In this short span we’ve discovered we’ve outgrown our previous website and that’s driven us to move to the new BuzzFactory.net website and blog which will be our new home on the web. The new WordPress driven site will give us a better platform to continue our conversation on blogging, content development, social marketing and how these tools can be used effectively in generating more online visibility for your businesses and websites. The blog will continue to have regular articles, updates, views and posts around content marketing as well as updates from the team every now and then so stay tuned.

Please bear with us as we transition to our new home on the web and iron out any kinks that may come up in the process. We are extremely grateful for the support of all our early customers and hope to be able to work with more of you along the way. Here’s to the journey ahead…

Cheers!

From the BuzzFactory Team

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!”

Every business is working towards a strong online marketing plan to help drive customers towards their websites rather than going after customers. Different strategies work for different businesses and whether it’s paid online advertising, search engine optimization, inbound lead generation programs or social media marketing, the main goal is the same: To get in front of customers with a message. Experimenting with all these various online marketing techniques over some time will help determine the winning mix of just how much of each one needs to get their customers coming in however among all these variables is one fact that can’t easily be disputed: Content plays an important role in the online marketing process.

The rules for the race to get the top spot in search engine results for the best target keywords has changed. The game has become more competitive. A lot more competitive. How many businesses would rest once their website shows up in the number one spot or the among the first page results of a Google search? Few. The race is no longer to get to the first page or claim that top spot. The aim is to dominate the results on the first page or even the first few pages of search results. After all, how long can your website hold that podium position before someone else comes along and pushes you down? This is why SEO or one aspect alone can’t drive online success. Once you’re at the top, you need to fight to stay there and you need to fight daily.

This is where content comes in. Fresh content is generally given priority over older content so need to produce fresh content as often as possible is key to staying among the results for a targeted set of keywords. Little wonder how blogging has turned into such a powerful marketing tool in any social media marketing plan. Depending on how often the blog is updated, the process helps update the content consistently and search engines pick up on this, marking it as a valuable source of information. Turning out daily content around a strategic topic area while including certain keywords (without going out of context just for the sake of keywords) will gradually work towards a website ranking higher for those keywords. More importantly, the more useful content you can get out there and promote through sharing and social media, the wider a net you can cast so more visitors are likely to be directed towards your site.

1. Develop content around your business whether its blog posts, videos, presentations, pdf documents, white papers, articles etc
2. Do it daily if possible or as often as you can. The more frequent you can publish new content, the better.
3. Promote each piece of content as much as possible. Share it, bookmark it, list it on directories and sites, tweet it and get it out there
4. Dominate the search results for that topic

Consistency is the key. If you can generate content consistently, you can become more visible.

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.