Each year, a growing number of small businesses are realising the potential power of blogging as an effective marketing tool.

According to State of Inbound’s 2018 report, 53% of the marketers they surveyed identified blog content creation as the second most important element of their company’s digital marketing strategy.

Indeed, websites with a blog have been shown to accumulate more than four times the number of indexed pages, which is thought to be a key indicator for the major search engines when it comes to search results ranking.

Growing an influential blog in a specific niche enables businesses to nurture potential customers over time. By creating regular high-quality content that informs and solves problems for readers, small businesses can build a highly-engaged audience and earn a reputation for thought leadership, which can, in turn, lead to increased brand awareness and trust.

However, just as with every other aspect of business marketing, a blog won’t get very far without a well thought-out strategy.

Here are the steps small businesses should take to create a successful blogging strategy and place themselves well ahead of the competition.

Step 1: Define Your Blog’s Purpose

Before you even think about writing your first blog post, you will need to precisely pin down the main purpose of your business – in other words, what is your business trying to achieve, first and foremost?

This might be anything from global domination within your industry to being the most popular pub or shop in your neighbourhood. Or, it could be a social aim such as reducing unemployment, tackling homelessness, or finding a more environmentally friendly solution to something.

Once you have clarified your business’s overriding purpose, you should whittle this down to a short, one-sentence statement which will form the basis for all your future marketing decisions, including your blog. You will need to ensure that your whole team is fully aware and onside with this message too.

When considering how best to communicate your purpose (also known as your message), you should also think about the kinds of stories that might support it, as well as the people who are likely to share your passion for it. These stories will form the basis of your blog content strategy. You might want to think of blogging as an opportunity to create and share the narrative of your business’s evolution.

The next step is to identify a few key aims that will help you to achieve your goals and fulfil your purpose. These might be things like raising brand awareness, persuading investors, attracting new customers, or better engaging with existing customers, for example.

Every blog post you write should align with your purpose and key aims to form a strategic element of your business’s long-term marketing goals – for example, one post’s primary objective might be to build your mailing list (attracting new customers), another might be to improve your Google rankings (raising brand awareness), and yet another might be to build authority in your niche (better engagement with customers).

With each post, you will also need to carefully consider what action you want readers to take as a result of reading it, and ensure that you have included a clear call-to-action – for example, do you want them to purchase your e-book, share your post on social media, or subscribe to your mailing list?

Once you adopt the principles outlined above, you will find that your blog has the potential to become a great lead conversion tool.

Step 2: Set Your Budget

Blogging offers a relatively inexpensive marketing method for your business in terms of the financial commitment required. However, what you save in money you can often lose in time spent.

Time is the one resource you won’t be able to do without if you want to make serious inroads with blogging. Planning, researching, writing, sourcing images, editing, proofreading, publishing and promoting content can all be very time-consuming, and it can take anything from 3-8 hours or longer to craft a decent length, high-quality blog post. However, if you do decide to invest the time, it really will make all the difference in setting you apart from the competition.

When it comes to money, this will mostly be spent on content marketing – after all, it’s no good having a blog if nobody knows it exists. It is estimated that most businesses engaged in blogging spend around 32% of their total marketing budget on content marketing. This is a useful benchmark to bear in mind when it comes to setting your blogging budget, if you are already clear about your total marketing budget (which every business should be!).

Step 3: Identify Your Core Audience (aka Target Customers)

Focusing on a niche audience and developing appropriate content specifically for those people helps to ensure there will be strong interest in your blog. It will also make the job of promoting it much easier.

The more narrowly you define your target audience, the easier it will be to identify those people, cater to their needs with your content, and reach them with your advertising and marketing messages.

Your target market or audience can be defined using demographic characteristics, such as:

• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Education
• Hobbies and interests
• Income level
• Marital status
• Occupation and industry

Questions to ask about your target audience might include:

• Why would they come to your blog?
• What questions might they have related to your industry?
• What challenges or problems (pain points) do they face?
• Where are they already getting their content?
• Which influencers do they follow?

Once you have all of this information, you will be able to map out a detailed audience persona.

