Basic overview of planning a strategic blogging plan to support your business marketing goals.

1. introducing

2. Strategic Blogging for Business
Presented at The South Carolina
Womens’ Business Center

3. Why Blog?
Companies that blog have
434% more indexed pages.
And companies with more
indexed pages get far more leads.
--Search Engine Strategies Conference, NYC 2013

4. Why Blog?
Blogging is an essential
marketing component for
your business

5. Why Blog?
• Improve Search Rank
• Build for Long-Tail Content
• Community and Market Education
• Communicate High Trust Content
• Build Lists, Conversions and Reach
• Build Brand Value and Equity
--Search Engine Watch

6. Control of Message
You are a self-publisher
New earned media
Gain share of voice

7. Blogging Steps
1. Platform Decision
2. Platform Setup
3. Research
4. Plan
5. Create
6. Post
7. Promote
8. Evaluate/Adjust

8. Technology Required
Self-hosted blog on your domain,
if you want to drive website traffic.
Don’t compete with your own site
by blogging on external platforms

9. Alternatives to Self-hosted
• WordPress.com
• Blogger.com
• Tumblr.com

10. Why strategy?
If you put effort into planning your
marketing and content strategy you
you’ll have a higher success rate and
also continue to execute based on a strategy,
versus reacting to what is wrong due to lack of
organization.

11. Strategy
Before you deep dive into planning and
executing your strategy consider and answer
these critical questions:
– How do you make money as a company?
– Why do you make money in those ways?
– What are you biz development goals?
– What questions can you answer, problems can
you solve, or understanding can you add?

12. Research
Blog Posts
Business Goals

13. What your
customers
care about
What you
care about
What you blog about
What do you post about?

14. Let’s Plan-Getting Focused
• Story: Human, real. Connects with people. What’s
yours?
• Message Development: What will you say in what
formats. Must fit your customers (photos, videos,
text)
• Tone & Voice: Company persona, “voice” of person
writing the posts
• Planning: Content calendars, trends to deliver timely
content when that topic or idea is in the top of mind.

15. 4 Tips for the Planning Phase
More planning = More success
• SERP Data: Get keywords from that that people are looking for. Find ideas for
what people want to know.
• Build a long-term and regular content plan.
– Long-Term Content Plan: Use Google Trends to compare products and primary searches.
– Regular Content Plan: What trend terms are big the past days and figure out what is
trending right now that your company can take advantage of.
• Create a publishing schedule so you can see what content is going live when. The
key is to plan your marketing according to your content.
• Measure your efforts to see what was successful and learn to make more money.
--Search Engine Watch

16. Research
• Consumer Trends
– Search the professional associations, Google
Trends, Web for reports, analysis, surveys about
topics or services your customer needs
– Note what is important to consumers using your
products and services
• Take Away Tip: It’s all about the customer!

17. Research
• Competitors
– Keywords
• Google Keyword External Tool
– SEO results
– Point of Difference
• Take Away Tip: Know your competition.

18. Research Examples
Live, real sources
• Digg :: Cupcake
• Storify :: Cupcake
• Google Trends :: Cupcake
• Twitter Search :: Cupcake
• Alexa :: Cupcakes

19. To find this, search for “Google Keyword External Tool”

20. Plan Blog Categories
Cupcakes
Chocolate Birthday Decorating
Parent
Category Child or
Secondary
Categories

21. Plan ‘Tags’- Micro Categories
Dark
Chocolate
White
Chocolate
Milk
Chocolate
Child
Category
Chocolate
Tags

22. Content Development
• Photos
• Videos
• Text / written articles
• Curated content

23. Create Editorial Calendar
Topic Mon Tues Wed Thurs Fri Sat Sun
Cakes Birthday
Cupcakes
Chocolate
Cupcakes
Desserts How to
decorate
cupcakes
with real
flowers
Favorite
Milk
Chocolate
Cupcake
Recipes
Superhero
Birthday
Cupcakes

24. Checklists & Tools
• Our planning document.
• Our list of what to do to make sure you’ve
optimized your blog posts.

25. Publicize Your Posts

26. Questions?