Heard the phrase “content is king”? Creating great online content is critical in any Inbound Marketing strategy because:
- Organic Traffic: Search engines love content. Without content, forget about dominating SERP rankings. And if you don’t rank well on the Search Engine Results Page, you’re missing out on organic Inbound Marketing traffic.
- Referral Traffic: Without great content you won’t get great links from other sites, missing out on referral Inbound Marketing traffic.
- Conversion: Only great content can convert visitors to “active” visitors who bookmark your site and share it with colleagues. And when you combine great content with demand generation software, you can even convert those active visitors to sales-ready prospects.
Today, let’s focus on helping you generate pages and pages of valuable content by blogging. In many ways blogs are the easiest way to build great content because:
- Quick to create and easy to publish
- Give you lots of flexibility in subject matter from post to post (within reason – see below)
- Style, grammar, and design expectations are more relaxed than when creating more formal content like whitepapers or ebooks.
So what should you write about? Well, there are two camps on this. The first group says you should “go wild”, write about anything vaguely related to your blog topic, let the internet “sort it out”, and let your audience tell you (via comments and feedback) which is the most engaging and valuable.
The second camp says you should focus, focus, focus. Determine your area of specialty, build expertise and credibility in that area, and reach out to a smaller but more meaningful group of prospects, customers, and stakeholders.
I believe the first camp is for ideal for personal blogs. For B2B company blogs, my preference is for the second camp. And here’s why:
- Focus develops even more expertise. It’s a virtuous cycle. And followers want experts. So unless you are a modern Plato, stick to what you really know.
- Focus develops content that is rich in your company’s “keyword identity”, which will deliver substantial SEO value.
- You will drive highly targeted, relevant Inbound traffic. If you are a small or mid-sized B2B company, then you are familiar with the benefits of market segmentation, niche markets, and targeting. The same applies here.
Now most new B2B bloggers are petrified of running out of content to write about. And yes, the blogging landscape is littered with well intentioned souls that give up after 8-10 blog posts. To help avoid that gruesome fate, I’ve created a list of 50 topic generators to consider once you’ve exhausted the standard topics of new products, new applications, and important company news. Here’s a small list to get your creative juices flowing. If you want more, send me an email for the other 43 tips.
- Troll the net for news and opinions on your industry, and add your unique perspective
- Share interesting new websites and online resources you’ve found
- Write about key events in your industry. Spread the news pre and post event
- Talk about neat things that your customers, suppliers, and stakeholders are doing
- Conduct an opinion poll through social media, and share the results
- Get suppliers, co-workers, customers to provide posts and share their relevant expertise
- Do some research on a relevant topic, digest the information, and summarize.
The most important point: Avoid making the blog you-centric. Inbound Marketing is all about the customer, not the seller. So write for your audience: their interests, their issues, their needs. That way you’ll keep your audience coming back.
Follow these simple guidelines, and you too will be adding great content to your site, and contribute to the growing wealth of wisdom on the internet.
You may also find our post on Royal Content useful.
Until next time – Axel
Tags: blogging, Inbound Marketing, Online Content, SEO
Eric 
