A blogger's success is measured by the goals he has achieved through blogging. For each entrepreneur, the purpose of their blogging efforts is different. Some focus on increasing email subscribers, driving traffic to their product pages, generating potential clients, or growing exposure to their brand. However, all business blogs eventually emphasize one metric - boosting sales.
Therefore, in order to get to the stage where bloggers can truly say that they are a success, they need to implement different tactics that will help them accomplish their targeted goals. One of the many ways to do this is by applying the best content marketing practices to your approach.
For optimal efficiency and the proper allocation of company resources, bloggers will need to form a marketing strategy through content creation so they can:
Produce quality blog posts based on a target keyword to optimize search engine rankings.
Publish well-researched content consistently.
Promote posts using the best sharing practices on social media sites.
Track and measure blog content and see which receives the most traffic, which retains the most visitors, which page have converted visitors, and more
If you're just starting a blog for your business website but have yet to figure out a strategy on how to achieve your own success, then consider this as a quick guide on how you can build an effective content marketing plan for your blog.
Research For Your Target Keywords
Assuming that you already have figured out the niche you want to blog about, you will need to research keywords to optimize for with your blog content. By using the proper keywords with your pages, you make your blog much easier to be indexed and ranked by search engine spiders. By achieving this, you will be able to receive referral traffic from Google, Bing, and others to your blog posts without actively promoting them!
To help you find the best keywords for you blog, run a quick query of your niche using Google Keyword Planner and UberSuggest. From here, you will be able to see keyword suggestions from your niche that you ought to use. For more results, further review Google's Keyword Tool to find additional suggestions based off the Google Autocomplete feature. Choose from up to 10 head terms and multiple long-tail keywords that you plan on optimizing for to broaden your chances of getting found once you've developed your content.
Develop An Editorial Calendar
A blog that is updated regularly with new posts has SEO benefits because:
You target more keywords with each new piece of content.
You set expectations for your loyal readers so they know when to regularly visit your blog looking for fresh content.
Internal linking to relevant posts becomes easier.
Your visitors are impressed by the wealth of knowledge you are sharing.
In order to encourage you to produce blog posts as necessary, an editorial calendar will help you determine and research for the posts that you will publish in advance. From here, you can plan the types of content you will create and the frequency of your posts in your blog, among other things. Once you've prepared the blog content you will produce within the next three months, assign each a post in your editorial calendar with a target keyword from the list you've researched.
Be sure to space out the posts throughout each month to maximize traffic. This also gives you the time to promote them properly using social media (more on this later).
Write The Best Blog Content
The best and most successful blog posts are written by bloggers who understand how to promote their blog with content that earns links and shares. Aside from using the target keyword in your title and image alt tags, the post must be well-written (free of grammatical errors), insightful (offers more than just generic information readily available anywhere), and actionable (encourages readers to act upon what they just learned). More importantly, your post should be able to effectively tell a story in order to get readers intellectually and emotionally invested in your content.
Finally, a blog post's success online is not necessarily only about its content. How the elements of a post are arranged on the page also affects how readers interact with your content, which determines how it performs as a whole. Therefore, the ability to divide your post into different sections and place specific calls to actions will be the difference between content that generates low traffic and a viral post.
Get Exposure - Share Your Posts
Upon publishing your content, you need to deliver it to your target audience. Social media is a great place to start, especially if you have developed a following with your different accounts. Since each social media site has distinct qualities that separate one from the other, you will need to know the best practices on how to use Twitter, Google+, Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram.
In order to monitor how your blog posts are performing in social media, you may need to share your posts using Hootsuite and Buffer. Both of these help you see how many users have clicked, viewed, and interacted with the link pointing to your blog post. From here, you can see which of the tactics you've employed has drawn the ideal reaction from users on social, allowing you to replicate the tactic the next time you promote your latest post.
Track and Measure Performance
Installing Google Analytics on your blog should help you monitor how your blog posts have performed since publishing it. GA offers a number of very important metrics to keep an eye on, including bounce rate, time on site, most visited pages, the flow of visitors through your website, the mediums from which you attracted visitors, etc. Combine this information with Google's Webmaster Tools data, such as "search queries", average position for search engine rankings, submitted vs indexed pages, links pointing to your site, and click-through rates, and you begin to get a more complete picture of your blog's strengths and weaknesses.
From here, you can figure out the types of content that you readers like (based on the number of visitors and the duration of their stay on the page, among other metrics) and double down on your efforts in developing this particular content type. For content that hasn't received enough traction from your visitors, use this time to rethink your approach and test new strategies.