Learning to maneuver content to attract the right customers is a key factor in developing a successful blogging strategy. By Dianne M. Pogoda
“Blogs are not an option in web marketing.”
That message, from Esteem Media founder and ceo Adam Japko, kicked off the three-day Design Bloggers Conference held in Beverly Hills last week. Japko, who also founded DBC a decade ago, opened the breakout sessions with that thought, and provided some key insights about how to use a blog as a way to attract customers.
“A blog is simply a website you can update, and crucial in web marketing,” he said. “A blog neatly organizes content for search engines and allows for fresh content creation.”
Japko pointed to several important elements about blogs, especially to those relatively new to the blogosphere: “First, the blog content must belong to you. It’s a search product, not a newsfeed product.”
He cited a recent example of how this went very wrong, with the pet-centric website Little Things. This site was “an iconic digital marketer” in the pet product space. The owners realized they needed to create content about pets and their owners to attract business. They created a single-platform strategy, distributing content on Facebook, and quickly grew. However, they were relying on another party they couldn’t control to distribute their content. This turned sour when Facebook changed its algorithm — the mechanism that determines what appears on users’ “walls” — to focus more on posts from friends and family and less on posts from businesses. Overnight, Little Things lost 75% of its traffic because its posts weren’t appearing on newsfeeds, and they were ultimately forced to shut down.
“The lesson is: own your content,” he stressed.
Another important point is understanding the two ways consumers find you on the Internet. The first is by placing an ad on a dominant website, and including your link in the ad. You pay to intersect with someone else’s audience, but you have to keep paying.
“The second way is that you go directly to consumers,” he explained. “You’re talking directly to them, you own the content and you include very specific key words. This is known as a ‘long-tail search.’”
A long-tail keyword is a phrase that contains at three to five keywords that are used to target niche customers, rather than the broadest audiences. In other words, they’re more specific and as such, they allow you to rank high in search results for popular topics. And the users they often attract are generally highly qualified, which leads to converting searchers into customers.
The way it works is that keywords in your content are assessed by search engines like Google, and the more specific your search words are, the more valuable you are. Therefore, you get more quality hits. Your information becomes the most important. The idea behind the long-tail concept is that popular searches, (which comprise less than 25% of the searches), include very broad search words. For instance, people might search for “bedroom decorating ideas.” That gets a lot of hits because it’s a very broad topic, but this wide audience might not be searching for your specific product, and therefore, the chances of them buying from you are small. It’s much better to have specific keywords like “teenage girls pink princess decorating ideas Boston area.” Specific content is the way to attract the users most likely to buy your product or service. Since the keywords are so targeted, they may draw less traffic — but they draw higher-quality traffic.
“Business blogging is different from personal blogging,” Japko emphasized. “In the first place, you can’t keep stories stagnant on your business site for a long time. You have to keep the content fresh — Google can perceive this, and will put your website high in the results list. Fresh content comes up first.
Several other SEO ranking factors affect where you land in a search, including how many people share it, click it, or block it, how many likes you get and who is liking your post. Google evaluates all of these factors to determine the list that pops up when people are searching.
“Your headline becomes the URL. That’s how the search engine works for you, so don’t get cute or clever with the headline — get the right words in there, because this is the way to come up ahead of the powerhouse sites,” he added, noting that WordPress is the de facto program for blogs.
Japko offered a few more tips:
- Every time you create a post, tag it with specific keywords. Be sure to put your location in your tags, too — that’s known as geo-tagging, and will attract potential customers in your area.
- Think about the customer’s intent – what search words a customer would use to find you?
- You can use too many tags on a blog post. Tags underscore for the searcher what the post is about. You need to be specific, but considered. Using too many tags dilutes the search, because you’re moving back toward including everything, thus getting the wider — and less-qualified — audience.
- The most important things to remember about content strategy: What do consumers want to know, and how do they ask about it?
-Cost: How much does something cost?
-Problems/Solutions: What are the problems associated with this product, and/or what do I need to know to solve it?
-Versus: This is a comparison — A compared to B… like granite vs. quartz.
-Reviews/Awards: What people/companies/products have been recognized in this particular category?
-The Best: What’s the best of anything? It could be the best product, the best retailer, the best service provider — people want to know the best.
The bottom line, he said, is that “blogging must be integrated in any content marketing strategy, because it’s the gateway to your business.”
