Author Archives: Kristen Hicks

Unpopular Opinion: Stop Calling Blogs Social Media

blogs aren't social mediaLanguage can be so complicated, can’t it? Especially when you’re dealing with words that are new and still evolving. The word “blog” only just came onto the scene in 1997. The first use of “social media” may have beat it by a few years, but the evidence of its earliest use is unclear. These are words that apply to technology that keeps evolving. And even as the technology itself evolves at a rapid pace, the way we use it changes even faster.

For a long time, blogging has been lumped in under the larger category of social media. I think it’s time for us to acknowledge that it no longer belongs there.

3 Reasons That Blogging Is No Longer Social Media

  • Blogs increasingly resemble media properties more than they do the content on social networking websites.

Brands have spent years trying to throw everything at the wall to see what sticks when it comes to blogging. Recently, we’ve started to gain a clearer idea of just what does work and, in most cases, it’s well researched, meaty, long-form blog posts that more closely resemble the articles common to media properties than the short and pithy posts of social media.

The difference between this type of blog post and a tweet is comparable to the difference between a magazine article and a slogan – they’re completely different types of writing, with different goals, and vastly different work processes involved. The way we talk about them should reflect that.

  • The most social thing about blogs – the comments – are only a prominent feature on a small portion of blogs.

If there’s one component of blogging you could use to really make a case for their being social media, it’s the comments. But how many blogs do you visit that don’t seem to have any comments at all, much less significant social interaction in the comments? Many prominent blogs have even done away with comments altogether, due to the increasing workload of sifting through comment spam. Copyblogger, a big proponent of calling blogs social media back in 2009, famously disabled the comments on their blog in 2014. They felt confident people would move the social component of interacting with their blog to social platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

So if the blog is for putting quality, article-like content out there and social networking platforms are for talking about them (and anything else you want to discuss), perhaps it’s time to acknowledge they’re serving different purposes.

  • The goals of a blog are different than those of a social media presence (although they’re related).

Social media is all about interaction, awareness and promotion. Blogging is about education, thought leadership, and traffic. The specific goals and KPIs for the two mediums should differ.

Social media’s a great tool for promoting your blog posts and ideally developing the community that will visit your blog, and blogging can be an opportunity to gain the trust of readers and turn them into social media followers – and both should be helping you work toward the larger goal of building trust and gaining customers. But they each have a distinct role to play within the larger strategy of content marketing.

 

When you hear the term “social media,” what do you picture? For the vast majority of us, the interfaces of Facebook or Twitter will be the main images that come to mind. I’d be genuinely surprised if you told me that the image of your favorite blog popped into your head. Blogs are a type of media, and they’re often social. But they don’t fit with how most us now use and understand the term “social media.” It’s time to acknowledge that, as important as the relationship between the two mediums is, they’re not the same thing.

Navigating the Tricky World of Hired Guest Posting

hired guest postingWith every year, as more businesses start doing content marketing, it gets harder and harder to be one of the brands people find and follow. Building a large library of valuable content on your own website is still an important part of gaining leads and building authority, but it’s no longer enough for most businesses.

You also need to find ways to get your content in front of new audiences. For that, a growing number of brands are looking for ways to get mentions and links on high-profile industry blogs. And freelance writers like me get lots emails from companies hoping we’ll get content about them onto blogs they want to target.

That’s understandable to want, but too often businesses have unrealistic ideas of how hiring a writer for high-profile guest posting works. Here’s a rundown of the main dos and don’ts for hired guest posting.

How Not to Hire a Freelance Content Writer for Guest Posts

I’m sorry to say some businesses and agencies are going about this all wrong. They’re either skirting ethical boundaries in what they’re asking for, or grossly underestimating what’s involved in getting a high-quality guest post published on a popular blog.

Don’t act like it’s one job.

When you’re hiring someone to pitch guest blogs and write a post you’re asking them to do two different kinds of work: writing and PR. While some PR specialists are good at writing, and some writers are experienced in PR, these are two distinct skill sets. Many writers (myself included) will decline the PR part of the work, but you may get lucky and find someone prepared to take on both jobs.

Whatever pricing structure you set up needs to acknowledge the two different types of work at play here and the (often extensive) amount of time that goes into building relationships and sending pitches. You’ll probably need to consider an hourly rate for the PR work, along with a project rate for the writing.

