Recently, I created a blog strategy for a client that I thought was really pretty good. Maybe a bit aggressive, but after reading Justin Kownacki’s post on “What I’ve Learned From Blogging Weekly Instead of Daily,” I thought that this strategy was pretty close to getting the sort of website traffic that I thought was needed to really make a difference.
It’s really pretty simple, as most things should be, and I know I don’t follow it myself, but as my parents told me several times, “Do as I say, not as I do.” Let me know what you think or if you’ve created similar strategies.
Your Blog should have a purpose and strategy behind it to make sure that it works and doesn’t get blog rot.
Here are a couple questions to consider:
- Why are we doing this?
- because it’s fun?
- to find business?
- to show off our thought leadership?
- increase customer engagement?
- PR for media, news, social networking and other bloggers?
- Improve search engine optimization?
- Provide a way to disseminate information?
- Recognize and promote employees, clients, partners, projects, etc.?
- How will we know it’s successful. What metrics are we setting for ourselves? Can we put numbers to this?
- Analytics, increased traffic, time, pages, etc
- Comments on blogs
- Links to blog postings
- Increased leads
- SEO
- Social Media mentions.
1. Purpose of the blog. The blog should show that you are a collection of experts that are not only knowledgeable in your respective fields, but excited about learning and sharing what you see, know, experience and demonstrate in your key business areas of expertise.
2. Solve a problem or identify a solved problem. This is somewhat related to number 1. Part of your strategy should be solving a problem, or another way to think about this is responding to issues from clients or to just find a way to be useful and relevant – with examples.
3. Be the Subject Matter Experts (SME). This will help determine your content strategy and help build your brand. Demonstrate what you’ve done and how it’s improved our success or our clients’ success. Wave your own flag a bit.
4. Optimize our content for SEO. Do a bit more work to get the right titles and keywords for the post. Find keywords that support the blog and the post.
5. Be honest, encourage 2 way conversations. Create content that is open and honest and is truly trying to offer solutions. Give of yourselves without needing anything in return accept happy readers.
6. Monitor the world. Create searches on keyword or clients to watch what people are saying in the world. Re-tweet, create a post about it or tell your client. If there’s a client you’re trying to land, monitor what’s being said about them to find a way to respond. See Number 3 “Be the SME.â€.
Some bullets on process:
- Address a business need
- Participate in other industry specific blogs, LinkedIn answers, business.com answers. Guest post both ways whenever possible.
- Encourage online reviews of your work
- Be strategic not trendy
- Focus on long-term engagement, not a short term hit.
- Social media is NOT an experiment. It is a proven, strategic, integrated part of your website.
- Test, Measure, Optimize, Repeat.
- Frequency: 1 major article per week, several supporting per week – create a schedule and trade off.
- Social connections. Connect the blog to pre-determined set of social media outlets. Don’t do all of them, but go deep in the ones we do.
- Take into account customers, competition, your Unique Value Proposition.
