Opening doors with open-source platforms

Over half of all blogs are written on WordPress (see Figure 14-1) and there are reasons for that. WordPress is a user-friendly, open-source platform so it’s easy to access, update, and publish your blog content. (Tumblr is a good platform for blogging and it allows your blog to be imbedded into your website.) Using WordPress means either building your entire website and blog on that platform, or simply building your blog in WordPress and connecting it to whatever platform on which your website was developed.

Building your blog on WordPress makes it easier to concentrate on blogging great content rather than on playing the frustrating role (frustrating for most marketers, anyway) of developer. A multitude of WordPress plug-ins make it easier for you to create graphically pleasing, user-friendly content that’s designed for SEO best practices. Building on any open-source platform means you have the freedom to post when you want and how often you want. Rather than relying on your IT person or department, it empowers you to share great content based on your marketing objectives rather than on IT’s timeline, and that’s usually a good thing.

There are literally thousands of templates available for creating your blog. Most are easy to access and update with fresh content. Be careful to ensure your blog matches your online brand image, even if it requires a custom blog build. Keep the blog form simple and the content clever. People don’t want to have to think when navigating, but they don’t mind laughing because of something funny you wrote.

Categorizing your content

When building your blog, it’s important to categorize your content. If you built your website with a CTA Map, this categorization should be relatively easy. You’ll categorize and tag your blog posts. What’s the difference between categories, blog content, and tags? I discovered this little gem on the Internet from John Haydon (@johnhaydon):

“Categories are like aisles in a grocery store and tags are like ingredients in the various different foods. Tags (ingredients) link together all of your posts (food items) across your categories (aisles).”

When assigning categories and tags, think about your content as food. Which aisle (category) would a visitor find it in? And after they found your blog post, what would the interesting details (tag) be?

It’s pretty easy to create categories in a WordPress blog. Simply identify your desired end actions onsite and use that information as a category when setting up your blog. In its most simplistic form, product categories serve as your blog categories. There’s nothing wrong with this because your blog categories should be very literal descriptions instead of clever creative writing. Figure 14-2 shows where to create categories in WordPress (https://en.support.wordpress.com/posts/categories).

Looking at Figure 14-2, you’ll see how easy it is to create Categories in your blog. The hardest and most important part is creating a hierarchical categorization that makes sense when connecting your product with people.

Tags, as opposed to categories, are optional but recommended. Tags connect a group of related blog posts, making it easier for your readers to discover similar relevant content. The easiest visualization of this is if you were to write a four-part “How To” series with one blog post for each part. Each of the blog posts would tag each other allowing your readers to discover more content and the search engines to know more about your website. WordPress makes it easy to add tags (see Figure 14-3) and you can learn in more detail on their website (https://en.support.WordPress.com/posts/tags/).

In the past, blogs simply populated in the chronological order they were published. Categories create blog content segmentation so a visitor may easily access content containing similar subject matter, all under one category, by filtering a search for your blog posts to the categories in which the reader is interested. If you’re blogging on WordPress, categories are a mandatory feature when setting up your blog. In fact, you won’t be able to publish a blog post without assigning it to a category. It’s important to plan your categories in advance so you don’t end up with too many for a visitor to wade through. You can create up to three sub-categories in WordPress, so thinking ahead about the hierarchy of your content avoids blog content organizational headaches later on. Categorizing and tagging your blog posts also contributes to your SEO efforts so it’s just a good inbound marketing practice.

Connecting your blog content with engagement content

Blog content is usually educational in nature. Designing attractive blog content is one thing; connecting it with middle-of-the-funnel engagement content in a meaningful manner is another. That’s why it’s best to begin with your engagement content and let the blog posts flow from there. Formulating blog material from your engagement content creates contextual relevance for your readers. That’s why you link your blogs to that downloadable engagement content.

Imagine you marketed for a university, and you created an e-book directed toward high school juniors entitled “Four Secrets to Choosing the Best College for You.” For this example, let’s say the four decision factors are:

• Geographical location
• Enrollment size
• Areas of study available (majors)
• Financial cost

Blog posts derived from this e-book could include titles like:

• “6 Benefits for Choosing an Out-of-state Private University”
• “Small College or Large University — What’s Best For You?”
• “How to Choose a College When Your Major is ‘Undecided’”
• “Securing Scholarships for College: Looking Beyond a University’s Published Tuition”

I can think of about a hundred more blog ideas stemming from just these four topics. I’m sure you can, too! Use your engagement content to stimulate your blogging content. Link blog content to the original engagement piece and with the other relevant blogs in the campaign. Gate the engagement content with a form for lead data collection and now your inbound marketing is beginning to work.