Don’t expect it to be cheap.

In doing research for this post, I came across a job ad looking for “experienced, well-connected bloggers” offering $30-$60 per published guest post. Sorry to break it to you, but you won’t find experienced bloggers willing to write high-quality posts for that amount. And the kind of rushed, low-quality work that might be worth $30 a pop isn’t going to get you featured on the big-shot blogs you want to target.

To come up with a reasonable rate for a guest post worthy of a popular blog, don’t just think double—think 10 times this amount.

I know that’s not what you want to hear, but really high-quality posts—the kind these blogs will publish—take lots of research, lots of time, and lots of work. That’s going to cost you.

Keep your expectations reasonable.

Often a very good idea or post won’t get accepted for reasons no writer or PR person can guess. Maybe the blog already has a post scheduled on a similar topic, or they just decided yesterday they’re moving in a new direction for their blogging strategy. Even if the freelance blogger you hire puts in the legwork, they can get rejected. Understand that there will likely be more misses than hits.

Don’t ask the writer to leverage their own contacts.

Carol Tice recently went so far as to call this kind of writing opportunity a scam. Freelance writers work hard to develop our contacts and earn the trust of our clients. Expecting us to ask those hard-earned contacts for a favor to promote another business just doesn’t make sense in most cases. If a writer sees an opportunity that’s beneficial for both parties – the client and the blog or publication they have a relationship with, then they might feel comfortable reaching out. But don’t demand it or be upset if they turn down that request.

On the other hand, one of the main jobs of a PR professional is developing contacts they can leverage on behalf of their clients. Consider hiring a PR consultant to do what they’re good at, and a writer to do the writing.

Don’t ask for posts that are overly promotional about your business.

I once pitched a piece on a relevant subject for my client to a publication, got accepted, wrote it up and passed it over to the client for review before submitting it. The client went through and added several specific mentions of the company’s product. You probably see where this is going…when I submitted the piece, the editor said “This is great! Except for all those brand mentions. I took those out and now it’s ready to run.”

Very few blogs or publications are going to accept a guest post that’s blatantly promotional. Your piece can’t be all about you. It has to be about something valuable to the blog’s audience. If you don’t get that, you’ll waste a lot of time working on posts and pitches that get no response.

How to Get Hired Guest Posting Right

That’s a long list of don’ts, but that doesn’t mean you  have to rule out the idea entirely. You can hire someone to write guest posts for you in a way that’s legitimate.

Do the pitching and relationship building yourself.

Or hire a PR person for that, as already suggested. Doing all the preliminary work of researching a blog, trying to understand its audience, generating relevant topic ideas, and sending pitches—that’s not writing. When you hire a professional writer to do writing, you get good results. When you hire us for something else that isn’t our specialty, the results will be more mixed.

And as an added note, it especially makes sense to do your own pitching if you want a guest post to go up under your name rather than the name of the freelance blogger you hire.

Be upfront about disclosing your company’s connection to the post.

You don’t get to casually slip in links to your website and hope no one notices. And you certainly don’t get to expect freelance writers to do that for you and risk their reputation in the process. That’s how you lose trust in the online marketing world and alienate the people who could be the best allies for your brand.

Hiring a writer to ghost write guest posts is fine, but will probably cost more.

Some writers aren’t fans of ghost writing. I’ve read some eloquent criticisms of the practice, but I also know a lot of professional copywriters that are happy to do it for the right price. The thing you have to keep in mind though, is if a freelance writer is going to do the hard work of writing a post worthy of a popular blog for the sake of someone else’s business and reputation, the price has to be right.

I know I keep coming back to price, but with good reason. It’s important for you to understand that if you want to take the road of hiring someone to write guest posts, you have to set enough budget aside for it. Guest posting is a competitive arena, especially on the blogs most worth landing a post on. You can’t go halfway on this. If you want to get the benefits of guest posting, you have to be willing to treat it as a serious investment.

Why It’s Time to Re-Consider How You Think About Competition

Austin is a city full of freelancers in general, and freelance copywriters in particular. In this town, meeting other people who do what I do is common. From a competitive perspective, that makes it sound like a terrible place to be a freelance copywriter. In my experience, the exact opposite is true.

