Many online marketing professionals consider business blogs as one of their main strategies for content marketing aimed at engaging and captivating potential clients or buyers and for good reason. Many studies have shown that blogs can prove invaluable for reaching more than half of one’s online consumer base. Unfortunately, many people in the SEO business still tend to overlook two vital tools when it comes to improving reach and website traffic or at least fail to strike a fine balance with its use– social media and optimizing for search engines.
Now a lot of bloggers and online marketers do have a grasp on creating great business blogs and SEO but many also tend to make the mistake of focusing too much on keywords and ignoring the online users that are likely to search for information online using those ketwords. Everyone in this line of business adds keywords to their blog post as it’s a fairly basic strategy for search engine optimization but that alone is certainly not enough to succeed.
One needs to come up with a plan for their content that not only satisfies their keyword requirement but more importantly, the social topics that their targeted online users actually care about. Doing so would result in a blog content that is inherently a lot more searchable and gains a lot of favor in the social media setting.
Blog marketing and social media optimization
The process of optimizing for social media involves among other thing, coming up with content that generates much interest from the online community. It rides high on the ability of social communities to share links to interesting and engaging online content with one another through social media networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Success here can help generate needed web traffic for business blogs. As you may already know, search engines also use social media as a signal when assigning website page ranks.
Simply put, blogs that are both SEO and social media optimized are a lot more effective when it comes to driving traffic to your website. Readers of your blog can share your content with others via social media channels essentially giving you an exponential increase in traffic. More importantly, having your blogs shared through social media can significantly affect its visibility in SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) and enable you to get quality traffic from online users who are actively looking for relevant web content.
Optimizing for the search engine and social media
Indeed making your site search engine friendly through a myriad of SEO strategies and methodologies is important. However, making your blogs and websites social media friendly is just as vital to the success of your online marketing efforts. Keep in mind that no matter how good your content is for blog marketing, it won’t do you any good unless it is read, used and shared – a good mindset for social media can help you do just that!
Think about how your targeted online users are seeking out information on the internet or what actually interest them and use it to encourage them to do what you want them to. That is, to read your blogs, share it with others and hopefully engage your business!
Blog marketing strategies
Now in order to actually make the most out of the opportunity that business blogs and social media actually offers you, there are a couple of questions that any online marketing professional needs to ask themselves. The answers to these questions can prove invaluable for coming up with perfect strategy for your blog marketing efforts
- Who are the people that you intend to convince or influence with your blog? These can be buyers, industry experts, clients, employees or even other bloggers!
- What content can you provide which will satisfy the needs of your targeted users?
- How do you plan to go about addressing those needs? Plan your bog content.
- How does your blog fit in when it comes to a client’s or buyer’s connection with your business?
- How is your blog going to indirectly or directly influence its readers and lead to results which your business can effectively measure?
Creating interest in your blog marketing efforts – A blog needs to be interested in its users
Creating a lot of interest among readers for your marketing blog is a task that is easier said than done. Truth be told, a lot of online marketing professionals tend to fail in this endeavor and the reason behind it isn’t really at all complicated. You see, a lot of business blogs out there tend to center itself towards branding – that is it talks about their brand and the services or products they offer without even considering the perspective of its readers and potential consumers.
A blog that centers itself too much on branding or even SEO has the tendency to come out as pushy and too aggressive in terms of getting results in search engine rankings.The issue with these kinds of blogs is that it doesn’t really provide the level of engagement that it needs to be shared or directly influence an outcome in the business perspective. Think about it – it’s all about branding in lieu of customer empathy and staying on the same page as your targeted consumers.
The significance of business blog participation
Indeed today’s blog marketing business should not only be SEO optimized but social media focused as well. In order to do this, it must participate with social networking communities extensively in any way it can and social networking communities can provide you with excellent ideas and stories for your business. Business blogs need to reach out to social communities for quality ideas that are customer-focused – engaging people through social media is an excellent way of doing just that! Success there will eventually make the social networking community start talking about you as well as their friends and their friend’s friend which is essentially the power behind optimizing your blog marketing efforts to go beyond SEO and seeing effective use of social media.