The blog is perhaps one of the most versatile online marketing tools and if you could focus on maintaining an engaging blog, that can be the key to fueling a number of online marketing and outreach efforts which can help gain traction on the web for your brand. For those who are believers in re-usability of a perfectly good marketing asset, it doesn’t get much better than the blog. A good blog post can be:

Bookmarked on social sites

Tweeted

Shared on Facebook

Shared on Linkedin Groups

Edited and converted into downloadable pdf resources

Distributed in the form of a newsletter

Shared through RSS feeds on other sites and so much more

A single blog post can be used to reach out to not just those who come across your blog but those on other channels and fuel newsletters, lead nurturing campaigns and others. Content like this is adaptable. People like their content in different forms and find it through different channels. Some through your Facebook group, some through Twitter, some in their email boxes and others through search engines or RSS readers. “What about the risk of overlap?” some may ask. There may be a small risk of overlap but it’s often very low. For example, if you Tweet about an article once, you may reach out to a small percentage of your followers who are around at the time. Similarly, if you email the content in the form of a monthly newsletter, just a small percentage of your entire database is likely to open and read it. The same goes for those who come across it on Linkedin groups. In fact…to really make the most of your content, you need to be able to adapt it to different channels and distribute it to audiences across different social networks.

Start with your blog. Then, work from there using your blog content to do the work on other online marketing channels (and offline if you consider creating print magazines, newsletters and catalogs out of your blog content). Re-usability ensures you get the most out of your content and there is nothing quite like a blog when it comes to that.

Banners, PPC, adwords and similar campaigns used to drive customers towards a website or generate inbound leads “are pay per campaign” marketing strategies where as spend on “building blogs” and “building online communities” are more like investing in long term marketing assets. It’s important to understand this when you plan to develop a blog around you’re business website to have reasonable expectations and avoid disappointment in the early stages. Like any investment in building an asset that will deliver long term benefits, blogs and communities have a gestation period before the returns really start to show. In the early stages it needs time and constant effort till content starts to build up and the blog starts to build a reputation. New and early stage blogs rely heavily on generating referral traffic and that needs constant promotion through other sites. Since the better part of the traffic to the blog is from other more popular sites, that traffic may not deliver a lot of sales leads and the frequency of inbound leads may be few and far between. This is the stage at which most marketers and businesses abandon their blog or become frustrated with the fact the output from the blog is not proportionate.

For those who do move on at the same rate with the same enthusiasm as they started with, they will move on to see the percentage of search traffic coming through search engines gradually increases in proportion to the referral traffic and this is a good sign. This happens as a result of a large amount of original content on your blog being indexed in search engines and your keywords starting to work for you. It basically means more traffic on your site arrived there as a result of  finding your site while searching one or more of the keywords in your blog content. This also means the traffic coming to your site is more relevant and the likelihood that they are well qualified leads is significantly higher. The frequency of leads captured through the site and quality traffic will be on the rise. The proportion of search traffic increases in comparison to referral traffic till it reaches a tipping point.

At this stage the vast wealth of search able content on your blog indexed by search engines is the main contributor to traffic on the site. It’s not uncommon to find an post you wrote a year or two ago still bringing a trickle of search traffic. You club hundred or several hundred such posts which bring in a trickle of qualified visitors to your site, it’s a flow of qualified leads or relevant audience and the returns are exponential. At this stage, even if the activity slows down on the blog in terms of adding fresh content for some time, the archives of content which still draw search traffic will sustain and that’s what makes business blogging such a valuable long term social marketing asset.

So if you need quick results and quick leads the pay per lead approach will be the better option but if you are looking to build a long term marketing asset, online communities and blogs can deliver some serious value.

Sell your content & not your product

That can make all the difference in the way you are perceived online and how people respond. All the most successful online marketers have been able to build a loyal following because their content is perceived as useful and not because they have been selling to people directly online. What is important understand to get your content marketing strategy right is to be able to separate intent from your social marketing strategy. Let’s take a look into my thought process while writing this blog post to distinguish intent and strategy.

Confessions

As a content marketer I have a small range of five solutions that I offer to businesses and my intent is to sell those through my website. I plan to use content marketing and leverage social sites to promote my solutions and my intention is to drive as many interested customers as possible towards my website and spread awareness about what BuzzFactory.net does to as many people online as possible. The most obvious thing to do would be to write blog posts about each of the solutions and post them to various social sites and keep Tweeting links to each solution everyday but that is not how the online world works. There is no value in this approach, no relationship building, no conversation. It’s just direct selling and as a social marketing strategy, that isn’t effective.

