Monica Romeri
With social media in the limelight, many companies have lost focus on business blogging. Although social media is a potentially powerful medium to share and publicize your original content, you must first create excellent content that readers will be compelled to share with their networks of friends and colleagues. The creation of highly shareable content should be your primary marketing objective.
Consistently creating share-worthy content is a serious challenge. Excellent content creation calls for commitment, creativity, real-time industry knowledge, a fresh perspective and well-honed writing and research skills. The benefits of maintaining an engaging, information-rich and well-written company blog are manifold, and blog-less companies risk missing out on many opportunities, including increased lead generation and business development and amplified brand recognition.
According to HubSpot, companies with blogs attract 55% more website visitors, get 97% more inbound links and have 434% more indexed web pages than blog-less companies. The more frequently a company blogs, the more traffic and leads it will produce. Businesses that generate at least 20 blog posts each month attract over five times more website traffic than those that generate less than four per month. In addition, companies that blog at least 20 times per month generate four times more leads than blog-less companies. Clearly, high-quality business blogging has real value.
Blogging also prevents your website from getting stale and is very advantageous for SEO. If you want to be ranked highly for your targeted keywords by Google, fresh content is required. Offering Google-friendly content would put your company blog ahead of many of your competitors. Excellent content creation on a consistent basis is a serious undertaking. If you do not have the internal resources to create such content, consider hiring an agency or a talented freelance writer to do it for you.
Tapping Your Resources
If you are game for producing highly shareable content, tap your key resources. One of the biggest challenges for business owners and heads of companies is finding the time for their many and diverse responsibilities. However, content marketing is critical, so make it happen one way or another. No matter what type of business you run, content marketing takes a significant investment of time and resources. To make content marketing more manageable, make use of the resources you already have:
1. Employees who are knowledgeable and able to write or speak on camera about topics in your industry
2. A list of questions your clients frequently ask to inspire blog posts, webinars and even whitepapers and ebooks
3. Insider resources relating to your product or service-whatever industry expertise you have to bring to the table
4. A network of industry contacts who would love to be interviewed
5. Notes taken at conferences and keynote speeches full of compelling advice
6. The content you have already created
Repurpose content to get even more value from it.
A single, long blog post can be turned into a multi-part series, if broken down into sections.
A series of blog posts can become a whitepaper or ebook without much additional work.