Your Blog’s Place in the ‘Content Mountain’

“Do I still need to blog?”

With the online world awash with large amounts of Facebook posts, Twitter feeds, Pinterest, Google+ and countless other exposure points and communication platforms, this is, now more than ever, a very good and valid question that I get asked by my clients all the time.

And in today’ s world of budget restrictions where many of my clients, who believe in Social Media Marketing as the way forwards and who are already stretching themselves to engage us to connect with their target audience on their behalf, create great content for them and build communities all over the internet, this is a question that I have asked myself too on more than one occasion.

Well, the short answer has to be a resounding yes: blog posts are still important for your business and a vital part of your content mix.

In this post I would like to give you some of the reasons why I think that blogging is still a very important element of your marketing mix.

The Content Mountain Concept

The first reason comes back to my concept of the “content mountain” that I use to explain our rather different approach to Content Marketing that we offer to our clients.

The idea is that, once we have decided on the content themes with the client (in terms of what we believe their readers need and want to read), and once we have all decided what the client wants and needs to be telling their customers (and they do not have to be the same), then it makes a lot of sense for us to think first in terms of researching and writing and creating a mountain of content. And once this mountain of content has been created, we use that content in lots of genres and formats across a range of platforms.

By working this way, we are able to produce much more content of a higher quality, yet at a much lower cost (read: happy client and happy customers!).

The basic thought behind this content distribution strategy is that, while readership is everywhere, not all readers are everywhere.

On the contrary, most readers spend their time on just a limited number of online or social platforms and these are primarily the only places where they will find and engage with content. Some love Facebook and spend most of their time there. Some love Twitter and this is where we need to find them and talk to them. Some spend lots of time on blogs or LinkedIn and for this group of readers, we need to produce content for them to find and consume.

Thus, in order to engage with a larger readership, one must think of placing your content across multiple online platforms.

The onsite blog is one of the key platforms in this mix that we can use for content, especially as many businesses find that their blog already has some readership in its own right, and that some individual blog posts are already starting to rank for important search phrases.

And for this reason, your blog is still an important piece of real estate in your online marketing mix.

Blog Content Should be Part of your Website

Publishing content on third party websites and online platforms (such as Facebook, Instagram, Forums, Twitter, third party blogs etc.) can be an excellent way of engaging with new readership and, if done correctly, can generate new traffic to your site. But there is no guarantee.

Your own blog, on the other hand, is an integral part of your own website. So if your content is useful and interesting and, if your content is being indexed by search engines or spread by your readers, then anyone who comes across your content will effectively be visiting your website to read this content.

And once people are on your own blog (which is your own real estate), you then have the opportunity to place sales messaging alongside your content, get readers to subscribe to your content or newsletter feeds, ask questions of your readership, try to engage them in conversation and more.

More In-Depth Content

In the same way that some offline media (such as television and radio) are more suited to the broadcast of quicker, shorter sound bites of information, while others (such as newspapers, magazines or journals) are better suited to longer, more in-depth analyses or discussions, the same is true with online content platforms.

When it comes to the likes of Facebook and in the extreme case, Twitter, the messaging has to be quick and sharp and to the point with little option (or desire from readers) for anything more than a headline, a sound bite and maybe an image.

However, while we tend to broadcast headlines and sound bites on these platforms, we have found that it can be a very good tactic to give readers the option to “read more” and point them to the client’ s blog where we then provide more in-depth content on the subject matter. Many readers like to discover “signposts” for good content in their social feeds and then want and expect to be taken to the full version elsewhere – your blog.

Blog Posts Boost your Rankings

Coming back to the idea of blog posts sitting on your own website (www.yourwebsite.com/blog), we are seeing that this actually represents a huge opportunity to boost the SEO assets of our clients’ websites as a whole.

In today’ s world of ongoing Panda & Penguin penalties on the one hand and the vast opportunities of Hummingbird on the other hand, where ongoing content expansion on your site is paramount to search engines, we are seeing time and time again that when we have an ongoing programme of ever growing content creation and every expanding new pages for our clients’ websites, we observe two amazing results. The first is that more pages are being indexed and ranked in Google (which is great for generating more relevant and quality traffic) and, very interestingly, these rankings are holding for very long periods of time without any further SEO activity required.

You can imagine how happy this makes our clients.
And you can imagine how much extra traffic this is generating to their sites.

This is surely the point and the objective of blogging in the first place?

If you would like to find out more about our “Content Mountain” approach to Content Marketing and how we can help you turn your blog into an effective corporate blogging programme for your business, why not give us a call. It’s what we love and do best.