Content marketing is all about using your content to attract attention and engage visitors in a conversation. A blog is a brilliant tool to help you generate new content over time, with each new post acting as a new web page and drawing search visitors.
But there are two problems associated with blog posts:
- Categories: the category pages are not that useful. Just a list of posts. And to avoid confusing search engines with duplicate content, it is a good idea to stop them being indexed anyway.
- Invisibility: once posts go into your archives, they can lose visibility. You want your great blog posts to be visible at the right time.
We’ve recently come up with a new Wordpress plugin that tackles these problems.
It lets you match up Blog Categories to pages in your website:
- When a page is linked to a Category, the latest posts from that category will automatically be linked at the bottom of the page.
- Each post in that category will automatically have a link up to the the related page.
Once the plugin is activated, under Dashboard, Manage, Categories you can simply associate any page in your website with a category, and the automatic behavior takes over.
This makes it possible to create a page with a lot of rich content about a topic, and then each time you post on that same topic, the post is automatically linked on that page. It is a bit like a souped up Category page.
Our first implementation of this plugin is specific to the OM4 theme. In the future we hope to make this more generic so we can publish the plugin.
Blogs are great for marketing. But not if your definition of marketing is interrupting your prospects, or promoting your service instead of helping them solve a problem. Interruption marketing and blogs don’t go together.
There are a lot of misconceptions about blogs, and whether they are useful for marketing or not. But if you approach them from the perspective of sharing information to help readers solve a problem, then blogs are excellent marketing tools.
A recent post by Seth Godin expresses the concept concisely:
The most effective marketing use of blogs seems to be when the advertiser/marketer uses the blog as an opportunity not to sell a product, but to attract people who are in the right mindset. Joel Spolsky rarely writes about his product, but that’s fine. The people who read his writing are the very same people who need his product, and his proximity to the valuable ideas (and his reputation) makes it not such a leap to go ahead and buy what he has to sell.
Attract people in trouble–>Help solve their problems–>Build your reputation–>Sales happen.
You can read the full (short) post if you click here.
Something I’ll be doing as I get this blog going is point out those resources that I have found most useful in understanding and practising online marketing. And at the very top of my useful list goes this book: David Meerman Scott and The New Rules of Marketing & PR.
David launched an eBook called The New Rules of PR around the same time we were launching PublicityShip. He subsequently developed the concepts from that initial document, and his book was the result.
I also recommend his blog WebInkNow as a great read. It also happens to be an excellent example of content marketing in practice.
One of David’s primary insights is that new media is enabling a direct conversation with buyers. If you want to talk to buyers through print or broadcast media, you need to address the needs of journalists and editors. But publish yourself on the web and you can talk directly to buyers. The implications of this change are profound. A blog is in no small way one of the channels for communicating directly with buyers (although you may choose not to try to sell them directly).
With a full title of The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How To Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing & Online Media To Reach Buyers Directly, you can expect to get a thorough run down on a wide range of new media. And you won’t be disappointed, or receive a trivial treatment.
David discusses in some detail the value of content rich sites (David’s earlier book Cashing In With Content is also in my list of top resources, and I will post about separately).
Unlike many books that can rapidly start to lose precision, The New Rules and Marketing & PR gets involved in:
- the crucial relationship between online marketing and copywriting
- practical approaches to thought leadership to build trust
- building a marketing and PR plan
Aside from the very specific guidance provided in relation to how PR and marketing operate online, David makes a very interesting point about the convergence of marketing and PR. I’ve definitely noticed this. When we launched PublicityShip, we were focussing on publicity. As The New Rules of Marketing & PR was being written, we were busy adding online marketing services to our offering. As it stands, we’ve decided to create two distinct points of presence for these services. One for Publicity and Public Relations (PublicityShip) and another for Online Marketing (OM4). There are advantages in this (well, I think so anyway, our clients will prove this one way or the other). However there is no doubt in my mind that we are more useful to our clients by having both capabilities. Crossovers between the two offerings are happening all the time - the convergence of PR and marketing is very real from where we stand.
For me the standout element of The New Rules of Marketing & PR is David’s explanation of how to use Buyer Personas. It is concise, to the point, and really useful in developing a content strategy. It gets a whole session dedicated to it at Blog School. To learn more you can also read Adele Revella’s Buyer Personas blog.
In summary, buy this book. You’ll enjoy reading it, and won’t be able to avoid scrawling notes on it. Reading it is like a mini online marketing strategy workshop. Shortly after we received our copy, I asked Jane to read it in detail, and she came back with about 25 separate marketing initiatives to discuss.
It sparks ideas.
