Blog as marketing tool
May 19th, 2008I recently spoke with a friend of a friend who was working on launching a new website and he asked me for some tips on getting the word out about his site. Based on our experience with singletracks I came up with a list of 4-5 things we’ve found to work pretty consistently and I thought I’d share the list with you here, starting with our #1 recommendation: create a relevant blog.
Of course blogs didn’t exist when we launched singletracks 10 years ago but if we were starting all over again my first marketing task would be to build a blog. Blogs are quick and easy to create and there is some pretty incredible software available for free from Word Press and others to get you started.
A blog is a great marketing tool for any website because it keeps users engaged and coming back for the latest news and content - but you need to commit to keeping things fresh. With singletracks we started our blog just after the New Year in 2007 and have been posting one article each weekday morning ever since. Ok, so maybe we miss a day here or there but the point is to give people a consistent reason to come back to your website day after day. Many blogs make the mistake of updating whenever they get a chance which is frustrating to readers who want to read your blog when THEY get a chance and they’ll move on if they don’t know when (or if) you’ll ever have any new articles.
Search engines love new content as well and the more often you post, the more often the crawlers will visit and index your site. On the singletracks blog we’ve noticed that our articles get picked up by Google within an hour or so of posting, making the blog almost as effective as our email campaigns. In fact, when we post articles on particular mountain bike trails we’ll see an almost immediate uptick in new user registrations from the surrounding area.
Blogs are also great at building a solid link base for your site. As you probably already know search engines like Google place a high weight on the number of sites that link to yours in search engine rankings. Interesting new content gives other bloggers and webmasters a reason to link to your site but you can also use links TO other blogs to drive traffic BACK to your site. Most blog software includes a feature called “trackbacks” that places reciprocal links between blog discussions. For example: I find an interesting blog post on another site about helmets and I place a link to that site in my post about kids bike safety. My blog software automatically notifies the helmet blog and places a link back to my post about kids bike safety. Nifty, huh? And by strategically titling your blog you can have an even greater impact: We titled our blog the “Mountain Bike Blog” and after less than a year we became the #1 Google search result for ‘mountain bike blog.’ It was that easy.
Finally, I want to share a couple tips that many folks just don’t seem to get right with marketing blogs these days. First, make sure your blog is a ‘marketing’ blog rather than a ’sales’ blog. To some this may seem like splitting hairs but it’s important to get this nailed down. A ’sales’ blog will be all about your product, your company, etc. without reaching outside to get customers interested in what you have to say and how you fit into the broader market. If you haven’t figured it out yet this blog is itself a marketing blog but instead of just talking about Review App (which we do) we want to talk about a broad range of interesting and useful subjects from consumer reviews to SEO to internet marketing.
It is also important to place your blog on the same domain as your REAL website to keep all the traffic in one place. I’ve seen so many examples of companies creating blogs on domains separate from their corporate sites which is simply counterproductive. Take advantage of those trackbacks and build up the pagerank on your site while making it easier for your readers to move from the blog to your main site. Subdomains are fine but separate domains are confusing to readers and search engines alike.
If you’re launching a new website, no matter what the subject, consider making a blog your #1 marketing tool - it’s an easy and effective way to quickly grow your audience!
May 19th, 2008 at 6:47 am
One more thing: for those of you familiar with the “long tail” concept of building search traffic, posting frequently on your blog gives you more chance of capitalizing on long tail searches. More content = more traffic so post as often as you can!
August 13th, 2008 at 8:03 am
[...] been following my own advice over the past two weeks. Back in May I talked about the power of blogging as a marketing tool and I said it’s a good idea to post every week day. My record for the last 10 business days? [...]