In later posts, I’ll be talking about the different ways you can reach out to clients and customers, but I want to focus first on what should be the foundation of any content marketing strategy: your blog. Forgive me if I’m preaching to the converted already.
Blogs aren’t sexy, I know, and it’s harder to think of and write a blog post (that’s what TCN does for you!) than it is to slap a link to an interesting article on Facebook. Here’s the thing: you always want to bring people back to your Web site, which has one huge benefit:
Your content doesn’t have to compete with anything else.
Whether we’re talking about Facebook, Twitter, or even email, anything you write will be merely a single raindrop in a raging river of distracting content (“Watch this kitten ride a horse!”). Even if you post a highly informative article with a compelling thumbnail and someone reads it, there’s always another post (“7 Celebrities Who Were Raised by Wolves!”) clamoring for attention. Or, more to the point, 100 other posts are pushing and shoving to get into that person’s head. The odds of them remembering what you’ve posted, or even connecting it with you, aren’t great. As the agency Simply Zesty wrote:
Think of your short term memory as an empty glass and the Internet and social media as extra water being poured into it. As you pour more and more water into it, the glass begins to overflow and the excess water spills outside the glass. In a sense, social media is this overflowing of information. If you’ve ever tried to take in the rapid influx of information from different social media streams, you’ll know that the majority of them are instantly forgotten about, your attention becoming selective as to what links or messages you check out. Many of these links are gone before we know it and therefore don’t register on your radar.
In contrast, your blog is a Zen-like oasis of quiet and calm reflection. Yeah, I realize that’s an exaggeration, but you get the point. The goal should always be to get people back to your blog, where you control everything from the header to the footer and where the reader has a chance to absorb both what you’re saying and the fact that you are the one saying it.
Blogs have another unbeatable advantage over social media and email:
Blog posts stick around for as long as you want.
We talk about Facebook and Twitter streams because every post is almost instantly swept downstream as soon as you post it. That’s why it’s a good idea to post the same thing multiple times — engagement goes up because so much of your audience won’t happen to be watching the river when your twig of a post sweeps by. Social media is the very definition of here today, gone tomorrow. Except that it’s more like, “here at coffee break, gone by lunch.”
Blog posts may not compete with diamonds in the forever category, but they’re solid and stable, and if you put some thought into what you’re posting (or go back and edit periodically), you can keep much of your blog’s content evergreen. That’s useful because:
- A blog full of content makes you look good. You’re productive, helpful, and reliable.
- You can reuse old blog content in social media and email, reducing the need for new content.
- Blog posts can answer frequently asked client questions so you can just send links.
There are, of course, plenty of other content marketing-related benefits to having a blog on your Web site, but I’ll stop for now. If you have questions about any of this, or if you’ve discovered a particular win from your blog, let me know!
In a future post, I’ll show you how WordPress users can populate their blogs with TCN content with the free CyberSyn plug-in, which brings all our content into your blog in draft form, ready for editing and posting.