Blogging Drives Leads: How to Create a Blog Marketing Strategy

You might not be aware how closely connected blogging is to lead generation. Once you leave behind the notion that marketing consists of interruptive advertising and move to an inbound marketing approach that focuses on creating content, placing content and using content to drive people to your website, and then turning those visitors into leads—blogging becomes a major focus for your business.

Inbound marketing is being fueled by the insane popularity of social media, as well as the multiple changes Google and other search engines have made to the type of listings being delivered when we search a topic.

Don’t take my word for it. The data is in. Blogging drives leads.

• 57% of companies with a blog have acquired a customer from their blog.
• Businesses with websites that have 401-1000 web pages get 6x more leads than those with 51-100 pages.  
• B2B marketers who use blogs generate 67% more leads per month than those who do not.
• B2C companies who blog generate 88% more leads per month than those who do not.  
• 92% of companies who blog multiple times per day have acquired a customer from their blog.  
• The average company who blogs gets 97% more inbound links, and inbound links drive traffic and rankings.  
• 79% of online shoppers spend 50% of their shopping time researching products online.  
• Within the next year, blogging is expected to gain a 50% increase in users.
• Among those who use email marketing, companies who blog achieve 2x more traffic from email than those who don’t.  

So now the question becomes—how do you get the blog campaign up, running and performing for your business?

1.  Consider your blog marketing strategy. While it might seem like you can just “jump in” and start blogging, some thought and planning need to come first.

Before you can start blogging, you need a blog platform for your website. There are a number of options available, and most are either free or relatively inexpensive. Some marketing automation tools, such as HubSpot, come with a blog tool as part of the package, and implementation is very easy. WordPress is also another platform that has attained success from its ease of use.

2.  You need to have an understanding of the keywords you want your business to be found for when your prospects start searching online.

This research needs to be finished first, before you start blogging, and has to be based on data, not intuition, gut or supposition. Over the years, we have learned that most business owners, CEOs and even marketing professionals, think their prospects are searching for them one way—only to find out, after we do the research, that they are using a method with completely different keywords.

Selecting the right keywords for your blog marketing strategy deals with many factors including, the volume of people searching and the difficulty associated with your keywords. Difficulty means the number of people competing for rankings for those keywords; the more competitive the terms, the longer it’s going to take for you to get rankings and traffic traction.

Be sure to pick a cross section of highly searched terms with both high and low difficulty. You might want to also consider low volume search terms with low difficulty. These low difficulty terms can quickly add up to increased traffic over a shorter period of time.

3.  Create an editorial calendar.

The calendar is critical to maintaining momentum around content creation, which then drives an active blogging effort. One of the major challenges with creating a calendar is: “What do we write about?” If you have a list of potential blog topics with keywords used appropriately, you will never run into this challenge.

The question of frequency always comes up, “How often do we have to blog?” The answer is—more. The more you blog, the more traffic you drive to your site. We typically recommend that clients blog at least a few times a week, and once a day is preferred.

4.  Know the “whys” behind what you are doing.

Maybe you are the same way, so let me explain why and how blogging actually drives more traffic to your website.

When Google changed its algorithms in the spring of this year, blog content began to rise to the top of the rankings. The reason for this: Google knows that its searchers appreciate the thought leadership and conversational style associated with blog posts vs. other promotional pages on a website.

Most search engines are also integrating with social media to identify more frequently shared content and pushing the shared content to the top of the rankings. Blog content is often the most shared of pages on a website, and there are a few tips and techniques to make that content even more popular.

For instance, when you publish a new post for your company, all of your employees should be sharing it with their social networks. Immediately, this gives your content social credibility with the major search engines.

This might not be as easy as buying an advertisement in a magazine or spending the day exhibiting at a trade show, but hands down, blogging generates more traffic, more leads and a much higher return on marketing investment than both of the more traditional marketing tactics.

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