Consumers have become so suspicious of obvious attempts to sell that marketers are now left with only one option: to entertain, engage, and inform. If you’ve ever wondered 'how does blogging work' and done any research into content marketing, you’ll probably have come across a wall of algorithms and technical details that are terrifying enough to scare you away from search engine optimization for good. From Hummingbird to keyword densities, link building to social media algorithms, it might seem as though you need a doctorate just to figure out how to gain Google rank.
If you organically draw an audience to your blog by engaging them with great content, all other details of your online marketing strategy will naturally follow. Google has reinvented itself to force content marketers into asking 'how does blogging work' to entertain their audiences. Doing so will draw the link generation, leads, and traffic required to push you to the top of search results.
How Does Blogging Work?
If Seth Godin, the godfather of modern marketing, uploads content onto his blog daily, it’s safe to assume you should, too. Godin keeps his daily posts simple, short, but frequent. He doesn’t cram them with keywords, but he does provide the kind of information his readers need. Google naturally favors sites that are constantly evolving and that bear no resemblance to the spam it’s constantly at war with. Keeping relevant keywords in your content is worthwhile, but these days, search results are different for every user. They’re also generated using synonyms instead of a single set of words, so the key is to stay relevant to your primary industry.
Dealing with Fear
Being creative entails taking risks. Read widely, get inspired, watch what your competitors are publishing, and then get behind your keyboard regardless of how much it scares you. Prolific work needn’t take up your entire workday. Great bloggers have one trait in common: they write the way they talk. Fluffy, overdeveloped writing is insincere, and it takes more time to craft than conversational writing does.
Evolution
If you want guaranteed results, you’re in the wrong industry. You’ll probably need to constantly adjust your content to find out what works best for your market. You must create posts that inspire shares, so strive to communicate what matters to your demographic.
Your Buyer Personas
No marketing effort is complete without an understanding of your demographic. It’s essential that you create and use buyer personas to get under the skin of what your target market wants. Valuable, essential content is customer-centered.
Criticism is a Gift
Everyone has an opinion online, particularly about what other people create. In the early days, your blog might offend and upset some of your readers, but their feedback is a free education in your audience’s needs. Treat criticism as the schooling that it is.
Rants and debates have the potential to become downward spirals, so it’s critical that you use them to sharpen your ideas, not limit your creativity and steal your time.
Achieving Virality
It can take weeks to get Google’s attention, so patience is key. At the same time, only impactful work can achieve the kind of shares that qualify as viral. Your work needs to be impactful if it’s to achieve that. Take pride in what you create and strive to create work that matters.
No content marketing strategy can exist without express objectives. Set goals that are measurable so that you can constantly tweak your tactics for improvement. Blogging should, however, also be fun. If you don’t enjoy creating content, odds are good that your audience won’t enjoy reading it.
Casey founded Gravity Digital in 2000 after serving as the Internet Services Director for a Nashville-based Ad Agency. He's a rare breed that operates both left and right brain, so along with oversight of the company he's active in the creative process for our clients.
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