As any small business owner will know, customer research can cost a small fortune, especially if you hire an agency for the job; however, much valuable research can be done for free online these days.

For example, Q&A forums such as Quora and Yahoo! Answers can be excellent platforms to discover the types of challenges your target audience may be facing, as can LinkedIn Groups.

Twitter Advanced Search can offer great insights into current trends, interests and concerns, and blog comments on other blogs your target customers read can provide clues about what type of content they are already engaging with.

Finally, Google Analytics offers a freemium service, meaning that small business owners do not have to pay a monthly charge. However, it is well worth signing up for the more advanced features for whatever monthly fee you can afford, as this will give you much more valuable information and will really help you to pin down and target your ideal audience/reader/customer.

When blogging, it is essential to build trust with your audience. By conducting careful research to find out the information your customers are searching for, and then creating helpful, high-quality blog posts around those topics, you can become known as a relevant, reliable and trustworthy source.

Step 4: Audit Your Competitors’ Blog Content

A successful blogging campaign necessitates being at least one step ahead of your closest competitors at all times. Fortunately, there are several tools available to small businesses to help them to achieve this.

Platforms such as Moz and SEMRush can help you to find valuable competitor information, which can be analysed and used to inform your blogging strategy. For example, if you notice that a competitor is ranking higher than your business for crucial keywords, then plan to write and promote higher-quality content for those keywords.

You should also take an in-depth inventory of your competitors’ blog content on their own websites. By doing this you can identify any gaps they may have in their content  – for example, any current industry trends you are aware of, new industry research, or little-known facts. Then, use this information to your advantage by covering those topics on your own blog.

In short, notice how other bloggers are presenting information similar to topics you intend to cover, and then try to come up with innovative ideas to ensure you do it better.

Growth marketer, Andrianes Pinantoan refers to analysis carried out by graphics giant Canva, which examined some of the criteria contributing to the success of their competitors’ best-performing blog posts. Here is what they discovered.

Step 5: Refine Your Keywords

Keywords are a major element of the algorithm search engines use when they attempt to understand and make sense of your content.

So, how will you ensure that when a potential customer searches for a specific phrase, they will discover your blog rather than your competitor’s?

The answer is by knowing exactly what your potential customers are searching for and then delivering it. In other words, you need to research which keywords they are typing into search engines, and then include those keywords in your blog posts. Keyword tools, such as those provided by SEMRush, will prove invaluable here.

A word of caution: don’t overdo it! Due to their constantly evolving algorithms, search engines are now able to recognise techniques such as “keyword stuffing”, and will penalise bloggers who use them by suppressing their ranking. To avoid this, make sure that your content is authentic and reads naturally.

Step 6: Develop Your Content Strategy

As more and more businesses attempt to compete in the blogosphere, content quality has become increasingly important. Great actionable content can really help to build your brand’s reputation. Once people see you consistently have something of value to offer, they are much more likely to convert into customers.

As we saw in Step 3, understanding your audience is essential to developing an effective content strategy. It is very important to view your blog from the perspective of your target audience – what do they want to know / see / hear / learn? Focusing on this question, rather than ‘what can I write about today?’ will yield much more effective results. Ask yourself what conversation is taking place in your ideal customer’s mind and then speak to those interests.

For example, say you run a music PR company and you discover through reading comments on several music industry forums that lots of people in your target audience group (independent musicians) are seeking a solution to a particular problem (getting their music heard). So, you write a blog post which offers a solution to that problem – for example, “10 Ways To Get Your Music Heard In 2019”.

Musicians read your post, see that you have relevant knowledge of the music industry and give good advice, and they begin to trust you. They consequently subscribe to your blog and your mailing list, and Bingo! – you have bagged yourself a warm lead and a potential future client.

Another way to drive conversions is to link your blog post to a landing page, as an integral part of your overall digital marketing funnel. This technique can work particularly well when you have a very tightly defined target audience.

Find Your Blogger Voice

Successful blog posts are always either entertaining or informative (or a combination of both). The most popular bloggers offer an authentic, unique and innovative take on whatever topic they have chosen to focus on.

