Brian Clark of Copyblogger is someone I admire. He’s one of the great folks in the content marketing world and he recently gave an interview for The Self Employed Podcast.
In the interview Brian shared what I thought was the most basic yet most important suggestion for those considering content marketing as a marketing strategy for their small or medium sized business. It’s simple, but it’s crucial to understand this when making the decision to commit to content marketing.
From Online Marketing With Copyblogger:
The really cool part is that you don’t really need anyone’s permission to do this. You need to learn and you to build a website that produces content a constant basis.
Brian is a great proponent of business owners and managers creating content to grow their business. It’s something he has done. It’s something the other companies he mentions in the podcast have done. Many companies have don this but one of the key components of their success has been constant content creation.
Brian’s site publishes about 1-2 new blog posts each day. There are people that read just about every post that is published on the site, but that’s not really the ultimate goal of the content. Sure, it’s nice if people are reading that much content, but it’s not the main goal of all that constant content creation.
The Goal of Constant Content is Conversion
You want your content to attract the attention of new visitors. This occurs somewhat with search, but increasingly it’s more about referrals. People share your content with the people they know. Your brand is exposed to new people. These new folks visit and learn to trust your brand because of the content you’re creating.
Ultimately this trust leads to conversion.
That’s the goal of any business. Profit is what allows a business to stay in business. The focus for most executives is to grow the revenue of the company while also optimizing the profit for the long-term. Content is something that can achieve both of these goals. The folks mentioned by Brian Clark above have done this and so have many others including the clients of Ghost Blog Writers.
The Blogging Death Cycle
The most common thing I see with business blogs is what I call the blogging death cycle.
I’ll be researching a company and I’ll see they have a link on their website to their company blog. I’ll click through to see what they’re writing about and to my surprise (well not really to my surprise) the blog will have a few posts, but nothing recent. In some cases the blog hasn’t been updated for months or even years.
This doesn’t reflect well on the business. It’s one of those cases where a blog seemed like a good idea, but the expectations for creating the content weren’t fully understood.
Brian mentions that creating constant content is intimidating.
It’s true. It’s actually one of the most common situations I see. It’s difficult to create consistent content. It doesn’t matter if that’s every month, every week or every day.
The benefit to creating more content is that you’ll have a better chance of getting referrals. These lead to more conversions for your business. You likely already know this opportunity with blogging. That’s why you’re reading this post.
What’s tough is the actual content creation. Understand that it takes some work to create constant content like Brian Clark mentions. If you can do it internally then go ahead and get started. If you need to bring in some help then consider contacting us here at Ghost Blog Writers. We can help you develop the strategy and we’re known for creating constant content. You neer have to worry about getting frequent content published. We handle that worry for you.