With nearly 89% of businesses using corporate blogging to communicate with their customers planning your blogging strategy is key to driving traffic to your website. You can then use analytics to track the traffic from the referred blog site or sites and measure the ROI.
First and foremost you need to cover the basics; identify your readers by brand, category or product. Create the persona and relevant channels specific to each of those readers and then establish your social media presence by building your network for content distribution.
Start with a manageable network you can use as your hub sites where you can post links to each new blog. Once these accounts are open you can join forums, listen to the online chatter and establish relationships with your target markets. You also need to decide whether to place the blog within your site or create a new domain/subdomain. You can also create a blog for each category, brand or persona depending on how many different communities you are trying to engage with. The more genuinely independent blogs you have the more link juice gets poured in to your main site.
WordPress and Blogger are the most popular blogs but it's also worth using other blogging platforms to optimise your articles even further.
Keyword research is crucial to successful blogging. Ensure your keywords accurately reflect what's on your site or try using your blog on longer tail keywords to see if the generate better converting search terms rather than the standard, desired, big volume terms that everyone else is chasing.
Long tail keywords can still gain you market share and without the need to go head to head with the major players that dominate the top 3 positions on the SERPs.
Blogging requires discipline so plan your posts and stick to a regular schedule. Blogging gets you on page 1 of the real-time SERPs in less than an hour in some cases. Check to see the lifetime of that page 1 result and throttle your articles so you know you are always going to be there. In competitive industries this may mean blogging every day and in more niche industries it may only mean posting an article every week or so.
Use free social media monitoring and engagement tools to find your influencers and peers. I really like How Sociable? As it gives a very simple and easy to use interface to monitor Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, MySpace, Digg, Reddit etc etc
Join their forums and post insightful comments on their posts. Offer a subscription through an RSS feed to further promote your blog as well as bookmarking your articles on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon etc etc.
Although everyone wants to find a shortcut to bookmarking by automating the process try, and always complete this manually - Google will love you more if you do!
Use Google Analytics and Google Alerts to provide you with the reporting on how successful and popular your blogs are. More importantly, you can then measure the ROI from your blogging activity by adding the ecommerce script to each page on your site and set the relevant conversion goals.
Posted by David Knockton
Head of Digital Sales and Strategy
Internet Search Management Ltd
