AlturaSolutions helps businesses grow by turning words into sales.
In-house marketing content creation (aka blogs) is all about publishing, relevant, quality, and well-written blogs on a company website that are effectively search engine optimized. This will help draw interest from potential customers and bring more visitors and attention to your site – including repeat visitors. All of these people may read your blog post, then take a look around your site. Eventually conversion happens and those blog postings turn words into sales.
To be effective, marketing content creation involves the following:
Build a community: Blogs build a community of people that views your site as an educational center, helping readers deal with challenges they may be facing. They believe your company can help them resolve those challenges. What often happens next is, they share that blog posting, internally and on social media, making you and your site a thought leader.
Expand online visibility: From here, blogs for business can really get things moving. Not only are readers spreading the word about your company, which means many more people will read your posting, the links to your site draws the interest of search engines. Links indicate the site is valuable to others, which results in enhanced search engine optimization. This is also a goal of an effective inbound marketing program. That means more visitors to your site due to higher search engine relevance.
Generate sales leads…and sales: Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute and an expert on the subject, says that blog posts specifically blogs for business along with other marketing content creation strategies builds trust between your company and your visitors, and with trust comes loyalty, and with loyalty come sales.
Wikipedia adds that through the use of an active blogging program, “ultimately, brands can become their own communication-medium, thereby replacing paid-media channels.”
Marketing Content Creation and the History of Blogs
Before blogging, which officially dates back to the mid- to late 1980s, we had something called bulletin boards. These boards actually go back to the 1960s, when they were used by the U.S. military and some government departments to post messages quickly and, at least at that time, very safely to people around the world.
For those not in the military or in government, these bulletin boards were glorified correspondence centers where individuals or groups could post messages to each other. Soon, however, these messages went beyond one-to-one and group correspondence, becoming shared correspondence and reaching many more people. Over about a decade, this morphed into the blogging format we have today, where companies and individuals use blogs to get their message out to thousands if not hundreds of thousands of other people.
Blogging history and growth improved significantly in 2002. About that time, politicians, political influencers, political news sources, and similar groups began to use blogs as a way of getting their message, thoughts, and views to potentially millions of voters. As we know today, blogging is just one form of social media that has become a very powerful way to influence people’s thoughts and actions.
Blogging Terms
The term “blog,” short for “weblog,” is roughly twenty years old, and many organizations are now looking for a fresher name for their communications hub. The best term will be based on the company’s goal for the blog. Here are some examples:
- Learning Center
- Customer Center
- Customer Corner
- Resource Center
- Industry Updates
- Views (Our Views)
- Media Center
- Thoughts
- Musings
- Digital Thoughts
As to blogging terms and vocabulary, industry-specific blog names can be very powerful because they tend to get better search engine attention. Some examples include the following:
- Floorcare Thoughts
- C-Suite Center
- Pipe Discussions
- IPP: Inspiration, Power, and Potential
How To Get Your Blog in Search Engines
No discussion about marketing content creation and blogs would be complete without a word on search engine optimization.
If you are fortunate enough to have a library of articles in which your company or your company’s products have been featured, I have bad news for you. What works in printed articles likely will not work as a blog post. Taking articles that originally appeared in print and publishing them on a blog is the first thing many organizations think to do. Unfortunately, while this is an easy way to get material on your website, it may be found by very few visitors.
Differences Between Blogs and Articles
If you want your blog to be found, the posts have to have keywords – and this can be one or two words or entire terms – based on how people search for that information. To make this work, place your keywords or terms in the following areas of each post:
- In the URL
- In the title
- In the first paragraph
- Sprinkled throughout the body of the post – as long as it looks natural
- In the last paragraph of the posting
This means that instead of telling a story, which essentially is what a printed article is all about, the content is built around the keywords. This is not an easy task, because if the keywords are used too frequently – called blog stuffing – the search engines will ignore the post and may even ignore your site. Used too infrequently and the post may get lost in the blogosphere.
For blogs to reach their full potential requires quality writing and an ongoing marketing content creation program. Just as important, however, are the keywords you choose. When you know how your readers look for information, you can ensure they will come to you and your blog for the answers.”
More information on marketing content creation can be found here.
