Every single person who’s interested in ranking his or her company on top of Google search engine results for specific keywords, knows the importance of blogging and creating great and original content for their company website.
These days, a lot of people use blogs for business purposes. Why? – Because, next to giving you the opportunity to capitalize on specific queries and create great backlinks, a blog allows its writer to share his or her knowledge and expertise about a certain subject with the world, and thus help guide even the most educated users or potential clients to make smarter decisions (meaning, purchase their products).
If you have an online e-commerce platform, you’re basically just selling your stuff from a fancy digital cart. So, when people finish up buying certain goods, if they don’t need anything else from you, they’re gonna leave your site and never come back. Your blog is what keeps them coming back for more. It keeps providing your targeted audience with additional value on a weekly basis by making it possible for them to form strong relationships with your brand and see you as an expert in your field.
Judging by some of the changes that Google is making to its algorithm, I think that in the near future blogs and content marketing in general will become even more important for every business who wants to gain something out of its online presence.
Why Don’t Some of Your Favorite Companies Blog?
Because they don’t really know how to run a blog. Next to that, they don’t really understand all the benefits behind blogging.
As a person who has been in this content marketing game for quite some time now, I came into contact with all sorts of different serious businessman who have one thing in common – they see my line of work as nothing more than a form of advertising. They think that the same set of metrics they use for advertising is going to apply for content marketing as well. You and me both know that they couldn’t be more wrong.
More often than not, these people set unrealistic goals for their content marketing team and before you can say blog post, they rain all over their parade and shut down their company blog, thinking that the ROI is too small to even bother with it.
Like I already wrote on this blog, content marketing isn’t just a tool for collecting clicks and increasing website traffic. No, it’s far more than that. If done right, it can really help you build up your brand authority.
If you think about it, there’s no better place to broadcast all sorts of different promotional campaigns and information about your company than on your official blog. It’s a place that’s solely dedicated to making sure that people who have any interest in the services or product that you’re selling find out what you’re all about, and why should they do business with you, instead of your competitors.
There are a lot of ways on how you could stimulate people to make a better connection with your brand via blog. One of the most popular ways is to start writing posts that showcase your expertise and help your potential clients see just how serious you really are about your work.
Writing a blog that can actually help people with their problems and issues about specific subjects or scenarios, has proven to be a great tool for large numbers of currently successful businessmen.
A lot of today’s active buyers are influenced by content. So when your potential customers are looking to make a purchase, and they’re looking for information, be it reviews, essays, features, and benefits, they are looking for content online to influence their decisions. So, if you want to motivate them to try your products or services, you have to create consistent and relevant content that influences their purchase decisions.
To some this might seem like a lot of work, don’t get me wrong, it is, but what you’re doing here is crucial for your business. You’re finding new ways on how to locate new clients, educate them about your service and expertise, and thus help them see you as a credible source for doing business with.
The biggest reason why content marketing fails is because it stops or it isn’t consistent. Remember, the content that you produce and share with your readers is like a showroom of your expertise. You don’t want them to see it as empty or filled with outdated junk.
How Do I Achieve Success Via Blogging?
By writing what your audience wants to read about, instead of what you like to write about. In this section of the post I’m not going to write about how to amplify your content. No, I’m going to write about how to create something that’s of real value to you and your targeted audience. If you’re interested in learning how to maximize the reach of your hard work, you should watch this video on MOZ. Ben Lloyd and Brian Rauschenbach really did a great job here explaining all tactics they use to make sure that their content lives up to its full potential.
Let’s get something straight. People don’t really care about you or your brand, they care about themselves. Before starting to create any type of content, you must first fully understand that. If they don’t see some benefits in what you’re sending their way, they’re not going to engage.
It doesn’t matter what you’re selling or what kind of life experiences you’re sharing with them, people will always first ask themselves this same question: “What’s in it for me?”
Stop Focusing on Vanity Metrics, Provide Your Audience With Something That’s of Real Value to Them
I found this research online which states that just two in ten people who invest in content marketing know how to effectively measure their efforts in this field. Shocking, right?
These other eight from our group fail at content marketing only because they focus on so-called “vanity metrics”. Getting likes, shares, Google pluses and retweets doesn’t mean much if you’re not building an audience. Your goal here isn’t to grab someone’s attention for a couple of minutes. No, you want to position yourself in people’s eyes as someone who knows what he’s talking about, and to whom they should frequently come for answers about specific problems.
Most companies make the same mistake here. They don’t have a real plan with their content marketing. They just create random posts, hoping that they’ll go viral. “Spray and pray” is the term we in the business use to describe this kind of content strategy. Why? – Well, I think it’s self-explanatory.
There’s nothing I hate more than when I meet with a client and he starts to ask me question like how many viral posts a month can I guarantee his company, if they sign me as their content manager. First of all, having not one, but hundred viral posts doesn’t mean anything if people aren’t really investing their time into reading your content. A while back, Fahrad Manjoo wrote this great post on Slate.com where he pointed out that a lot of content that is heavily shared online is never read in its entirety. Same goes for those most linked-to pieces. They are neither shared nor read from top to bottom.
Knowing this, we can pretty much now agree that creating viral posts shouldn’t be on top of our content marketing list. Instead of that, we should focus a lot more on capitalizing on user behavior and anticipating their intent. The goal here is to provide your targeted audience with something that will entertain them, as well as help them solves their current problems. This is the recipe for implementing an effective content marketing strategy into your blogging. This kind of setup will later on help you earn quality links, increase your brand awareness and position yourself as an expert in your field. As Julie Joyce, owner of Link Fish Media, wrote in her post for Search Engine Land, in order to get it right, you must invest your time and effort into each ingredient of this magical recipe.
Creating a great company blog is not something that can be created overnight. No, it takes a lot of time and effort, but, in the end, it’s all worth. Don’t give up your blog, not at least you really try to make it work. If you figure out how to anticipate your potential users intent, I promise you, you’ll see your business grow into a real powerhouse on the web.
That’s all for now. I hope this post helped you better understand all the benefits behind owning a successful company blog. If have anything to add to this subject, feel free to write your thoughts in the comments section below. If not, well – thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule to read my content.
See you again,
Kindest regards,
Goran @ AltusHost B.V.
The author is highly qualified and writes blog posts weekly.