They do this by allowing their individual voices and personalities, as well as their authoritative knowledge to permeate the content, and they will often incorporate their own thoughts, ideas, perspective or expertise into their blog posts.

When developing your own unique voice, remember to ensure that it echoes your business’s brand, purpose and overall style.

Types of content

It is very difficult to create content that isn’t readily available elsewhere online, but it can be done with a little creative thinking. Content about any given topic can be presented through a variety of different media (written blog, video blog, podcast, etc) via a multitude of different formats (lists, prose, infographics, image galleries, slideshows, competitions, Q&As, tutorials, etc). Think about how you might mix and match different media with different content formats to come up with a unique presentational spin on your chosen topic.

You can also use this same idea to repurpose content you have already generated. Take the ideas and research you used for a previous blog post and recycle that same information in a different format. This can help you to reach a wider audience and engage with people who may not have read your original blog post.

For instance, you could take key quotes from a blog post and schedule them as individual posts on  your social media channels, along with a link to the original post. Or, on a similar note, you could make the same quotes into images and post them on channels such as Instagram and Pinterest. Alternatively, you could make an infographic out of some of the statistics you quoted in your blog post. This is just the tip of the iceberg – let your imagination run wild!

Topics and Titles

When creating a blogging strategy, it is always a good idea to brainstorm lists of potential topic titles for future content in advance. This way, you will be able to schedule your posts in a logical and coherent order.

Blog post titles are very important to get right. Not only is it crucial to create great headlines for keyword ranking purposes, but a really good optimised title will automatically attract the ideal type of person it’s aimed at. So, always take the time to craft the best, attention-grabbing titles you can.

Try headlines with:

* questions

* teasers

* top tips

* lists (e.g. 10 reasons why ….)

* comparisons

Questions work because they either pique the reader’s curiosity, or promise to answer a specific question they have been seeking the answer to.

Teasers give just enough information to whet the reader’s appetite so that they are left wanting to know more, and are ultimately unable to resist clicking on the link.

Top Tips offer a quick and easy way to take in bite-sized pieces of helpful information about something – they are often concerned with the best way to do, avoid, or deal with something difficult.

Lists are popular as they are generally easy to read and digest, and people can quickly get a handle on the point you’re making. It’s also easier for you – the blogger – to refine the points you are trying to make with a tighter structure rather than a convoluted ramble.

Comparison posts can lead to a higher rate of traffic and conversions. For example, reviewing and comparing products or brands in your industry can lead to more traffic from people who are already seeking to buy the types of products or services you are offering.

Finally, we can’t mention content without a passing reference about factual and grammatical accuracy. Be sure to fact-check everything when carrying out your research, and always edit and proofread your work carefully to avoid or correct any errors. Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors and sloppy research can destroy your credibility and make your blog appear amateurish.

Step 7: Plan How You Will Promote Your Posts

You could have the best blog content in the world, but if nobody ever sees it all your hard work will be in vain. There are several tried and tested tactics for promoting blog posts, and you should plan to employ a variety of these when creating your blogging strategy.

One very popular promotional approach with small businesses is inbound marketing, a method which requires a lot of determined effort upfront.

To do this successfully, you will need to identify and build relationships with key influencers in your industry – in other words, people your potential customers respect and trust. These influencers command authority in their niche which affords them very large audiences – audiences made up of potential customers for your business if you can reach them.

There are a plethora of ways you can attempt to build relationships with influencers – from commenting on their blog posts and sharing their content, to mentioning and linking to them in your own blog posts. Once you are on the influencer’s radar, make direct contact and offer to write a guest post for their blog. If they accept, this will give you instant access to a vast and already engaged new audience.

Another effective method of promoting your blog is to interview experts working in your industry. This can be done in a written Q&A blog post, as a video blog post, or as a podcast which can be posted to your blog. This method enables you to build credibility and trust within your niche, as well as enabling access to new audiences when your interviewee shares the post with his/her networks.

Other blog promotion methods include: sharing posts on social media; building a mailing list; designing lead magnets; being a guest interviewee for other bloggers; posting on popular forums; and optimising your blog for search engines.