Creating your blog editorial calendar

When you first start blogging, it’s a struggle just to keep up. Give yourself enough time, say 30-60 days, to create content ahead of the publish date so you can begin working further out. Not only does this encourage strategic thinking, but it also allows some cushion time for when publishing hiccups occur, which they most certainly will. The best method for keeping track of your blogging efforts is to create a blogging editorial calendar. In its simplest form, your editorial calendar will be a forward-thinking plan that includes:

• Blog category
• Blog campaign (often this is the same as your category, but it doesn’t have to be)
• Keyword focus
• Blog title
• Engagement content CTA
• First-draft deadline
• Publish date

For this calendar, a simple Excel spreadsheet will suffice. You can even link it to a calendar format if you wish. Some marketing automation software includes blogging and social media calendars, which is very helpful for your content planning.

Knowing your audience

Probably the most important tip when writing your blog is to write for your audience. Yes, you should use keywords. Yes, you should optimize your content. But, if your blog posts are sterile, keyword-stuffed posts with stilted, unemotional language, well, good luck!

You’re writing to human beings. The purpose of your blog posts is to connect with people. Effectively connecting and communicating requires knowing your audience. If you’ve performed an IMA that includes customer profile and/or persona information, congratulations! You’re ahead of the game because you’ve peeked into the minds of your customers to understand their individual needs and buying motives. That’s not to say you’re going to use pushy sales language. Rather, your blog, using educational information, is one of the first steps in helping a person solve a particular problem. Write to that problem by listening to your customer base, identifying with them, and pointing out how much better the future looks when their particular problem is solved. Help your audience envision their problem is solved and your first onsite conversions will grow higher.

Choosing your keywords

The smart inbound marketer performed keyword research in Stage 1, which is an inbound marketing assessment. This process includes sorting and categorizing keywords based on the inferred needs of your target customer persona, the product on which you’re focusing, and the location of your persona in the purchase path. Knowing this information is powerful when blogging because you now identify with your reader on a three-dimensional plane, speaking directly to their needs based on who they are and where they are in the purchase path at your point of contact.

Use keywords to direct your blogging efforts but use them sparingly and appropriately. In other words, don’t try to trick Google by keyword stuffing.

Identifying authors

You have several options when choosing whom will create your content. Here’s a handful of options:

• You could write the content yourself.
• You could dedicate a content producer to be responsible for all your blog content.
• You could outsource your content production.
• You could share responsibility for the blog among a number of employees.

Previously, I’ve shared with you the pitfalls of relying on employees to create content. I don’t recommend it unless you use those posts as bonus posts, like icing on your blog cake. If you have the time and no other marketing responsibilities, you should create content yourself. This often starts with a bang and then fizzles as the novelty of content creation wears off and the realization of the discipline, strategy, and organization required to effectively produce, post, and distribute your content. But it can be done.

Provided you have the resources, hiring a content producer is a viable option. The internal company and product knowledge is beneficial because there’s no learning curve to hinder content production. Allowing this individual to write and produce customer-centric inbound content rather than product-centric interruptive messaging is sometimes a problem but that can be managed.

Outsourcing for help makes sense in three scenarios:

• Your dedicated content producer understands the strategic direction, possesses the organizational and delegation skills to work with freelancers, or with a content service or content marketing firm. In this scenario, your internal employee acts as the hub of content production and distribution.
• You don’t have the internal resources to produce the volume of content you want or need. In this case, your first choice may be a content marketing firm specializing in content strategy and content creation to guide your blogging efforts.
• The content you wish to produce requires specialization, technical skills, or specific expertise. In this case, you’re outsourcing to someone whose specialization is online tool building or you need a videographer and editor to produce quality video content.

Creating your blog content

Whether you produce your content in-house, outsource it, or a combination of the two, it’s important to follow an editorial calendar, to publish consistently and follow a strategic content plan. Often the importance of blogging content is overshadowed by the need for quick results. Even more often, the discipline required to run a blog results in intermittent posting that span weeks or even months. All content, including blog content, is too important to the inbound process to ignore. Assign ownership of your content with deadlines and begin blogging for attraction.

Sharing interesting visual information

Not all blog content is the written word. Pictures are worth a thousand words and video must be worth a million. After you’ve perfected the art of consistently creating, posting, and sharing written content, consider expanding your blog formats into images, videos, and infographics, all designed to attract through educational content. Here are some options to create more interesting blogs:

• Photographic images
• Illustrations
• On-page links to relevant videos
• Infographics
• Graphs, charts, and tables
• Callouts and quotes

Tagging your images also improves your SEO slightly so make sure you’re tagging all your blog post images. Lastly, including a video script in an inoffensive location at the bottom of your post enhances your SEO because search engines can’t crawl videos for the content you’ve created within the video.