My inbox today had a rather interesting read. I received an email from the other side of the world from someone who was looking for permission to use a photo I had shared on Flickr but couldn’t connect there since I’ve been inactive there for a while. She wrote:

I sent you a Flickr e-mail but when I noticed that you hadn’t uploaded in 2 years I figured that maybe you were no longer checking mail there. So I took the plunge to google you, you certainly are not hard to find and that is a credit to your business!

I’m no Justin Bieber by a long shot but it’s heartening to know that what we do with social media and business blogging makes it easier for others to find us and connect with us. This email could well have been a potential customer who heard about what we do through “content” that they came in contact with and then did a search to see if they could connect with us. As a business that wants to be present on the social web the question you should be asking is:

How easy or hard would it be for someone to find you and connect with you if they decided they want to connect with you and did a Google search?

a) Impossible

b) Not to0 hard with some searching

c) Easy, we come up all over in related searches

This is where the reference to the social media phenomenon Justin Bieber comes in. Now don’t get wrong. For the record I would like to say I don’t get the “Bieber fever” …in fact I’m not a fan of Justin Bieber. I have been lucky enough not to have listened to any of his songs or watch any of his performances all the way through and intend to keep it that way. To go a step further his hair bothers me as much as Donald Trump’s does and if I had a razor and had my way I would probably get a restraining order from both their respective lawyers.

However, Justin is a social media wonder. If somehow you don’t know who he is, look up the name on Google and there is no other Justin or Bieber online that dominates the web results like this web phenomenon turned super star. Millions of youtube plays for his videos and a twitter following of over 8 million! Finding Justin Bieber on the web is not a challenge. He is EVERYWHERE!

This is one of the main perks of having an active social media, business blogging and content marketing strategy in constant motion. If you’re publishing and promoting content consistently and daily, you’re growing your web footprint. The more you grow this web footprint, the easier it becomes for those who need to connect with you …find you! Now this may not be on the Justin Bieber scale of things but every action that contributes to reaching out and indexing more engaging content online, makes the process of finding you, your business and website more visible on search engines.

So unless you’re looking to stay anonymous, get the wheels of your business blogging efforts turning and ….get found!

being silent leads to being forgotten

If you picture a kid in a bus who is constantly talking about something and barely silent for a moment, you may not really be interested in what he is going on about but the chances are you are going to notice him and tune into what he is talking about. Chances are, others in the bus have also taken notice. It’s a lot like this with online channels starting with your blog. If you keep a constant conversation going online through your blog, Twitter, social networking and bookmarking sites, it will draw some listeners and create some interest. A part of that interest may drive readers to contact you and explore further. It generates a active interest in what you are talking about and creates opportunities. However, when the conversation stops, the blog posts dry out, the Twitter accounts turn silent and there is no dialog online, the activity around your site also tends to diminish (with the exception of search traffic coming through content that has been well indexed and show up in search results which has long lasting effects). If that online silence is prolonged, you’re likely to be forgotten.

constant activity is key

Most of those we work with are looking for our blogging and social media marketing support not because they don’t know how to do it themselves. It’s because they do know how it works and they know how important it is to be able to post and stay active very regularly and that is something their time schedules don’t permit.  They know there is a direct relation between the ability to consistently publish fresh content having active social channels and the ability to generate interest, conversations around their business and new customers.

keep a continuous online conversation going starting with your blog

For now, it’s time for me to break that silence on this blog with this post and other ones to follow. Then get back to being active on Twitter and other social sites to let everyone know I’m back and stiring a buzz. Perhaps I’m not very talkative in person but when it comes online marketing I know for sure, too much silence is not good for business.

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.

Business vertical based blogs are a great alternative to high ad spend and are one of the most valuable mediums of inbound marketing. It’s important to note the main objective of such a blog or online publication is not outright push selling to a customer simply using the blog as a tool to do that. The objective is to create the most engaging and useful publication with great content for targeted audience in your business vertical. If you can publish a blog or online magazine which can do that, you will build a community of followers who will be pulled to your business website eventually simply because they enjoy your publication. It’s non-intrusive pull marketing. For example, if you’re reading this article on online content marketing and value the articles we publish, the chances are, sooner or later you will be curious enough to explore what we do and what we offer at Buzzfactory.net. The objective is: this article you find useful will lead you to our website and perhaps even contact us to see if we may be able to work together.

Thinking out-of-the-box and not restricting your content to revolve only around your business can play an important part in how others perceive your publication. For example, if you are hotel or resort located in Miami, a blog which talks about the hotel property itself may be interesting but can you really build a long term reader base around it? Instead, if you could build a blog with great articles on “Travel in Miami” which has tips, guides, advice and articles on what those visiting the city could do, that could scale into a widely read travel blog. In effect, the branding space on such a blog would be more valuable and the reader base perfect for those who may be interested in checking out the resort website and perhaps making an online booking. An adventure sports blog for an adventure sports apparel company, an automotive blog for a a car dealership or a boat & yachting online publication for a boat manufacturer are all along the right lines to attract attention online and build a good platform. In the B2B space the objective is the same. Create a publication that the audience finds useful and ask yourself, as someone interested in this vertical, what would you like to read?

Finally the success of an online publication for any business  comes down to it’s planning and execution. While many set of to create a vertical or industry blog or publication, few actually manage to keep up the momentum and publish fresh content as frequently as it should be. The way we approach completely managed publications for our customers is much the way a magazine would. Setting monthly objectives for both content and traffic goals is important as is a weekly plan of the articles that need to be done for the week. Once articles are published they need to be promoted on social networks shared through social bookmarking and the process needs a dedicated effort. It’s a gradual learning process which needs experimenting and constant review to understand what is working, what the audience respond to and how to stay creative and continue to make it valuable. It calls for a dedicated effort where you can consistently publish fresh content and continue to keep readers happy.

If you’ve looked at the best blogs and online magazines in your industry and have made up your mind to take them on with your own, our advice is “Go for it!”

Almost everyone who comes across the idea of setting up a blog for their business is excited by the prospect and gets into it with the enthusiasm of a six year old going to Disneyland for the first time. Whether its to communicate with customers, drive traffic or create more online awareness about a business, thousands of company or business blogs are kick started every week across the web with hopes that it can be a great channel to get to customers on the web and there is a lot of activity and frenzy in getting the blog launched. Few months later…. it didn’t quite seem like such a great idea. So are blogs really than ineffective for online marketing? No!

Blogs can be extremely effective as online marketing tools and customer acquisition but they don’t happen over night. You can’t expect to plant a packet of magic beans and expect a beanstalk overnight. This expectation gives a lot of first time marketing bloggers false hopes and when they see in the first week or so that they aren’t getting a gush of visitors, they give up, lose interest or reduce the frequency of their updates. Inactivity is the number one reason why a business blog can fail. The flipside of this is constant updates and regular refreshing of blog content works towards building a successful blog.

If you look at how a blog starts drawing readers and visitors, keywords have a special significance in helping visitors find you. Compare this to a fisherman using line with more than one hook. Every single time you put up a new blog posts it’s like adding a few more hooks to your fishing line and you’re increasing your chances of people finding you online. If you can post every day, you are effectively increasing your online reach daily and over time you will have what could be compared to a net of content instead of a line. However, this process needs to be done consistantly and as often as possible to build a successful blog around your business. It’s easy to lose interest and managing a blog can be very time consuming which explains why many busy marketing executives and business bloggers find they don’t have enough time to keep up with posting daily or weekly and the blogs are neglected. Whether you hire a content writer or manage your own blog, building that blog content consistently and being persistent will pay off. Don’t give up!

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.