Instead of viewing each other as the enemy, we help each other out. I’m part of a freelance referral network that has brought me thousands of dollars in business, much of it sent directly my way by other local freelance copywriters – my so-called “competition.” And I know some of them have profited from jobs I’ve passed on because I was too busy or they weren’t a good fit.

Befriending my competition may just be the best thing I’ve ever done for my business.

How Do You View Your Competitors?

Whenever I encounter clients who insist that nothing they publish can include links or references to their content marketing competitioncompetitors, I usually shrug and oblige, but I always think what a missed opportunity. These are the businesses that share your target audience, and that are probably producing content that would be of great use to them. Is trying to pretend they don’t exist actually going to bring you more business?

If you view your competitors as a threat to the degree that you worry any mention of them could hurt your company, take a minute to analyze why. Is this really a strategic decision, or one borne of fear?

Why Content Marketing Doesn’t Have Room for “Competitors”

The big goal is to provide value to your audience, right? Content marketing is a long-term strategy designed in large part to gain customer trust. You know what makes me really trust a company, if they’re not afraid to admit a direct competitor has done something good.

Whether that’s an impressive piece of content they’re willing to share, or acknowledging that a feature in the competitor’s product makes them the better choice for some customers. Man, I hear that and think: this company is confident in their product and positioning.

Still Skeptical?

All my arguing for this so far has been based on my personal opinions and anecdotes, so I could see someone being unconvinced. But I’m not alone in this thinking. KISSmetrics, one of the top blogs out there in the marketing space, gives tips for growing your social media following that include following your competitors, commenting on their posts, offering to guest post on their websites, and promoting their stuff. But that’s just social media; I argue that there could be a clear value to publishing content that directly mentions your competitors or links to them.

Imagine for a minute that you’re the first person anyone looking for products or services in your industry comes to when they have a question about what to buy. How different would your business be?

Marcus Sheridan pretty much pulled that off with his pool business by publishing content about his competitors – not negative content, just informational stuff. He paid attention to the kind of questions his clients had and he answered them honestly on his website, even when it meant saying something positive about one of his competitors.

If you’re interested in using content marketing to become a thought leader, or even just a trusted brand, then the fear of mentioning your competition has got to go. You don’t have to go out of your way to promote and interact with them (obviously), just be willing to do so when it fits in naturally with your overall strategy. If the product or services you offer are really and truly great, then what do you have to fear?

7 Questions to Guide Your Business Blogging Strategy

Last updated February 2019

Anyone that spends much time online knows a simple truth: the internet isbusiness blogging strategy vast and awash in content. One estimate puts the total number of blogs online at over 500 million. For businesses doing content marketing, that means the competition is fierce.

To be clear, that doesn’t mean that business blogging isn’t well worth it. Business blogging has been found to produce 55% more traffic, 97% more inbound links, and 67% more leads. But those results aren’t guaranteed. You can’t just put up a blog post and hope for the best. The more content that gets published on the web, the more important it is to take a strategic approach to the content you put out there.

If your business has a blog, there’s no getting around it. You need a business blogging strategy.

The Difference a Business Blogging Strategy Makes

Every year the Content Marketing Institute publishes new research about the state of content marketing, and while every year the research reveals some new trends and priorities, one insight stays consistent: the importance of having a documented strategy

That’s true for content marketing in general, and just as true for business blogging in particular.

If you started a blog because you kept hearing businesses were supposed to have a blog, then you may have overlooked this crucial step in the rush to check a box on your business to-do list. But if you didn’t take time to figure out what you want your blog posts to accomplish, and how to match your efforts to those goals, then you probably aren’t seeing the results you felt you were promised.

A business blogging strategy accomplishes a number of important things:

  • It helps you maintain blogging consistency. One of the goals of a blog is that it gives your visitors something to come back for, and consistency is important for that. If you publish three blog posts in a week and then nothing for several months, people won’t know what to expect and are less likely to check back. A business blogging strategy will help you plan out your scheduling and keep up with it over time.
  • You can better tie your blogging efforts to SEO (search engine optimization) results. For many businesses, SEO is the main goal of starting a business blog. But getting onto page one in Google for popular search terms is extremely competitive—it doesn’t happen by chance and luck. To increase your visibility in search, you need a strong blogging strategy.
  • You can connect your business blogging to your other marketing efforts. A blog can be a powerful tool on its own, but it’s worth even more to your business if your blogging supports your efforts to build an email list, grow your social following and get better ROI for your paid search and social ads. That only happens if you’re strategic in how you approach your blogging.
  • You’ll more thoughtfully provide what your audience wants. You know your industry, which makes it tempting to think you know what topics to cover in your blog. But you’re not writing content for yourself, it’s for your audience. Creating a blog strategy will help you think carefully about who your audience is and what they care about, so you can center them in your blogging.

