Strategies For Publishing Content On Your Blog

Email

We discussed setting up a WordPress blog last week so I didn’t want to leave you in the dark about what to do next.

Publishing Consistent Content!

In some instances, this could be the hardest part of maintaining a blog. First let’s review why content is the king of online marketing:

• Content builds authority
• Content is super viral (within social media)
• Content builds links and search engine results
• Content expands exposure and brings qualified traffic
• Content generates leads and sales

Listening to Your Current Clients/Customers

What questions do you get asked on a regular basis? What do you find yourself repeating over and over to clients or prospects? Your blog can become a resource by answering these questions individually and in detail with blog posts.

Listening On Your Social Networks

What are popular discussions on Twitter? What discussions are being posted on LinkedIn or Facebook groups? Make sure to take time to listen. Your social networks can be one of the best sources for content ideas.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is not only a great tool for managing your online reputation, it could also be a great tool for monitoring a topic or your industry news. Let’s say you are a bookkeeper and you want to be notified of anything related to QuickBooks Tips. You can set this up as a Google Alert. Google will email (daily, weekly or as it happens) anything it finds on the web with this keyword. A lot of the content you find online from Google Alerts, can be used as references or ideas for new blog posts.

Google Keyword Tool

The Google Keyword Tool is another great tool (one that I cannot live without) to use for finding content to publish. A lot of times you will find long-tail keywords that will give you ideas. For example, if I search for the keyword blog or blogging I will get related results like How To Start A Blog. With this information, I know that a great blog post to write can be titled How To Start A Blog. I can use my expertise to answer a question that is widely searched on Google.

Google Reader

Google Reader is a great place to organize blogs and websites that you find interesting or helpful. You can organize blogs by category or topic and refer to these blogs for ideas. I subscribe to a lot of social media and internet marketing blogs and refer to new posts on a regular basis for knowledge on recent happenings and ideas of what I could write about. Maybe there is a lot of buzz on one topic and I can write about it using a different angle. Or maybe I want to write a post on the latest buzz to inform own connections and email subscribers. Google Reader is a great place to organize a lot of information in one place.

Thought Leaders

Every industry has it’s leaders. Facebook has Mari Smith. Marketing has Seth Godin and so on. I make sure and follow these industry leaders to help me stay up-to-date not only to provide better service to my clients but also to provide the latest information on my own blog and become a resource for others. If you are not sure who your industry thought leaders are,use your social networks as mentioned above.

Repurposing Content

The best strategy you can use is repurpose your content! Let’s say you start with a hot topic:

How can you turn that topic into a blog series?

From that series, how can you extend it to create a free report or Ebook to generate email subscribers?

Then use that same information to build traffic by creating a Squidoo page.

Can you break up the series into short tips to post on your Facebook page or Twitter profile?

Once you know the strategies you will use, create a content schedule. Maybe use one topic per month to repurpose plus 3 regular blog posts per week. Lay out a plan for up to 3 months or more.

(Don’t forget to setup Google Analytics to track the traffic and results from your content marketing!)

Want to learn more on how to leverage content marketing for your blog? Need help creating a content strategy or schedule? Contact me for a free 1 hour consultation!