Given the current social and search landscape it is very important to make sure company blogs are fitted with the proper mechanisms which allow publishers to take advantage of search engine optimization (SEO), social media optimization (SMO), and monetization (lead capture). The aforementioned three are critical when launching a content marketing and inbound marketing campaign. Below are eight items a blog must have in order to maximize its performance in an inbound marketing campaign.
Blog Title - Having a title for your blog should serve two purposes: branding and standing out on a subscriber’s feed reader. You’ll find about 17% of your blog visitors (average adoption across the internet in the US) will use RSS. These subscribers tend to have dozens of RSS feeds in their feed readers. Your title will help you stand out in their crowded feed reader.- Share Buttons - Social media and social bookmarking are proven content distribution channels. The easier you make it for your readers to share your content the more likely it will be distributed amongst their networks.
- Subscribe - Always give your readers the ability to subscribe to your blog via email and RSS. By not offering both options your blog will have fewer subscribers than if you offered both.
- Calls to Actions - Unless you are just blogging for fun and have no business purpose for producing content on a blog make sure you have some type of unique value proposition (UVP) or moral bribe offered through a call to action (CTA) graphic or text near the navigation or on the side of your blog.
- Social Media Accounts - A certain percentage of your readers will prefer to engage with you and your blog via social media rather than leaving comments on your blog. Make sure you give those people the option of connecting with you via social media.
- Blog Categories (Tags) - Tags serve two purposes: The first is to allow your visitors to sort through your posts by specific topics in order to access specific information the visitor wishes to read. The second is for SEO. Every tag has its own URL that is indexed by Google separately. The keyword or phrase in the tag will be in the URL and in the body content of all of the posts identified with the tag. This makes that URL very optimized for the keyword or phrase in the tag.
- End of Post Call-to-Action - If a visitor commits to reading your whole post and gets all the way to the bottom it is your responsibility to tell them what they should do next. You can do it graphically or with text in the last paragraph. CTA’s can send people to a landing page or something as simple as asking the reader to leave a comment.
- Comments - For many bloggers receiving comments is a metric which determines the success of a post. Many of your readers will leave feedback and engage with your blog via the comments area.
If any of the above are missing or ignored on a blog the results can crush an inbound marketing campaign. Ideally, the blog should be fitted from launch with the above attributes, but if the blog is missing any of the above it is recommended to add them. For more on blog optimization feel free to download our Blog Post Optimization Playbook.
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