Finally, remember to incorporate a “Share” button into each of your blog posts. Make it extremely easy for readers to share your content via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram. All the popular blogging platforms have a widget you can use to integrate a Share button into your blog. Doing this can help you build your audience through virtual word-of-mouth.

Step 8: Define Roles & Responsibilities and Delegate Tasks

Blogging necessarily involves many different stages, skills and qualities. For this reason, if you have a team behind you ready and poised to implement your blogging strategy, you will be much more likely to see great results.

When delegating tasks to members of your team, you should try to encourage a sense of ownership for the specifics involved in each role. Some of the key tasks involved in blogging and content marketing include:

• Keyword research
• Content research – including fact-checking
• Copywriting
• Text editing
• Graphic design and image editing
• Video editing
• Scheduling (i.e. editorial calendar management)
• Promotion
• Repurposing

The exact number of people you will involve very much depends on the size of your marketing department, your budget, and the skills already available within your team. Indeed, it is quite common for small businesses to have one or two people responsible for multiple roles.

Step 9: Create A Schedule – Use checklists and reminders to keep you organised

Creating a detailed schedule is an important element of your blogging strategy, which will hold you accountable and help to ensure that your blog posts are developed and published on time. This will result in a consistent stream of content output, whilst enabling you to get into a blogging rhythm that your readers will come to recognise and grow familiar with.

Consistency and regularity rather than frequency are the key factors. It doesn’t really matter how often you post as long as your readers know how frequently you do post and you stick to that. However, bear in mind that if you disappear for an extended period of time you run the risk of losing your audience completely, so it’s advisable to post at least once or twice a month to start with, increasing this over time if appropriate.

Blogging isn’t just a numbers game. Other factors such as content quality and SEO also play an important role in any blog’s success. There is no right or wrong when it comes to how often you should post. Be prepared to experiment and conduct analysis on your blog over time to find out which types of posts fare better than others, and adjust accordingly. Never sacrifice quality for quantity. Having a plan and a calendar can help you to be consistent in both.

It’s a good idea to take a long-term overview of your blogging strategy, and to plan out your content schedule up to six months ahead. This will enable you to step back and see the bigger picture. Some businesses opt for a shorter pre-planning period, but be mindful that anything less than a month tends to lead to less effective results. Taking the time to plan out each blog post in advance removes much of the pressure of actually writing the posts, since the difficult part – coming up with the idea – has already been dealt with.

Organise weekly scheduling meetings with your team to ensure that everyone involved is on track and reading from the same page. One item which should always be on the weekly agenda is a review of your editorial calendar, to ensure that it remains relevant and fit for purpose. Your editorial calendar should be planned so that it aligns with the intended aims of your blogging strategy, which you will have pinned down in Step 1. Many small businesses use a project management tool such as Trello or CoSchedule to create and manage their blog content calendars.

It is good practice to pinpoint the resources needed for each post when ordering and scheduling individual posts. One efficient way to plan research in advance is to come up with three or four topics in your niche that can be turned into a series of posts. This will enable your team to find their flow and can ultimately increase productivity. It will also entice readers to subscribe to your blog, so that they will be notified when the next post in the series is published.

Decide in advance how long your average posts will be. This will give you some indication of how long they will take to write, an important consideration when it comes to planning and scheduling. It is generally believed by digital marketing experts that search engines now give preference to longer posts. After analysing 1 million search results, a study by backlinko discovered that the average length of pages ranking on the first page of Google contains 1,890 words.

Finally, try to make room for occasional guest posts on your calendar as they will help to promote your blog and your expertise. They can also expose you to a new audience and provide your site with valuable back links.

Step 10: Track & Analyse Engagement Metrics

There are many different types of metrics that can be used to measure outcomes against goals, all of which can help small business owners to analyse, evaluate and improve their marketing efforts. The most commonly used metrics for bloggers include engagement metrics, distribution metrics and conversion metrics.

Engagement metrics might include things like the number of post comments, subscribers, shares, Likes, Re-Tweets, Follows and backlinks, plus factors such as bounce rates and name-checks on other blogs.

Distribution metrics help small business owners and bloggers to track how many people found their content via a specific channel and who those people are, as well as providing other valuable information such as which keywords your target audience is searching for.

