Why blog? How often should I blog? What should I blog about? How do I know what my potential customers are looking for? These are questions we are asking and answering every day as we work with clients in their internet marketing. The first step of any internet marketing campaign is generating traffic to your website. A solid inbound strategy is founded on writing good content and writing it consistently and in a compelling way.
At the introduction stage of things, it is all about a good blogging strategy. While there is a lot of work involved in creating a solid blogging strategy for your company, there are two simple components at a high level that I want to remind you of today. An effective blogging strategy has to balance out the quantity of blogs that you can generate on a regular ongoing basis, with the quality of those blogs for generating and retaining well qualified leads to your website.
Quantity – The more the merrier, right?
Any good inbound marketing strategist will tell you that the amount of traffic to your website that is generated by creating blog content will grow in concert with how many times a week you are posting blogs. If you only post occasionally, your traffic will grow slowly. If you are posting frequently, your traffic will grow more rapidly. We have seen this reality in our own company as we chose an aggressive blogging strategy in 2013 (5-6 days per week) and saw the traffic to our website increase over 400% in nine months!
Clients we are working with who have a more moderate plan of 2 per week grew more in the neighborhood of 15-20% over the same time period. With the onslaught of information that is being created every day on the web, you have to contribute more often than even in the past couple of years in order to be noticed. The more content that you create, the more opportunity you have to be found by Google and offered up as a solution to the questions your potential customers are asking. Search engines like quantity. They like to know you have something to say and that you have something to say regularly on the topics in your field.
Quality – How good is good enough?
The other side of the coin, however, is quality. Having a lot to say is one thing, but having relevant, significant, important things to say is another thing altogether. While your blog posts are not technical dissertations or finals for your English exam in college, if they don’t have a level of quality that readers find helpful, they will not do the job of driving traffic over the long haul.
There was recently a post by Matt Cutts, who is a Google “bigwig” where he very soundly critiqued companies who are using random guest blogs to simply generate a large quantity of content, while not being at all careful about whether that content has any quality at all. While it is certainly beyond my understanding how they do this, Google programmers are getting smarter and smarter about how they sift the available information out there and serve it up. Matt Cutts’ blog was emphatic about this issue of quality. Guest blogging isn’t necessarily a bad way to add content, but it is critical that you vet the guest bloggers to ensure that they are providing quality information that is well written for your customers.
Whether you are using internal writers in your company, outside writers who are subject matter experts, or even grabbing an occasional guest blog now and again, you need to be careful that you don’t sacrifice quality for the sake of quantity.
In creating a solid blogging strategy you do have to figure out how much content you can write that will really help your potential customers and answer their questions. It simply won’t do any good to write meaningless or disconnected content that isn’t targeting your customers well. If you know you need to create content but don’t have the time within your company, consider outsourcing to a reputable internet marketing firm who understands how critical both the quality and quantity issues are when it comes to blogging. We, of course, would be happy to help!