How to Create Your Business Blogging Strategy

To create a strong blogging strategy for your business, carefully consider and answer these seven main questions.

1. What are my business blogging goals?

A blog can be a valuable tool in bringing in new leads and customers, but most of your blog visitors won’t go straight from reading one blog post to making a purchase.  So while increased sales can be an ultimate goal for your blog, when it comes to creating your business blogging strategy, consider more intermediary goals  you can set that help contribute to eventual sales, such as:

  • Higher search rankings
  • Backlinks
  • Traffic
  • Email subscribers
  • Comments
  • Social shares

A blog has to help you gain more visibility and traffic before it can lead to sales. And signs of engagement, such as comments and social shares, are signals that visitors are starting to build a relationship with your brand—often a step on the path to becoming a customer.

Take time at this step to figure out what you really want your blog to accomplish. Do you want potential customers to have an easier time finding you? Do you want to build more of a relationship with the visitors that already come to your website? Having multiple goals is fine, but figure out what your priorities are. That will help you shape your strategy to better accomplish the main results you want to see.

2. Who am I writing for?

Hint: it’s not you. You can absolutely create a blog that’s all about the things you’re most interested in – but it shouldn’t be on your business website. Your business blog has to be about what your audience cares about.

If you haven’t already created a buyer persona for your marketing strategies, then create one now for your blog. It will help you clarify who your target audience is, and then better understand what their problems are, what questions they have, and the types of things they normally like to read and do online and in the world at large.

You want your blogging strategy to reflect your business goals, but for it to do that, you’ll need to take a step back and make sure you don’t make your blog all about your business. What you blog about and how you write needs to center your audience first and foremost.

3. What does my audience care about?

You really want to get inside their heads here (as much as you can without being creepy, anyway). If you’re a local business in a city full of people with local pride, that should come through in your business blog. If your audience is moms who care about the environment and worry about the ecological effects of every product they buy, your blog should share that concern (and provide information that helps them make informed choices).

Do your research.

  • Pull up websites you know your customers like and look at what posts and articles are the most popular.
  • Read the comments that people in your audience write on those sites.
  • Spend time in forums.
  • Have conversations with your customers and prospects directly.

Keep a running list where you collect everything you learn so you can make sure you’re blogging about the things they care about.

4. What keywords do I want to rank for?

If SEO was anywhere on your list of goals, then keyword research should be a key part of your business blogging strategy. Keyword research helps you figure out what topics your audience cares about, and the language they most frequently use when searching for information on those topics.

The keywords you uncover in your research will help you shape your strategy around the concepts your audience is interested in, and will help you create a plan for gaining the search rankings that are the most valuable for your business.

When identifying keywords for your blogging strategy, give as much priority to long-tail keywords as you do broader, more popular keywords. A good SEO strategy is built as much on answering more detailed and specific questions as it is on providing pages that address the main general topics in your industry. For example, a company that sells time tracking software may want to consider terms like “how to have more productive meetings” as well as terms like “time tracking software.”

5. What are my competitors doing?

You have two categories of competitors: your business competitors and your blog competitors. There may be overlap, but you want to especially pay attention to the latter in this category. When you do searches for the target keywords you’ve identified, make note of who shows up the most often.

You have a lot to learn from the businesses winning the top spots in your industry in search. Analyze their blogs. Which blog posts are the most popular? How long is the typical post?  How do they format each blog post? And what can you learn about how they distribute and promote their posts?

SEO tools offer features to help with competitor research. You can get a list of the keywords your top competitors are ranking for, learn which keywords send the most traffic to their website, and see what backlinks they have. All of that information can help you build out a stronger blogging strategy based on what you know works.