Conversion metrics measure how effectively your blog content marketing is persuading people to take a specific action – these actions might include, for example, subscribing to your mailing list, sharing your post on social media, clicking through to your landing page via your call to action (CTA), or buying your product or service.

There are a number of analytics tools on the market which provide business owners with comprehensive and insightful information, enabling them to learn a great deal about how their business is performing. Perhaps the best known of these is Google Analytics, which should be adequate for most small businesses.

As we have seen, metrics can be very helpful, but they’re completely pointless if you haven’t set any meaningful goals in advance to measure them against. This again takes us all the way back to Step 1, where we looked at the importance of defining the purpose of your blog and the specific goals you need to achieve along the way.

Once you have set those goals, you can then assess which particular metrics will best help you to track your progress towards them. Only then can you really understand how far certain actions are contributing to a specific outcome – for example, how many blog subscriptions have later converted to actual sales.

Wrapping Up

As we have seen, a successful blogging strategy involves several steps and many key elements.

These include: clarifying your purpose and refining your message; setting a realistic budget; defining your target audience in detail; assessing what works for your competitors and identifying the gaps in their content output; refining your keywords; generating a coherent range of varied, multimedia content ideas in multiple formats; putting in place a plan to promote your content effectively; defining roles and responsibilities within your team; scheduling and pre-planning individual blog posts; and tracking, measuring and evaluating key metrics.

To sum up in brief, the more unique, authentic and well-planned your content and the more effectively you target your chosen audience, the easier it becomes to build a loyal following and potential customer base through your blog.

A good headline is essential for almost any type of marketing message, from advertisements to sales letters. It’s also important for your blog posts.

If you publish a blog on your business website, creating more engaging and compelling headlines is essential if you want to get more clicks.

So what should these look like? There is no one way to write a headline that gets clicks, and there are various techniques you can use, some of which you can use in combination.

Here are 11 ideas to create a clickable headline:

1. Promise Something of Value

Ideally, a headline should promise the reader something of value for reading on. The headline’s primary task is to get people to read past the headline. If you suggest that there is something of value inside the content, this can encourage people to read on.

Basically, make it clear why your blog is worth their time. This could be how to do something quickly, discover some little-known piece of information or learn something important. These are all options that provide a clear benefit to the reader.

2. Provoke Curiosity

Curiosity is a classic sales writing technique used in emails, sales letters, and advertisements. You can use it in your blog posts too.

It can be hard to get it right, but the idea is to provide a clear value proposition without giving too much away. For example, you could write a headline like ‘3 Fast and Cheap Ways to Redecorate Your Home’.

By doing this, you’re not giving away the information and the reader has to read on to find out more.

3. Be Specific

Although curiosity can be effective, don’t make your headline too vague. Try to be clear and specific to give the reader a good idea of what to expect inside. Then they can better decide whether it is worth their time reading on.

For example, ‘Learn to Fish’ is too vague. But ‘Learn How to Fish in 3 Days Without Spending a Penny’ is specific and more enticing.

4. Use Numbers and Lists

One of the simplest ways to make your headline stand out is to make use of numbers and figures. When you use a number, this gets attention, especially when you use it in list format. We are attracted to numbers because we like lists. A list suggests that the content will be quick and easy to read, which draws us in.

You could also use numbers in the form of a statistic. This suggests that the content is specific and well-researched, which again draws the reader in.

5. Use Fear

Fear is often a good option for your headlines. You can use this by implying that the reader is missing out on important information that could help them in some way if they do not read on. A headline like ‘5 Surefire Ways to Die Younger’ will get people desperate to find out more.

You could also suggest that they are being lied to, or imply that they are missing out on some crucial information that could help them. It’s not something you want to do with every blog, but use it sparingly and it can be very effective.

6. Use the ‘How To’ Format

The ‘How To’ blog format has been around since the first blogs started appearing, and that’s because it works. It’s one of the classic headline formulas and it immediately implies that the reader will find useful information inside.

People want information, they want to educate themselves, and this is a headline format that clearly suggests they will be able to do that. Just don’t overdo it by using it for all your headlines.

