eBooks

Blogging in the Age of Content Marketing 6 7 Blogging in the Age of Content Marketing Brand Awareness Assuming that you've got the pieces aligned to write great content for a targeted audience (don't worry, we'll walk through this), blogs are a phenomenal avenue for building brand awareness. Interesting and relevant blog content can have a wide reach and although your content won't explicitly discuss your brand and products/services, your brand's name and logo will be apparent and associated with the content you produce. Producing high quality con- tent and sharing it with your audience and influencers means that your brand's name will be shared across the web for more people to see, thereby increasing your brand awareness. SEO Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a big beast to tackle and would make for an entire eBook on its own; however, what's important to know about SEO is that a blog is one of the easiest low-hanging fruits for build- ing your SEO strategy. Since your blog lives on your website, you can and should be writing content which incorporates strategic keywords that are important to your company's SEO and Search Engine Results Page (SERP) rankings. As your content drives more and more traffic to your site, search engines will begin to rank your site with higher authority which will increase your SEO and SERP results. Furthermore, search engines crawl and index every page and keyword on your website – and that includes any new blog pieces you publish. Using targeted keywords within your con- tent means that your piece will appear higher in SERP results when people are searching for a particular topic. Check out this piece for a step-by-step guide to creating an effective SEO keyword strategy. Shareable content via blog impacts SEO as current digital landscape changing – social SEO helps from that perspective. Thought Leadership Great content produces authority and trust with your audience. Over time, your readers will associate your in- teresting, relevant, and informative content with your brand. Building this rapport and relationship with your au- dience is invaluable as you work to drive these people further down the funnel. Qualified Leads Assuming that your blog lives on your company's website (which it definitely should), your content will ultimately pull a targeted audience of potential buyers directly to your website! Sounds pretty awesome, right? Forget for a moment the significant SEO ben- efits that this traffic will bring – you've ultimately got a group of people on your website that you've identified as being your target audience (as determined by your strategic content creation), who now trust your brand as a thought- leader, and have a gaping problem/pain point in their lives that your product/service can solve. Yes – done correctly, your blog can be a signif- icant driver of leads for your company! Another way to think of blogging (and content marketing as a whole), is as a relationship. Through your content, you're taking the time to build a relationship with your audience, showing them that you understand who they are, what they're interested in, what they're struggling with, and why they can trust you. Unlike the old school hard-sales approach (does a used-car salesman come to mind?), content marketing and blogging is all about building a genuine relationship with your audience – one that's built on a strong foundation of trust and reliability. Instead of trying to hit a home run on the first date, content marketing is a long term approach that is built off layers of conversation and trust. When a connection is built and a relationship secured (i.e. a lead is generated), you can bet it's been built out of love, not infatuation... or coercion. 2. 1. 3. 4.

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