6. What’s my (realistic) blogging schedule?

The fact is, research shows that more frequent blogging tends to get better results. Businesses that manage to publish 16 or more blog posts a month got 3.5 times more traffic than those who publish 0-4.

business blogging traffic

Image via HubSpot

For many businesses, that’s inconvenient knowledge, especially as research also shows that the time it takes to create a high-quality blog post grows every year.

business blogging time

Image via Orbit Media

While publishing fresh content frequently can often add up to better business blogging results, that’s only true if the content is good and you keep up with it. A lot of businesses don’t have the bandwidth for daily blogging, and if you try to push out a high-quality longform blog post every day, you’ll get burned out pretty quickly.

The ideal isn’t to produce as much content as you possibly can, it’s to produce as much good, worthwhile content as you reasonably can. Setting your sights too high in terms of quantity will mean an abandoned blog or junk content no one wants read.

Carefully consider how much time you really have, how much time your employees really have, and how much you can afford to spend on a good freelance blogger. Then create a blogging schedule that you can realistically manage.

7. How am I going to promote my blog posts?

Don’t overlook this step. It’s one of the big things that sets successful blogs apart from those that fail. People have a lot of content to choose from out there. How are they going to find yours if you don’t create a plan to get it in front of them?

Content promotion can take a number of different forms. Some common strategies include:

  • Sharing all of your blog posts on social media.
  • Using paid advertising to drive traffic to your blog posts.
  • Promoting your blog posts to your email list.
  • Writing guest posts that link back to your blog posts.
  • Highlighting industry influencers in your blog posts, so they’ll help with the sharing.

Whatever tactics you decide to go with, make sure your business blogging strategy includes room for promotion, both in terms of time and budget.

A Business Blogging Strategy is Key to Success

Starting a blog is easy enough, but doing blogging that yields tangible results for your business is hard. Anyone who says otherwise is misleading you. If you’re going to invest in a blog, be willing to invest enough to make it worth it.

My free report on building a better blog is a good place to start in visualizing your larger business blogging strategy. If you could use some help with the content writing, side of things, I may be able to help.

On Content Marketing Semantics: Can’t We Just Get Along?

Over a year ago, I started a discussion in a LinkedIn copywriters group* asking members what they saw as the

content marketing vs inbound fight

Hopefully no one gets this mad.
Image via Tambako the Jaguar on flickr.com

difference between the terms copywriting and content marketing. I was surprised to learn from the comments on the post that:

a) Many of the people in the group had an opposite idea of the difference in meaning for the two terms than I did. The idea that content marketing was a subset of the larger term “copywriting” was popular – although I (and presumably, most content marketers) would see copywriting, or even content writing, as one part of the larger content marketing whole.

b) People were very opinionated on the subject.

I guess that latter point shouldn’t have surprised me, but the level of defensiveness of the term people were most used to and dismissiveness of something different was significant.

Every so often, a discussion with a similar tone (very much including the aforementioned defensiveness and dismissiveness) comes up around the terms content marketing and inbound marketing. Sometimes terms like online marketing and permission marketing get thrown into the mix just to make the whole thing a bit messier.

The result inevitably includes a lot of passionate comments, strong opinions, and lengthy explanations on why varying opinions are more correct than others.

These discussions have been happening with these particular terms for at least five years (exhibit A, from 2010, but for more examples of the tone described, see exhibit B, from 2011). As far as I can tell, everyone I’ve encountered who practices content marketing also considers themselves to be practicing inbound marketing, which makes the passion and disagreement on display in these discussions more than a little confusing.

Here’s my take: I don’t have any interest in defining the differences in the terms, because for all my intents and purposes, they point toward the same sort of work and goals. Some people think term A includes term B, but is broader. Other people argue the same, but with the equation flipped. I think it doesn’t matter much either way.

As a content writer, I relate a bit more to the term content marketing(it’s also the term I came across first, which probably makes a difference), but I immediately related to the ideology behind inbound marketing once I found my way to it. We’re all just trying to create content good enough, people would pay for it (as Jay Baer so memorably put it) on the path getting more customers and establishing better relationships with them.

While it’s valuable to argue semantics up to the point that you confirm you and your audience are on the same page, beyond that it can get more destructive than useful. Both terms were made up within the past few years and both will evolve to mean something different in the years to come. In the meantime, let’s just focus on doing quality work that helps clients and customers alike.

 

*The link to that discussion is here, but I don’t think you’ll be able to access it unless signed into LinkedIn and a member of the group.