Leads are often hailed as the lifeblood of a business – and while not everyone will agree with that statement, leads are extremely important to the success and growth of your business
There are all kinds of lead generation activities, such as email marketing and social media marketing, but one of the top sources of leads is content marketing – especially, blogging.
In this blog post, I’m going to talk about the reasons why blogging is one of the best lead generation tools for businesses – and if you’re convinced, make sure to check out the Quick Win here to learn all about how exactly you can use blogging for lead generation.
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Going viral is something of a dream for us B2B content creators and marketers. You’d be lying if you deny that, plain and simple
And why not? Creating original, high-quality content is a monumental task in itself, let alone marketing it and making it stand out. The thought of our content spreading across the internet like wildfire is often what keeps us going.
However, for B2B marketers, achieving virality with a well-written blog post is even more inconceivable. That’s because our audience is highly targeted professionals and business leaders, and our content is not meant to entertain or amuse. Going viral with a piece of content is somewhat akin to finally getting our "big break" in the digital industry, after writing countless blog posts, outreach emails, and what have you.
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Many marketers and businesses don’t really put together a detailed strategy to outline their blogging objectives
Content marketing is well-known as one of the most effective forms of business promotion; and out of all content marketing tactics, blogging is arguably the best-performing and most cost-effective tactic.
In my latest Quick Win for Smart Insights, I show you how to develop a blogging strategy from start to finish. You’ll learn:
Why blogging is such an effective form of content marketing
How to set quality objectives for your blogging strategy
How to perform content and keyword research to improve your content
How to put together an editorial calendar and come up with great headlines and topics for your blog
How to create a promotional strategy for your blog to improve your overall results
As well as how to measure your results from blogging so you can improve your blogging strategy and…
Chart of the day: New research reveals that bloggers are getting results across a few metrics, whilst most are blogging less often than daily
Over 1000 bloggers took part in a survey for Andy Crestodina of Orbit Media, they were asked a range of questions about how often they blog, the types of media they use, blog promotion and whether blogs are delivering results for them.
As in the B2B world (and even in B2C) blogging is such a commonly used technique, which often gets a lot of time from marketers, but does it work? The results are positive.
Bloggers are blogging less often, most bloggers publish weekly rather than daily, but bloggers are spending more time than ever writing blog posts. The message "quality over quality" certainly seems to be true. Bloggers are not publishing loads of content for the sake of it, there is a clear focus on quality. Better, longer…
Increasing your reach by getting off your B2B blog and writing for others
The benefits of business blogging and personal blogging are well-known in terms of improving search visibility, delivering traffic and raising your profile but often it is hard to get audiences to come back to a blog on a business web site and engage.
A standard approach most business bloggers adopt is to seed blog content around the web - tapping into social media platforms, websites, groups, hubs and communities - with the goal of getting people to click the link and return to the website to take action.
Blogging, in this sense is, a very worthwhile activity. But it also a little bit spammy and has to be managed carefully to avoid coming across as being self-absorbed.
As most companies are blogging in order to improve visibility, stimulate greater website traffic and foster deeper engagement - a more inclusive blogging distribution strategy is…
Getting noticed with 'Three S Timing' for content marketing campaigns
In my previous article covering the core tenets of the Watertight Marketing Framework, I looked at earning the right to a person's time. This can be achieved by developing a range of time-chunked materials will help you to steadily increase the amount of a person’s time they are willing to give you. Today, I'm moving on to deciding exactly when you put that material out there. That is, what month of the year, what day of the week, and what time of the day?
Once you have your range of materials mapped to a buying decision in place, you'll need to prepare a content marketing timing plan for its release. You can do this simply and powerfully with Three S Timing:
Selectivity
Scheduling
Seasonality
Selectivity – showing up when they’re in a buying mood
You’ll…
A 5 step process for creating or refreshing a business blog
Whether launching a new WordPress blog or, as in my case, relaunching an existing blog, there are many issues to consider and a number of ways to approach the project.
Having recently redeveloped and redesigned a WordPress blog, to help other marketers, I thought I would share some of the considerations that we took into account. I've split the project up into two parts; this first post focuses on the objectives, planning and resource considerations. The more "hands-on" functionality and implementation considerations will follow in Part 2.
To add a bit of context, 3 years ago, a brand I now work on, set up a skiing blog called Ski-buzz, run on WordPress. Set up on a free theme and with minimal amounts of additional resource or budget it started life quite slowly. Unbranded, sitting on its own (totally separate domain) and growing slowly…
How to promote your company blog to reach a larger audience
Writing a blog doesn't end when you hit the publish button. Far from it. In this third part of our series on business blogging, René Power reviews the best approaches to seeding and distributing your blog content - giving it the best chance of being seen by the people you're targeting.
1. Promote it on your website
Add a snippet to your home page. It provides a sign post for visitors and also offers some additional search engine optimisation benefits if you have considered your keywords carefully.
2. Index your blog with major blog directories
Ensure your blog is listed in as many blog directories as possible, particularly those with specialist sections. Why? Backlinks to your blog are still one of the most important factors in determining how visible your blog (and…
8 key issues to review to make sure your blog supports company goals
This is the second in a series of blog posts aimed at helping business bloggers. The first post explored getting started and avoiding writer's block, sometimes an issue at this time of year. In this post, René Power examines the key elements of a successful business blog.
If you're running a business targeting other businesses in 2012, it is likely you have either read about or been advised to introduce a blog to your website. The benefits of business blogging are much chronicled - Dave and Chris both covered it from a commercial and SEO viewpoint.
But with a bewildering choice of over 250 million websites and 130 million blogs (with five million new ones coming online every year), your customers don't have a lot of time or attention. How does a corporate blog attract and retain readers? (Statistics…