7. Write for Search Engine Clicks

When thinking of a clickable headline, you won’t often think of keywords. But keywords can play an important role. When you include your main keyword in the title, if someone searches for that keyword and your link shows up, the keyword will be highlighted. This can make it stand out more and get more clicks.

Also, don’t forget about the length. Try to keep the headline to about 60 characters because if you go too far over this, it is likely to get chopped off in the search results. If your entire title is displayed, it is more likely to get clicked on.

8. Add Some Drama

Be bold in your headlines. Don’t be timid and boring. Mention words like ‘secret’ and ‘ultimate’. Use power words, exciting verbs and adjectives. Don’t lie or mislead, but do make it sound more interesting with the language you use.

9. Focus on the Audience

When you’re writing your headline, always keep the audience in mind. This is where your all-important customer segments can really come in handy. If you’ve been successfully building your segments, then you’ll know them inside and out. As such, you’ll know who they are and what they want.

And if you’ve only recently come into a business or you’ve bought an online business and you’re unfamiliar with your audience, the premade customer segments will provide you with a valuable insight into your new audience. Know your audience, and you’ll know what makes them tick, helping you write headlines that they will read too.

So think about them and what they want, then provide the information they are looking for. Understand their hopes, dreams, and fears, then write around these and you can’t go too far wrong. In your headline, clearly make reference to the topic, and it is sure to catch the eye of your target audience.

10. Ask a Question

Questions are a great technique for headlines. When people see a question, they automatically think of the answer. It gets them involved in the article and draws them in. If anything, they might click just to find out if they were right.

11. Be Creative and Different

Finally, try and be creative with your headlines. Don’t write the same old headlines that everyone else is using. Change things up and make your headlines stand out. Surprise people who come across the headline. Be controversial, or just say something in a different way. This is hard to do, but it will help your headline get noticed, leading to more clicks.

You can write the best blog post on a topic, but if the headline is weak, it will never get as many readers as it could. These tricks can all be used in different ways to make your headlines stand out and get noticed and clicked.

Don’t add a headline in a few minutes at the end. Spend time over each and every headline. You’ve gone to the trouble of creating the content, so now spend some time coming up with a headline that does it justice, and get more clicks.

As always, if you found this article helpful please consider sharing it – thank you, it’s very much appreciated.

Guest blogging has become increasingly popular and not without reason; building your online authority through this inbound marketing strategy has a massive impact on business growth.

The combination of awareness, personal brand building, referral traffic and links that guest blogging provides has the power to significantly boost your online visibility and your sales.

What is Guest Blogging?

Guest blogging involves writing blog posts for other websites.

But that’s not nearly all:

Writing high-quality and insightful content for other similar blogs in your industry is an excellent way to establish your authority.

Creating authentic and originally written posts on topics which are relevant to the blogging site is mutually beneficial; the blogging site gains good fresh content, while the author bio on the guest blog provides an introduction to the guest blogger and includes a backlink which ensures that the writer is genuine while also attracting traffic from the blogging site to the author’s.

It’s a straightforward quid pro quo:

When you write a blog for another website as a guest, you promote your own brand. It’s the perfect trade to gain recognition and receive more targeted visitors to your site.

Still not convinced about the benefits of guest blogging? Take a look at these 5 big advantages of this inbound marketing strategy.

The 5 most significant reasons to guest blog:

1. 1. Establish authority: Good quality content is paramount in gaining relevance and popularity for your website. Well-written and authoritative content that speaks to the readers in addition to engaging them and keeping them hooked is the perfect type of content for blogs and this will help establish the website as an authority on the subject.
      Search engines love sites that provide useful and authentic information. Through guest blogging on such sites the guest blogger benefits by way of exposure to the readers of a niche category who are genuinely looking for relevant information, resulting in the guest blogger establishing his or her authority as a quality writer.
      
      
   2. Visibility and targeted traffic: One of the biggest benefits of writing a top-quality guest post is the instant exposure it brings. Done the right way, guest blogging will result in targeted traffic and sales. To boost your chances of conversion you should optimise your site’s landing pages and CTA’s.
      
