can say without a doubt that there are some talented writers out there who can churn out some high quality articles.
So, what's the problem? Simply that when you hire a freelancer, you are expected to lead them, and if you don't have a bigger-picture strategy in play with all of the other things I'm going to talk about in this post, you're going to end up with silo'd articles that will have very little impact on your bottom line.
In addition, your blogger should be apart of the overall strategy development, which means sitting in on strategy sessions, and spending a decent amount of time learning your products and service offerings. If you don't give them this insight, they'll end up BS'ing their way through it, and it WILL come across in your posts.
Extra sessions like that equals extra pay, and the whole point of using a freelancer was to get it on the cheap, no?
I remember early on in my time as a freelance blogger having a SaaS client that had absolutely no background or experience in marketing, and he refused to let me in on any of his strategy sessions. Week in and week out I was assigned topics that made absolutely no sense from a marketing standpoint, and even though he was thrilled with my work, the outcome was dismal.
Get somebody who understands marketing and that you plan on having included in your planning sessions. They should know your business inside and out.
2. SEO
Why blog? Well, SEO for one.
Every blog you post is indexed by Google. Each one has a unique title, meta-tags, and keywords. If you do it right, you'll have links and CTAs from your posts to your website and landing pages that lead to conversion forms (more on fluid marketing HERE).
If your content is compelling, it will even help you land some nice inbound links.
If you're going to go to the trouble of optimizing your site for the search engines, you ought to have a forward-moving game plan as well, and that comes from blogging. Whomever you have in this role should understand SEO concepts, so they are using keywords appropriately (not over stuffing like I see so many do), and increasing your ranking for the best ones.
3. Blog topics that mean something
Coming up with blog topics is difficult, and there are two rules we should follow:
1) Blog for your readers first
2) Blog around keywords
Never forget about your readers. If you focus solely on SEO benefits, it's going to fail. Google will catch on, and your readers will bounce before they do anything meaningful, like convert into leads by subscribing or downloading content.
Your marketing objectives should keep this in mind, because if it's traffic volume you're looking for and not customers, you'll have success on paper (at first) with low quality content, but it'll never manifest itself in the form of sales.
4. Evergreen
Your business is here to stay, so lets have your blog writing services focus on topics that will be relevant in 2, 3, or 10 years time as much as possible.
For some industries, doing so is harder than others. For example, in accounting, it's helpful to blog around tax law changes occurring, so people come to your site to read about them. However, that doesn't mean we can't mix in posts about rules that haven't changed in a long time or generally misconceived concepts related to certain tax incentives, such as the R&D tax credit.
Going evergreen means that blog will surface visitors, leads, and customers for years to come... It means that you'll be able share it in social media whenever you feel like it, and even go back and republish it years down the line.
5. Distribution
If a blog post falls in the forest, and nobody is around to read it, does it make it to Mashable?
Okay, so three topics ago, I said blogs will help your SEO, which is absolutely, unequivocally true... but don't stop there, because organic search is only PART of the traffic you want on your website.
What about social media? Are you actively sharing your blog posts (amidst carefully curated content from others) on Twitter, Google+, Facebook, and LinkedIn? You should be. This is how you jump start everything.
6. Easy to subscribe
So, I'm reading a blog post the other day, and I'm totally digging the content, and I'm thinking that I want more like it. So, I go to subscribe... but there was no field for it... anywhere.
Being the creep that I am, I inspected the page to see how it was built and saw that it was WordPress. Isn't WordPress built FOR blogging? So, why isn't it automatically in there to subscribe? What if I want to subscribe?
I chuckled, closed the window, and never returned... not because I didn't want more from that author, but because they made it too much work to follow him.
7. Let a blog be a blog
Your blog is about providing education to your readers, NOT advertising or news stories about your business.
Let your blog do what it's supposed to do and put news where it belongs... on the News page. You will lose readers fast if you try disguising those other ideas as blog posts.
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