Importance of the Blog for Your Online Business

Let me be blunt. Content marketing is not like other forms of marketing. You can’t invest a little bit of time and expect a little bit of reward. Instead, you either invest all the way or not bother. Because if you’re investing only part of the way then you’re just going to become part of the background noise that’s always out there on the internet.

People don’t pay any attention to the background noise. They don’t read it, they don’t like it, and they most certainly don’t share it.

What makes content marketing different from other forms of marketing?

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I think I’ll let Mark Templeman from Forbes take over here, “unlike SEO and PPC, you’re not dealing with an algorithm when it comes to content marketing. You’re dealing with the reactions and emotions of your living, breathing customers. And that can’t be gamed, hacked, or exploited.

In fact, the truth probably is that in a couple of years’ time you won’t be able to game those algorithms either, but that’s an entirely different story. Let’s focus on people, content marketing and blogs. If you want people to share your material, then they have to like what you’re writing and though there are plenty of psychological tricks to deploy, these will only take you so far.

The rest is down to consistent high-quality content and a long-term game plan. If you’re not willing to put in the time and the effort for those, then may I direct your attention to traditional marketing? Just because it’s no longer hip doesn’t mean it’s suddenly no longer effective.

How to make content marketing work

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If you are, however then there are a few things to deal with. First of all, you know the line If you’ve got a hammer everything looks like a nail? That’s what’s happened with the blog and content marketing. Yes, it’s a powerful tool, but it isn’t the only one. You’ve also got the email, social media, ebooks, infographics, guest posts and videos (to name but a few) to get your content out there. Now your blog will naturally serve as a storehouse for most of these, but it should be far from your only way of sharing what you’re creating.

You’ve got to be pushing whatever material your material hard, especially initially. For that reason, it’s very important that you have the right social media campaign going and you’re using the right twitter strategy.

That in place, you have to make certain that the quality of your material is a cut above the rest. And you can’t just expect your marketing manager to do that. They might be good at marketing, but that doesn’t mean they have the know-how to consistently create content that’s going to get you eyeballs. Instead, you’ve got to get the whole company involved. If somebody knows something about an area, then get them to write about it or – if they don’t have any writing talent – get interviewed by somebody who does.

And it doesn’t just stop there. You’ve got to continue exploring ways that you can create interesting internal content. Do you have interesting statistics about your customers that they’d like to hear about? That’s interesting, consider doing a story about that. Do you know experts in the field who you can interview? That could be an interesting story.

The key here is content. Now that doesn’t mean you abandon selecting the right keywords or similar SEO strategies to push up your page in the ranking, but you’ve also got to keep the viewers on your page once you get them there. And that is a team effort.

So is the Blog worth it?

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Again, not as an also-ran, done by some guy in a back office who doesn’t even fully understand the business that you’re in. Just hiring some external writer who does it all for you won’t cut the mustard, for example. That’s just going to waste money.

Instead, the blog has to be central to your company’s efforts to get the product out there, with a well-defined strategy, the entire team involved and hard deadlines that are just as important as the other ones. And yes, then you might have to hire somebody who has a gift for words to turn their ideas into easily consumable content, but that is the last step in a long procedure instead of the only step. So I guess the question is, how far are you willing to go?

Norman Arvidsson
 

Norman Arvidsson is a passionate writer at WriterSquad. He was born in Sweden but at the age of three moved to United States with his family. Familiar with such areas as web development and design, marketing, small business, and eLearning. Considers personal growth as the main goal in his life. You can contact him through his social media networks.