How to blog with Purpose: Blogging as part of your brand strategy
While I’ve been known to expound on the benefits of corporate blogging, explaining how blogging is central to most B-to-B branding and marketing strategies, giving rooms full of conference attendees the simple advice of creating an editorial calendar, remarking that blogs don’t have to be long dissertations but can be quick snippets, I have a dirty little secret. I really don’t like to blog. Even at this exact moment, I’m thinking, does anyone really care about this, or at least care about it enough to justify the time it’s taking me to write it?
I’ve never been good at anything that requires regular maintenance, long hauls or delayed gratification of any sort for that matter. And for years, blogging has felt labor intensive, self-referential and squishy in its purported benefits.
Well, there’s good news: blogging is actually not a waste of time. It turns out that putting highly relevant content out on the web, content associated with topics and key words you want to be associated with, makes it easier for people to find you and associate you with that content. Blogging isn’t a tactic in search of a strategy. Instead, it’s a way of making sure that when someone is looking for precisely what you do, that they find you and they find useful information about that topic.
Specifically, blogging helps:
- Prospects understand what you do and find you via search
- Customers stay up-to-date with your offerings and thought leadership, and
- Search engines have another page they can index for specific search topics
When you use blogging as part of your focused marketing and branding strategies, it can be highly effective, increasing web traffic and building relationships with qualified, prospective customers and existing customers over the long term. But there are a few things to do in order to reap these benefits. Download Your Blogging Checklist to make sure your blogging with purpose, not wasting your time.
