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Spice Up Your Yawn-Inducing Blog with Some Quick Fixes

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Imagine you’ve just stumbled upon your blog. In fact, do it right now. “Stumble” onto your blog and scan the page with fresh, unbiased eyes. I know it’s hard. If it’s too hard, ask someone else to do it (someone who’s never seen it before) and have them tell you off-the-cuff what they see. What are the immediate responses popping into their head?

This exercise should inform you what could be wrong with your site, at least on the surface level. And surface level issues typically require surface level fixes, which are your low-hanging fruit.

Is your blog arresting the attention of your casual visitor? Does it provoke engagement and social sharing amongst your readers? If it doesn’t, it’s failing to serve its purpose as a content marketing initiative and component of your SEO strategy.

Is your writing turning people off?

Perhaps a quarter of the battle is visual. Your test visitor might tell you what they like and don’t like visually on your blog, which will inform you on some stylistic tweaks that you can implement with relative ease. But after that initial 10 seconds, what do you think they’ll consider next? Bingo—your headlines.

It’s a given that your company blog, depending on your industry, will have a tendency toward salesy roboticness, and it will be one of your greatest struggles to write in a compelling way on potentially wooden topics. This is where your intrinsic creativity as a writer should take center stage and stretch your blog to territories that will engage and captivate your readers.

Quick tips on effective writing:

  1. Cultivate a simple, personable voice. Blog is short for weblog—a personable tone is expected.
  2. Keywords should occur naturally and sparingly.
  3. Pick your topics based on what you know, or have researched thoroughly.
  4. Pick your topics based on what your readers know (or don’t know) they need to know. You’ll be the one to convince them of that “need.”

A Few Angles to Consider

As you’re considering topics or angles to liven up your blog, think of these techniques:

  1. Interview posts are engaging and unique. Candidates could be experts within your organization or colleagues.
  2. Tell a story about a client or personal anecdote that illustrates your product or services in action and the results.
  3. Make a customer profile that hypothesizes on their likes, dislikes, fears, demographic, etc., and use it to inform your tone, topics, and style.

On a scale of 1 through 10, how would you rate the engagement level of your blog?

Sources
DeMers, Jayson. “Got a Boring Company Blog? Here’s How to Fix it.”http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2372579/Got-a-Boring-Company-Blog-Heres-How-to-Fix-It?utm_term=&utm_content=Got%20a%20Boring%20Company%20Blog%3F%20Here%E2%80%99s%20How%20to%20Fix%20It&utm_campaign=09%2F30%2F14%20-%20SEW%20Daily&utm_medium=Email&utm_source=Daily. (October 10, 2014).

Courtship and Content Marketing: How to Measure Your Success

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Marketing is simply another form of courtship. As marketers, we court our prospects with the hopes of winning them over with our charm and beginning a lasting, mutually profitable relationship. You see, in this analogy, we’re not dealing with a one-sided, dysfunctional romance, but a win-win situation for both parties.

Continuing the analogy, traditional marketers and content marketers represent two kinds of wooers: the short-game players and the long-game players. Each type of marketer must track their success in different ways, but before we get into that, let’s explore the distinction between the two.

Traditional Marketers: Masters of the Short-Game

These are the more aggressive go-getters. They put their offer on the table in a take-it-or-leave-it type approach, often with a narrowing window of opportunity. Their pickup line is to the point and leaves little room for “maybes,” usually eliciting an immediate “yes” or “no.”

Yeses in traditional marketing come from people who have been adequately prepared to take the leap and become a lead, whether by happy circumstance or deliberate prior conditioning through content marketing.

How to Measure Traditional Marketing Success

Tracking your success with traditional marketing is a simple matter of counting up the yeses, or leads. How many people filled out your contact form? How many calls did you receive off of the new landing page? How many clicks did you get off your PPC campaign?

Content Marketers: Pros of the Long-Game

Content marketers play a game of patience, opting for the trust-building technique, which takes more time but creates more payoff. Not only may your efforts end in a lead or sale, but your prospect will learn to trust you as an authority, confidante, and/or friend in the process.

The relationship a content marketer is trying to build is noncommittal, even passive. You want to build something long-term and loyal, but you’re not making demands or asking for anything right out of the gate. That’s the traditional marketing approach. Your priority is to disseminate useful information and media for their consumption and education. You also want to learn about your prospects through fruitful interactions via blog comments, webinars, surveys, and more.

Just like an attentive date, you understand that a healthy long-term relationship is built off of solid two-way communication and benefit.

How to Measure Content Marketing Success

It’s tempting to only track clicks, downloads, and views as your measurement of success in content marketing, but the real measurement of success will come outside of individual pieces of content or media.

What you really want to know is how well your content is motivating your prospects to take action. This can be accomplished by tracking prospects versus content. It will involve asking targeted questions of your prospects and sales team. You’ll need to find a way to track what your prospects are consuming and where they go after that, and what they do.

For example, if a particular prospect has downloaded a whitepaper on cloud computing for big business, and has visited your cloud computing product page a number of times, sales can be informed on how to approach that particular prospect and what content they may be interested in viewing next.

By tracking your prospects’ progress through the courtship process and learning all you can about them, you can take away actionable insights that will allow you to prove your success and recognize areas for improvement.

How do you track the success of your content marketing efforts?

Sources:

Balik, Rachel. “To Successfully Measure B2B Content Marketing, Get In the Friend Zone.”http://marketingland.com/successfully-measure-content-marketing-get-friend-zone-91908?utm_source=marketo&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter&utm_content=scap&mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRonv6TOZKXonjHpfsX97uwrXaS%2FlMI%2F0ER3fOvrPUfGjI4JRMpqI%2BSLDwEYGJlv6SgFTbLCMbpx37gNXxU%3D. (July 29, 2014.)