Blog marketing is the convergence of content marketing, SEO, and UX. It serves as a platform where website visitors seek knowledge or entertainment. During their visit, you have the opportunity to engage with them and convert them into users or customers. Hence, it becomes your responsibility to ensure that their experience is:
- Relevant – They find what they came for.
- Pleasant – By providing a solid User Experience.
- Transformative – By successfully converting them from visitors to leads.
As a growth marketing agency, we prioritize inbound and organic marketing over paid marketing for our own marketing efforts. Our most prominent organic marketing channel is our own blog.
Now, let’s delve into what we do in our blog and the blogs of our clients to generate leads. But before that, here are some brief definitions and clarifications.
What is Blog Marketing?
Blog marketing is the use of a blog to create valuable, informative, and engaging content.
Through blog marketing, companies can connect with users and aim to convert visitors into customers.
The key elements of blog marketing include content creation:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
- Promotion.
Blog marketing and content marketing often overlap as content is the primary focus of the blog, but there are some key differences between the two.
Blog Marketing vs Content Marketing vs Blog Monetization
Blog marketing is a subset of content marketing that centers on using a blog as its primary platform. In contrast, content marketing encompasses a broader range of content formats and distribution channels.
Blog marketing and blog monetization are two distinct concepts that should not be confused. While blog marketing focuses on utilizing a blog to create valuable and engaging content to attract and nurture leads, blog monetization is centered around directly generating revenue from the blog itself. Blog monetization methods often include advertising, sponsorships, affiliate marketing, and subscriptions. It’s essential to understand the difference between these two approaches and choose the one that aligns with your business goals and objectives. For lead generation and building a loyal customer base, blog marketing proves to be an effective strategy, while blog monetization is geared towards directly earning revenue from the blog’s content and audience.
With the definitions clarified, let’s delve deeper into the topic of blog marketing, which is the primary focus of our discussion.
Bringing Value to Your Reads
A blog’s primary purpose is to create value for its readers.
According to Ilia Mundut of HeftyBerry, this value can take various forms, with the most common being:
Educational value: Providing valuable knowledge, insights, and explanations to teach and inform readers about specific topics or subjects. It may offer time-saving tips, practical shortcuts, and tactics, which is what our own blog typically offers.
Entertainment value: Engaging and captivating readers through storytelling, humor, or compelling narratives. It offers enjoyable and engaging experiences, providing a break from routine.
Social value: Fostering a sense of community by encouraging social interaction and promoting engagement among readers. It often involves content that encourages readers to share their thoughts and experiences, including discussion forums.
Inspirational value: Motivating and uplifting readers by sharing stories, personal experiences, or examples of success and resilience. It aims to inspire readers and ignite their own aspirations and ambitions.
Emotional support value: Providing comfort, empathy, or solace to readers who need support. It offers understanding, encouragement, and resources to help readers navigate difficult situations they may find themselves in.
No matter what type of value your blog offers, to maximize its impact, you will need to employ the tactics outlined below, says Vaibhav Kakkar, CEO & Founder of Digital Web Solutions.
Here’s how we do it.
1. Write Relevant Topics for Our Target Customers
To engage our desired readers, we prioritize writing about topics directly related to their needs, challenges, and interests. As a result, our content covers themes such as digital marketing, SaaS, startups, and tools.
Our blog, similar to many other digital marketing blogs, attracts two primary personas:
- Potential Customers: These visitors are interested in learning more about digital marketing because they are considering purchasing marketing services.
- Competitors: These visitors are interested in delving deeper into digital marketing as it is their job, and they seek to gain further insights and knowledge.
Interestingly, we develop content to cater to both competitors and potential leads.
2. Create Unique and Thought-Provoking Content
Originality is the cornerstone of our blog strategy. Our aim is to deliver content that sets itself apart, offering fresh perspectives, innovative ideas, and unique experiences.
For instance, we conduct in-depth research and publish articles like “LinkedIn Experiment: Link in Post VS Link in Comment.” At times, we also publish original pieces that may not have immediate practical value, such as “History of SEO: The Evolution of SEM (1950s — Today)” or “The 5 Weirdest Guest Post Emails We’ve Received.”
Alongside these, we provide standard guides that you would expect from a digital marketing blog, such as “Product-Market Fit: The Definitive Guide [2023].” While we may not be reinventing the wheel with these articles, we strive to present them from a unique and compelling perspective.
3. Create Custom, Branded Visuals
Visuals are a crucial component of our blog posts, elevating their appeal and impact. We invest in crafting unique and branded visuals, from eye-catching thumbnails and open graphs to in-article images and infographics.
These visuals not only enhance the visual appeal of our posts but also serve to simplify complex information, making it more accessible and engaging for our audience.
4. Add Internal Links
Internal links play a vital role in enhancing the structure and SEO of our blog. Beyond its technical benefits, internal linking acts as the cohesive force that binds our blog together. Through well-placed internal links, we create a seamless journey for readers to navigate across our blog.
By strategically incorporating relevant internal links, we not only encourage readers to explore more of our content but also foster greater engagement and establish trust with our audience.