      
   3. Improved search ranking: When you write and publish several guest articles on authoritative blogs, your search rankings will improve. Guest posting earns you link juice which translates into higher rankings in the search engine results.
      One of the main ranking criteria for search engines is the relevancy and quality of links that point to a website. Guest posting on high-quality and relevant websites will earn high-quality and relevant links pointing towards your site, which will increase your search ranking.
      However, always remember that your focus should be on the quality of the content that you’re creating rather than simply a link to your blog or website.
      
      
   4. Shares, followers, and leads: Guest blogging not only increases the number of social media shares to your content, it will also boost your number of followers and generate leads. Contributing to an authoritative blog earns you trust as they are essentially vouching for your brand.
      Remember to customise your contributor profile and include links to your social media accounts to make it easy for your new fans to follow you.
      Winning your target audience’s trust and turning them into active social media followers is just the first step, reward them with regular updates and useful information that aligns with their interests.
      
      
   5. Guest blogging builds relationships and trust: Good content is the foundation of any blog. Bloggers and website owners are in search of kickass content for their blogs and websites. When you gain a reputation for providing that type of content to people in the blogging world, it will help you promote your business, resulting in increased website traffic, more subscribers to your blog and ultimately more people that trust you and want to do business with you.
      

Conclusion

A guest post can help you achieve so much more than traffic, links and brand visibility. It can bring in quick sales and increase revenue.  Guest blogging is a very effective inbound marketing strategy, especially when you carefully research industry blogs and create high-value content that people can’t find elsewhere.

As Neil Patel says: “Great content does one essential thing: improve your brand image. It also gives the right audience a strong reason to listen to you.”

Guest blogging allows you to communicate with the right people for the right reasons and is, without a doubt, a crucial step for online marketing success.

Do you guest blog already or is this something you’ve been thinking about? Were you aware of all the benefits of guest blogging?

Would you like to contribute to SEO+?

SEO+ are currently accepting guest blogs. If you’re in a similar space and think our audience would find what you have to say interesting send us a message here.

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With the availability of information being ever on the increase, it’s no surprise that the task of reaching customers and creating a strong brand image has become increasingly difficult. With the new digital age heralding a dynamic shift in the way that businesses reach prospective customers, content marketing has become an area of huge importance and intrigue; it is forecasted that 64% of all paid media on mobile by 2020 will fall into this area.

Traditionally championed by small business owners for being a methodology that creates results on a low budget, more and more big corporations are now coming to understand the power of this domain. So, with more players on the field how do you keep ahead? With so many tools and channels available, which should you focus your time on? Well wonder no more, these are the key points to focus on in 2018 to keep your business ahead of the trend.

Lights, Camera, Action!

Okay, so the use of video is nothing revolutionary, but a report from Cisco predicts that by 2019, up to 80% of all internet traffic will be dominated by it. If just one picture can tell a thousand words, then imagine how much more you can say on film. Not getting aboard this trend will be almost impossible if you wish to make any impact at all on your market. To maximize engagement, zoom in on these vital areas and watch your content take off.

• Live Stream Video

Storytelling is at the basis of all good content media. We want not to just engage peoples’ heads, but their hearts too. Savvy business owners will be keeping people up to date with their actions and inviting the viewer backstage in their operations. This transparency translates into trust and understanding.  The figures speak for themselves, with recent research showing that Facebook live streams increase engagement – over regular posts – by 178%.

• Immersive Media

If storytelling is the aim, the purpose is to immerse viewers within the brand image, and the use of new technology is certainly set to play a significant role here. Already head-mounted cameras have made their mark with leading brands, such as GoPro, now going one step further and introducing a 360° video feature. Use of augmented reality and computer-generated content overlaying video can add an extra dimension and help set your media apart from the rest.

• Short, Snappy and Accessible

A key component to making video a success in the upcoming year is accessibility. With more media now being accessed through smartphones and tablets than through desktop computers; making sure that your media is user-friendly is crucial. The design and length of a video will also be under scrutiny, with a shorter more conversational style preferred by the viewer. There are plenty of inexpensive phone apps that can help you accomplish this style. Finally by embedding video within blogs and social media posts you can increase stay time on your sites. This means not only higher sales, but it also improves your search engine optimization.

