Without a blog, you can kiss free traffic goodbye and weep away to the sound of crickets.
Your blog is where your content begins its journey and your ideal client ends theirs. Consider it a meeting place where you want your best clients to meet. Now, what do you need to add to help them find you and keep them there?
How do you attract them and keep them coming back? You need to begin blogging.
Imagine each blog post generated just 50 visitors per month – and you created 1 article per week – in 1 year your blog would have 2,600 visitors per month or 31,200 per year. Convert that at the min rate for cold traffic – 2%, that’s 624 sales or new email subscribers.
Not a figure to scoff at – and we started off with only 50 visits per post. When you SEO your posts you can expect much more traffic than that.
Now up the number of posts to 2 per week and you have 1,248 conversions per year.
If you choose keywords that have hundreds or thousands of potential visits, you would be looking at 100x-ing these figures.
So what do you need to do to make sure all the time and money you invest in blogging actually turns into the right traffic and clients….
The right platform and blog structure will set you up for long term success. Your SEO efforts and keyword research should begin before you even create your website., and choosing the best blogging platform can help accelerate your results. Doing it the other way round will be much more costly. In order to make sure that your website is well SEO-ed, you need to make sure it is built on a platform that is easily SEO-ed such as Wordpress.
“How often should I blog?” is the most common blog question I get. The answer depends on what sites you’re competing with, however generally industry experts agree that all things being equal (meaning that your website tech and structure are SEO-ready) with 2 posts per week you can muster enough authority to get your posts to the first page of Google.
The second most common question I get is “How long should my blog posts be?” This once again really depends on how hard your competition is working however generally we would keep weekly blog posts to around 500 words. Some say even 350 are enough but I like to err on the safe side. You should also produce cornerstone, epic or pillar posts at least once per quarter. Pillar posts represent the Pillars of your business. You should write one of these for each main section of your business. Cornerstone content is the content that is most important for your website. It should be highly relevant to your audience and search engines. Guides make very good cornerstone content. The next type Epic posts will likely be the longest ones. With cornerstone and Pillar Posts often hitting 2 or 3 thousand words, my longest Epic post is close to 9,000 words. Of course this is not obligatory, however, Epic posts need to be, well… Epic. They need to be in-depth and exhaustive like this one http://stephanief.com/content-marketing-tips/content-marketing/101-content-ideas-to-grow-your-audience/ their purpose is to get shared on Social Media.
Make sure your copy is optimized for your keywords. Keyword stuffing is old-fashioned and will do more harm than good. Google understands language well so keeping it natural is important. using your H3 tags and sub-titling your articles is also going to be important.
Look at the frequency and length of the posts your competition is posting. (in case you’re wondering, your competitors are those sites ranking for your best keywords.) Do make sure that you match up and exceed their efforts.
(Medium Huffpost etc) When you become an author and write on different platforms, Google picks up that you are a writer and will rate your content higher. If you’re a company and you can’t write hire a ghost writer.
(quality back-links) Not all back links are created equal. Most will do more damage than benefit to your website. However if you spend some time finding high page rank sites that take guest posts you could hit link gold. It is much harder to do linking campaigns these days because only the best links are worthwhile, but the mileage you get will benefit you for a long time to come.
We have already mentioned optimisation a few times. Of course optimising your content for the wrong keywords is a big waste of time, so keyword research should be high on your agenda. You should also know your LSIs – these are the words that appear under a Google query result. They show you the terms Google is already connecting to your query.Use a keyword tool such as SEO Powersuite there’s a free version and it’s used by professionals.
Around a year ago Google released new updates and came up with something called the freshness score. This resolved Google’s problem when bringing up the wrong results due to old content ranking higher than new more relevant content. For example if I googled ‘Ghost in the Shell’ chances are I would find old content about the old film or the TV series that has been around for years. But since the film was recently released, I am probably looking for the latest version. So how does Google resolve the freshness issue. Google picks up social media and content buzz around certain keywords. This means that by playing with your frequency (temporarily upping it) your can rank higher due to your freshness score. This strategy does not work in isolation but can help boost a long term content strategy.
(30+ you then go down) Make sure you’re not adding too many menu items on your page. Google looks at your page structure and website structure to understand what is most important to your website. Putting too many top level links )or main menu links in your page, will confuse Google when it’s trying to understand what is most important on your website.
Use relevant linking text not just “Read More” . Google reads these to know what people say you’re about.
Your ideal client persona is the description of your target audience which all your marketing is based upon. Use facebook ads that are directed at this ideal client to verify that they respond to your keywords, products and content. Test, test and test again.
Test the conversion rate of your keywords, page and funnels using Google ads. Test your online funnels or freebie downloads by throwing some money at Google ads.
Do this before feeding money into ads – know how much your ROI or email subscribers will be per 1000 visitors.
Do not create complex download, freebie routines that confuse the user and are difficult to measure. Always make sure you keep it simple enough to measure then add one more layer or step next time.
Evergreen funnels are great, but if you don’t launch in person you may end up with a dud. In order to write good converting copy, price it right, send emails that get opened etc, you need to test. So launch your products a few times before ever-greening the process. Going straight to evergreen almost never works.
It sound simple, but many people start blogging without a precise goal in mind. Building traffic is not a goal you can achieve without knowing your audience. It is much easier to build the right audience through keyword optimisation and content once you know what you want to sell. It takes longer and is much harder to build an audience and then understand what they want to buy.
You don’t want an audience of freebie hunters so add in a Tripwire to filter them. A tripwire is a small paid product that you offer your audience, soon after a freebie download or registration. It’s a great way to monetise right away and people who buy are also proven to be more likely to purchase a higher-priced product through an up-sell. So it’s win-win.
New lists convert at a higher rate than old lists, but existing clients convert at an even higher rate. So you want to watch your fresh list and people who already bought from you pretty closely and take product decisions based on their needs.
No matter how big your list, you want to consolidate it into one list. You want to know as much as possible about the people on your list. Keep them segmented using a simple tool like Mailerlite, just keep each contact connected to the form it was registered for. Mailerlite also shows you which other products/forms the same user registered for. When sending out mailshots make sure you tailor them based on the intentions they had when they joined your list. Send them the right content and customise the message in your emails and they will convert.
My last tip is probably the one you’ve heard tossed around the most. Stay consistent. Google rewards consistency. Actually every platform rewards consistency… Google, Youtube, Facebook … most online platforms reward consistency so choose a consistent frequency you can keep up in the long term, and start today. You don’t want this to be next year’s biggest regret now, do you
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