5. Implement Tooltips for Terminology
To enhance user experience, we implement tooltips for technical or unfamiliar terms within our blog. Tooltips are user interface elements that offer additional information, eliminating the need for readers to open new tabs to understand unknown words or terms.
By incorporating tooltips, we make it more convenient for users to navigate through our content, particularly in cases where our blog delves into technical subjects.
Delivering a Solid User Experience (UX)
We prioritize delivering an outstanding user experience through our thoughtfully designed blog. Our emphasis lies in optimizing the overall UX to ensure a sticky and engaging platform. This involves incorporating clear navigation, optimizing page loading speed for faster access, and ensuring a mobile-friendly layout.
According to Daniel Sarrero, Co-Owner of SEA Concrete Contractors Seattle, by providing a seamless and enjoyable reading experience, we keep our audience engaged and entice them to delve deeper into our content, ultimately fostering a strong connection with our blog.
1. Incorporate Sticky Table of Contents
To enhance navigation within our blog posts, we integrate a sticky table of contents at the start of long-form articles. This helpful feature enables readers to quickly access specific sections of interest, saving time and facilitating easy access to the information they require.
2. Foster Engagement with Comments and Related Posts
At the core of our blog strategy lies a strong emphasis on fostering engagement with our readers. By enabling comments on our posts, we actively encourage and invite our audience to share their thoughts, ask questions, and participate in discussions. We believe that meaningful interactions with our readers not only enhance the overall reading experience but also provide valuable insights and perspectives that shape the content we create. We value the active involvement of our audience and view their contributions as an integral part of our blog’s success. So, whether you’re a regular reader or a first-time visitor, we welcome you to join the conversation and be a part of our vibrant community. Your voice matters, and we look forward to hearing your ideas and opinions as we continue to deliver valuable content that resonates with our audience.
Furthermore, we enhance reader retention by displaying related posts at the end of each article, offering additional relevant content for exploration, ultimately prolonging their stay on our blog.
3. Include Social Media Sharing Buttons
To promote the sharing of our blog posts, we incorporate social media sharing buttons.These buttons make it easy for readers to share our content with their networks, amplifying our reach and directing more traffic to our blog.
4. Facilitate Easy Sharing Options
We facilitate easy sharing options beyond social media. Users can choose to share, listen, quote, or simply copy & paste sections of our blog posts.
This flexibility helps our readers to consume and share our content in the format that suits them best, further amplifying our reach.
Getting More Traffic through SEO
Creating valuable content is essential, but it’s equally important to ensure that your content reaches your target audience. While various channels like email, social media, and paid advertising can be effective for content promotion, when it comes to distributing content from your blog, content marketing and SEO are a perfect match.
In our case, over 70% of our blog traffic comes from organic search.
Content SEO-optimization and building a Google update-proof SEO strategy are broad topics that can be explored in depth, but here are a few key points to consider, according to Dave Roebel, Owner of Northeast Mechanical Services.
1. Identify Your Keywords
To optimize our blog posts for search engines, we strategically incorporate relevant keywords throughout our content. Thorough keyword research helps us identify the terms our target audience is searching for, allowing us to seamlessly integrate them into our articles.
When it comes to blog content, there are two primary types of search intent:
- Informational Intent: Users seeking answers, knowledge, or information about a specific topic.
- Commercial Intent: Users interested in product comparisons, reviews, pricing information, or seeking recommendations.
There is also one more common intent:
Transactional Intent: Users looking for products, services, or solutions and being ready to convert.
However, transactional intent is often fulfilled through landing pages rather than blog pages, as shown in the example we provided.
2. Include Schema Markup for Enhanced SERP Presence
To maximize our visibility on search engine result pages (SERPs), we incorporate schema markup in our blog posts.
Implementing schema markup helps Google understand the context and structure of our content, leading to enhanced search engine listings that occupy more space on Google’s SERPs.
This increased visibility significantly improves our chances of attracting organic traffic to our blog.
3. Link-building
Link-building is a critical aspect of SEO, as search engines like Google consider links as a key ranking factor. When reputable websites link to our site, it signals to search engines that our content is valuable and trustworthy.
We actively engage in link-building, focusing on white hat techniques, where we build links through collaborations. This approach allows us to establish strong connections and partnerships, contributing to the credibility and authority of our blog.
Conclusion
Blog marketing is a powerful tool for lead generation and driving sign-ups and conversions. By focusing on creating valuable and engaging content that resonates with our target audience, we can attract potential customers and build a community of loyal followers. Incorporating SEO strategies, utilizing social media sharing buttons, and implementing internal links can further enhance our blog’s visibility and reach. Additionally, by delivering a solid user experience and providing various sharing options, we can encourage readers to explore and share our content, expanding our blog’s influence. Emphasizing lead generation as the ultimate goal of our blog allows us to turn visitors into valuable leads and eventually loyal customers. With a well-crafted blog marketing strategy, we can effectively leverage the power of content to achieve our business objectives and establish ourselves as thought leaders in our industry. So, let’s harness the potential of blog marketing to drive growth, foster engagement, and ultimately, succeed in our lead generation efforts.
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