Blogging has and is becoming a more and more critical component of online marketing.
Online marketing is also understood as inbound marketing and/or Internet marketing.
This blog post is simply a free flow of thoughts by myself regarding the importance and connection of a good blog strategy as it relates to an overall inbound marketing blueprint. I would love nothing more than to hear your feedback and comments regarding these thoughts.
The way I see it, is that although inbound marketing may still be in its infancy, it has also been developed especially over the past 5 to 8 years. I feel that this is important to understand because of all the moving parts and certainly, a blogging strategy is a significant moving part.
As you may or may not understand, some of these moving parts connected with a successful online marketing strategy include search engine optimization to increase your presence or visibility, a well-rounded blogging strategy to keep your content fresh and consistent, a comprehensive conversion strategy that includes calls to action, landing pages and finally, accurate data analysis on a regular basis so you can best understand how your blueprint and strategy or performing.
Blogging: what are the benefits of a good blog strategy? There can be many! The primary and maybe obvious benefit is a good blog, and a consistent blog, provides you a great mechanism to offload work post new, fresh, helpful content on a regular basis without having to wrestle with a ton of technology. There is a common saying in the inbound marketing world, content is king. You've probably heard that before but it is as important as ever. From a search engine standpoint, it is relevant content that can make the most difference when attempting to achieve the highest rank possible. The more you can keep your content current and fresh and it absolutely helpful, the more attention you will gain from all major search engines. When you write compelling and helpful content, other bloggers, visitors or website owners may be interested in sharing your content in a number of different ways, including establishing a link, posting on twitter or Facebook or even sharing on their own newsletter or mailing list.
In this day and age of business and marketing, the benefits I mentioned above can be some of the most powerful available. The Internet, visibility, conversion, analysis and sales have and continue to transform. 10 years ago the Internet and web visibility reflective the older and possibly more annoying traditional marketing strategies. In other words, websites mimicked television commercials. The strategy was to make you listen to their message. I don't know about you, but I am very tired of being hit over the head by a hammer in an effort to force me to pay attention. The great visionaries saw this as a huge problem and slowly but surely understood a better purpose for the Internet. That purpose is connection and engagement on more of a social level. The best examples, as you can plainly see would be LinkedIn which is mostly for business, Facebook, twitter and YouTube. People are much more interested in sharing and connecting online, not being forced to watch a commercial. We get enough of that on television, radio, newspapers and all other forms of outbound marketing.
This is the essence of inbound marketing and more specifically how a good blog fits into this puzzle. All good blogs were created to help, not sell. This is exactly what I'm trying to do on this particular blog post. I'm simply trying to share my own experience and knowledge on this subject. My hopes are that it proves useful to all readers and that this will be an ongoing relationship with you. If the content I create proves to be helpful, you may be interested in signing up to this particular blog. Maybe you will think enough of it to share it with your social network. The other side effect of producing a regular flow of content, is that all major search engines will be paying more attention because you are more relevant, more fresh and hopefully helpful to your audience and theirs.
Stay tuned as we continue this series on successful blogging.
