That’s right! BuzzFactory.net has just launched a “Create A Custom Social Content Marketing Package” as an alternative to the existing solutions. You can now create your own social content marketing strategy and BuzzFactory.net will make sure it gets executed on every month like clockwork.

The online visibility solutions we have been offering are carefully tailored mixes of content and social marketing  activity which we know to work towards creating an online buzz for most needs. However, we understand  not every business has the same requirements and we’ve often tweaked the solutions to develop a mix of content and promotion activities that would suit a very specific requirement.

The new “Custom Social Marketing Solutions” offering on the website allows you to take the helm and create your very own content marketing strategy by selecting from a range of content development options, promotion and social media marketing activities which would help create the buzz around your brand on the web that you are looking for. The content options include:

• Engaging blog posts
• Keyword rich articles
• Guides
• White papers
• Reports
• PDF download documents
• Press releases
• Slideshare presentations
• Email drafts

Combine this with active social bookmarking across major social sites and promotion of content across social networking sites, Twitter, Linkedin and you virtually have a customized social content marketing strategy that’s ready to be put into action. Based on this submission we’ll get back to you with a proposal and a pricing quote shortly and if it all looks good, you’ll have a team to execute your plan for you.

Have a content marketing plan you need a pricing quote for? Use the “Custom Social Content Marketing Solutions” form and get a pricing quote soon!

The truth is there is no real shortcut to developing long term inbound search traffic and steady business through a website. The few overnight successes that you hear of where traffic suddenly spikes is often just that….a temporary spike because something you posted really took off and became viral. The effects of these one time spikes are also more often than not….temporary. Social marketing is a process that needs very engaging content creation and a lot of activity on several social sites (where your target customers are) consistently and every single day. It’s often this commitment in terms of time which many find they are not able to do as much as they would like to and in that process, there is no daily activity and the social marketing efforts stagnate.

If your experience is similar, drop us a line and explore how we may be able to help you maintain that daily activity required while you focus on strategy and other areas of importance. In effect, this may just be the shortcut you need.

The blog is a diary-like online platform to post a personal opinion or account of daily events so that others can read right?

…..Wrong! And this is what turns off many who think to themselves “What am going to post everyday and how will that help bring customers?” A blog is a highly versatile publishing platform. It can be what you want it to be and is only limited by one’s creativity. While some use it effectively to publish a daily account of events, others use it just as well to turn it into a learning resource with informative articles and some can adapt it to publish an online magazine with content that’s of interest to it’s readers. What you choose to publish depends largely on one’s business and more importantly their customers.

A very niche high tech company which needs to attract a very no-nonsense technical audience may need to publish more along the lines of technology publications maintaining a more serious tone and ensuring it’s valuable to the readers. A business targeted towards a younger audience may choose to publish a more rich media based one with a lighter first person tone to strike a chord with their readers. Finally the objective is to create a real social connection through the blog and develop a valuable online resource for your target audience.  That’s how your customers will discover you. How do you decide what kind of publication your business could use and how to leverage a blog? Simple….

• Define your target audience and customers (what kind of audience would you like your publication to draw?)

• Now put yourself in their shoes for a while and think about what kind of an online publication would attract your attention and have you go back for more on a regular basis? (What kind of content? What kind of tone? What are their current favorites? What can you learn from them? How could you make your publication even better?)

• Execute! Start working towards building that dream online publication  and spend some time every day thinking “how can I make it even better?” , “what would a reader like to see here?”… and make your publication the best there is.

Virtually every industry, business vertical or interest area including the niche one’s have successful online publications in the form of blogs, journals, portals, news sites and magazines. The blog as a platform is perhaps the most versatile marketing tool we’ve seen in a while. Use it well, and with a little effort you can also have one of those publications your customers value so much.

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.

