An all too common scenario I hear from most clients and professionals who approach me for marketing help – specifically with blogging – is that:
- They’re not sure what they should be blogging about
- They have been blogging, but aren’t seeing any positive results
- They simply don’t have the time
The truth is you know you should be blogging, but you aren’t putting in the needed time to set the right strategy and tactics to align your expectations with the results you see. As a result, you end up disappointed and discouraged.
To get you started, here are a few tips to supercharge your blogging efforts today…
“Who” are you writing for?
Knowing your target demographic is one thing, but deeply understanding the type of content they consume and the conversations they participate in across the web is another thing. As such, start by creating no more than 2-3 different buyer personas you should be writing for. For each persona identify the following:
- Age
- Gender
- Profession/Role/Title
- Specific pain points
- Goals and values
Doing so will allow you to create content that resonates with your buyers. Here’s a persona example for your reference:
“Where” do your target customers hang out?
Leverage tools like Reddit, Quora, Buzzsumo, Google’s Keyword Tool, Twitter Search and LinkedIn Groups to help you understand where you target audience is online. Then dive deeper to understand the conversations they are having, questions they are asking and key topics they are participating in.
Once you have content written, you can begin to participate in the same conversations you know your target customer is having by inserting your own thought leadership pieces, i.e. a link to a blog post you wrote around a similar topic.
Mix up the content types
Rather than just writing text-based blog posts, look at how you can mix up the content types by utilizing tutorials, videos, webinars, memes, and infographics. Varying your content types enables you to expand the lifecycle of your content types into other assets. For example, you can turn multiple similar blog posts into a white paper, create a webinar out of your most popular blog posts, and even create infographics.
Instead of just directing traffic to blog posts after blog posts, you can now create multiple landing pages promoting different content assets for your audience to download in exchange for their contact information. Once you generate these leads, you can begin to segment them out by persona. That will ensure you aren’t sending everyone on your list the same email, but segmenting it all out so that each persona receives content most relevant and personalized to their interests and needs.
Track and measure what’s working
Analytics should be held with a high-priority, helping you see exactly what’s working, what’s not working and what needs improvement. Break out your metrics into the following buckets:
- Content topics that incur the highest amount of traffic and time spent on site.
- Content types and topics that have the highest amplification rate.
- Content types and topics that incur the most leads.
- Content types and topics that help shorten the sales cycle.
Once you understand what’s effective, you can take a popular piece of content and turn it into something that’s more elaborate like a paid in-depth training session.