Websites That Think for You

2018 will be the year where we work smarter, not harder. Employing computer learning to our websites could cut out hours of complicated data analysis. This is why DWP Dynamic Web Personalisation is set to take off.

The use of web personalization has recently started to grow, this is a logical step to help direct the audience you want to the relevant content for them.

Using computer algorithms to recognize and segment website visitors – in order to display information targeted to them – has had clear and proven results. Research shows that personalized calls-to-action do have a 42% higher viewer status than non-personalised calls-to-action – this is a staggeringly indicative statistic. Such a method streamlines the search process for both viewers and customers, helping them to see more of the things that they’re interested in. Effectively, this gets more people to the right place at the right time. To get the step on your competition, you should employ these tools and have the most efficient and user-friendly website possible.

Strike a Match & Watch the Fire Spread

As previously mentioned, we should be working smarter not harder, and, ideally speaking, what all businesses want is self-propagating content. For this, you must make it meaningful and relevant enough that others want to take it upon themselves to share it for you. In the past, using celebrity endorsements was the main vehicle for this, but with the rise of blogging, social media, and youtube channels, anyone with a passion for documenting and creating can become a helpful ally.

UGC User-Generated Content shared through non-endorsed channels is much more likely to be trusted and therefore shared; creating greater reach.

• The trends have shown that the most engaging content has to be meaningful. You need to strike a chord with viewers; amuse them, inspire them, inform them and so cajole them into sharing your content with others. The use of content funnelling has demonstrated results. Companies are creating videos with no emphasis on selling, and instead making short stories or documentaries that can appeal to a wider audience. Some great examples of such methods can be seen in Billabong’s ‘I surf because’ campaign. Or Volvo’s hamster steering video.

 

• By approaching their brands in a novel way and creating interesting media, people are more likely to share it. This has a knock on effect of reaching more of your target audience. By casting your net wide, you can, in turn, funnel your actual audience towards more product driven content using links to these original videos.

These methods show results, but, how do you decide what your audience finds meaningful? Obviously, money can be spent on experts that will help you creatively; film producers, designers, and so on, but for smaller businesses, this may not be in the budget. Instead, an effective solution is to partner up. Do your research – see who is hitting your targeted markets, and then see how you can get involved with them. By collaborating you can share the workload whilst increasing your reach. Popular social media platforms are becoming increasingly expensive to feature content on; whilst also becoming increasingly ignored by users, who feel bombarded by advertising. This year it is crucial that you find new contacts and therefore new channels to reach your audiences.

Feeding the Future

Finally, a trend that will see you through 2018 is automation of content sharing.

Content marketing may seem a relatively new phenomenon but it has been very much a work in progress. The key to success is to think long term. It takes time for you to gather followers, but by making sure you are consistent in releasing and engaging your audience, you can expect it to pay off.

However, this can be time-consuming and difficult for smaller businesses without personnel dedicated to marketing. There are many tools that allow you to schedule your media releases, creating a strong presence. It is, of course, important to remain flexible and to make sure you remain up to date on your content to keep it relevant. Creating a content calendar also works in reverse, allowing you to review past content and revive it, if still relevant for today’s market.

In conclusion

Content media will be something no business can ignore if they wish to carry on engaging their markets in 2018.

• The main vehicle to win your viewers hearts is predicted to be video. Opening up your business with live stream and shifting the focus away from selling – is a must.

• Investing now in new filming technology to immerse your viewers will give you an edge on your competition. Whilst websites that are streamlined and media that is easily accessed on all devices, will become the norm and therefore crucial to dedicate time to.

• Emphasis on making meaningful content, with little to no focus on selling, will accomplish a wider reach; with users taking on the role of propagators.
• Finally, invest in technology that thinks and acts for you, with websites that are personalized and that can automate the scheduling of content release.

Most of all, keeping on trend will be a case of constantly adapting and searching for novel ways to capture your audience. Stay connected and keep innovating – then, it may even be your content setting the trends for 2019.

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