Prior to launching BuzzFactory in my previous work experiences I had the opportunity to work closely with a number of content sites which were designed to draw inbound search traffic around a specific B2B (in most cases) or B2C (in a few cases) industry vertical. The objective was to develop each of these sites into a valuable resource for each industry that had fresh content updates such as news, articles, blog posts and more in a single location and professionals would have a something akin to an industry publication they could quickly open and read through for good content in their space.

One set of these sites were driven by syndicated content which came through RSS feeds from various other related publications and an other set employed a very small team of writers who would contribute to the content daily in the form of one or two articles and blog posts a day. The general idea behind the site which displayed content from other publications was to have more updates and a lot more content in an automated and cost effective way. Since it was simply aggregating content from other sites, it didn’t need much time or money and would update it self several times a day building a large index of links on the site. On the other set of sites progress was much slower. Limited resources mean’t the site could only be updated when there was bandwidth for someone to spend time writing a post or a detailed article, using the right keywords, linking, publishing and finally promoting it personally through social networking and bookmarking sites. While the first set of sites had hundreds of new article links each week (though duplicated (syndicated through RSS) the second slowly and steadily grew at around one new original post or article each day.

Now as logical guessing would have it, the first set of sites should have done very well but failed quite miserably at search results in every single case. The second set of sites which depended on original content though slow to develop grew in terms of both referral traffic and gradually drew a rising percentage of search engine traffic through some very relevant keywords and phrases.

Lessons Learned

• Syndicated content on your business website is a good resource. It’s useful for those who come to your website. It’s not as effective in bringing them to your website from search engines.

• Syndicated duplicate content doesn’t do much for gaining more links in search results as that benefit really goes to the site that originally posted the content you are just re-distributing.

• Duplicate content which is not syndicated and posted directly on your site is a big no no. It’s not just damaging to your page rank and site reputation, it’s plagarism.

• Keep it original even if it means it can cost more in terms of time or money. It will pay back in the long run and give you long term returns in terms of bringing the right people to your site.

• Slow and steady wins the race. Even if you can’t update your site with new content everyday, do as much as you can and make sure it’s fresh, useful, relevant to your business or website and build your own content one step at a time. Even if you don’t see magical spikes in traffic, each original post will bring in a trickle of search traffic and you can build that trickle into a stream of search traffic gradually.

Perhaps best said by Joe Pulizzi of the Junta42 blog in a post he published in July this year:

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, social media doesn’t work without relevant, valuable and consistent content. Success in social media relies on a web content strategy that works for the brand and especially for the brand’s advocates.

Running a community, sharing links on Twitter, blogging, search marketing, inbound marketing, online marketing promotions or landing pages all rely on having great content to generate that conversation or value that draws the right people. That “content creation” is a core component of all subsequent social marketing and online marketing activity and needs to be accounted for by businesses.

What needs to be considered about content?:

• It’s a core component of social media and a lot of other activity is built around it and relies on it
• Creating content involves considerable investment in terms of time, effort or money. Even a one man business running a daily blog to create awareness needs the owner to spend considerable time daily to keep posts fresh.
• It’s a constant requirement not a one time purchase. As long as you need to improve search traffic results, deliver something engaging to your audiences or keep a social marketing program running, you need a supply of content.
• It needs to be accounted for in marketing budgets and feature separately for any online marketing plans to really measure true costs of online marketing and accurately track progress.

Good social marketing campaigns are fueled by a great supply of quality content. Just take a look around:

Successful software product company 37Signals much loved blog Signal Vs Noise and ebooks like Getting Real have fueled a huge online fan following for the business who will generate massive marketing for anything they do.

Inbound marketing company Hubspot’s exceptional content in the form of blog posts, videos, comics, podcasts, Slideshare presentations and online TV show is behind the huge buzz they have generated online around their business and drew a large customer base in a relatively short time.

The evidence is consistent with every sucessful social marketing effort. They are all backed by great content and to build a supply of great content, a dedicated effort is needed. One that clearly addresses content creation and content marketing as a core part of the overall social marketing strategy. Do you have your consistent supply of online content figured out?

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.

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