My strategy is to use this blog and create a resource that would appeal to marketers. Instead of selling my products directly, I write content like this post here which could be perceived as valuable among marketers who are seeking information on content marketing and social media marketing strategy hoping it will drive some of them to the website and attract them towards the solutions. My strategy is to sell and promote this content using social sites as much as possible to build more traffic towards the site and since this is interesting content and not just a sales pitch or product page in the form of a blog post (alright this particular post might be but lets assume the other content on this blog) it is not intrusive push based advertising and still has the potential to draw more relevant traffic and create awareness about the business. If you have come to this post through a link I’ve created trying to promote this post and read this far, half my objective of ensuring you’re aware about BuzzFactory has been achieved. If you go on to the site to explore our solutions, then that was my intent and it goes to show the strategy works.

My intent is to get customers but my strategy is to give users interesting and useful content, build a resource, create relationships, be a contributor to content in the vertical and  start conversations. The “getting customers” will happen naturally  as result of this activity.

So if you find your business blogging isn’t going anywhere despite efforts, people on Twitter don’t seem to want to follow you and social marketing is just not working for your business, try this simple tweak in approach. Create content that will appeal to your target audience and then sell the content not your product.

Content plays an important role in social marketing and is often to keeping the conversation and buzz going around your business.  You need to have content that you can share with the online community. The real challenge is how you generate that daily content and keep it interesting for your customers.  One great way to tackle this is starting with a very active blog. By very active, we mean one that has engaging posts, insights, reviews, articles or observations as often as possible. Useful articles and posts around your business can be very versatile and need not be restricted to the blog. Once posted, the same post or article can be Tweeted, shared on groups like Linkedin, MySpace and Facebook, posted to discussion forums or communities, converted to a down-loadable document for the website and even sent out in an email newsletter. Discussions naturally follow around these posts whether in the form of comments people leave on the blog or social sites like Mixx & Reddit, re-tweets and replies on Twitter, passed around on social networking sites and really fuel the wider online conversation around your business and help it gather momentum.

We recently developed an niche vertical based online magazine for a customer of ours to provide not just their customers but virtually the industry with fresh articles published daily with interesting content within the space. Other than the stand alone community of readers within the industry which quickly developed around the online publication the company saw this as a great opportunity to tie the blog / online magazine content to jump start their other online marketing initiatives. This included posting regularly on a large community site for the industry, posting articles and starting conversations around them on their Facebook community, Myspace and drawing more followers on Twitter. On all these groups and communities they have people who enjoy reading through, sharing and commenting on the articles which are interesting or offer some valuable insights to them. As a result, the members on all these communities have increased activity and helps the business build stronger communities and better relationships with their customers.

The common ground for all social media marketing channels and social marketing is your content. Invest in regular content and the process of having a constant conversation with your customers online will just become a whole lot easier.

One of the most common arguments put forward every time a company considers a business blog is ROI. When considering strategies like social media, content marketing and business blogging, measuring ROI is difficult as is making your boss see it. Considering the cost of getting a blog up, hosting it and the time and cost that goes into writing articles and blog posts regularly, are the returns worth it? My answer would be yes it is!

The issue with ROI and measuring the returns of a blog is that the returns are not immediate, they come in over some time when the blog content has started reaching critical mass. The other attribute is the ROI is not one time, its recurring. This is why management don’t like you spending time working on developing the company blog but its also why the blog is such a powerful marketing tool. Every post you have published may not bring in a waterfall of visitors and generate a tonne of leads but every post you have published is creating a channel of keywords that will bring in a steady trickle or flow constantly over a longer time. When you build more channels through more posts, you are effectively building another pipeline towards your website and the effect is long term.

Rick Burnes of Hubspot echoes this concept through a great example in his post Why Your Business Blog Is an Annuity . Rick says:

Every time you write a blog article, you get an ongoing cash flow over the lifetime of your blog — except instead getting cash each month, you get valuable search traffic.

Confused? Let’s look at a real-life example from this blog.

For the past three months, a post I wrote back in November about inbound marketing has been getting about 300 visits a month from people searching for the term “inbound marketing.”

HubSpot’s keyword tracking tool estimates that we would have to pay $2.41 to get each of those visits via paid search traffic. That means that each month that post is producing about $730 worth of traffic from search engines.

Now think about what that means going forward. Assuming that page holds similar traffic for the next two years. With an interest rate of 5%, that traffic is currently worth about $10,000 to HubSpot.

As difficult as it maybe to see the value of a business blog which delivers customers towards your business, there is a very very clear value in the long run. It’s almost like those stocks you managed to get several years ago at a bargain price which are now bringing in the dividends and have long repaid their initial investments several times over. Similary with your business blog, you need to give it time and be persistent in making it work because when it will, it will keep working for you.