A successful business blogging strategy is one that leverages content, in the form of blog posts, as a way to drive inbound traffic to a website. The purpose of driving traffic to your website is to increase your brand exposure and ultimately acquire more customers for your business.
News Article Marketing
If your market is defined by a geographic area, news content may be the ‘secret sauce’ to your business blogging success. No matter what city you do business in, large or small, there’s no shortage of news happening on a daily basis. And as such, you can leverage this news content as a way to dramatically increase local traffic to your website.
I’ve experienced first hand the power of news content. Over the past 5 years, I’ve built two blogs that have subsequently been accepted into Google News. Both of these sites were sold to 3rd parties solely because of their high traffic volumes. Through these experiences, I learned that news content is a powerful force on the web – both in Google search and in social media – and I’ve learned that local news content can be an equally powerful force in driving traffic, exposure, and new customers for local business.
Because of this, news content has two unique characteristics for effective business blogging content:
- There’s never a shortage of news happening in your area.
- News content is polarizing, and can quickly generate a buzz – which means huge spikes in traffic to your website.
Traditional online / offline advertising
Let’s say you are a heating and air company in Atlanta, Georgia and you are trying to figure out the most effective way to advertise your business. You have a myriad of options at your disposal:
- Newspapers – both online and print
- TV ad spots
- Radio ads
- Magazines and other publications
- Google Adwords
- Facebook ads
- Billboard ads
Each of these options, in their own respect, represent billion dollar industries. Why? Because advertising is necessary and an effective way to acquire more customers.
But there’s one characteristic that all of these traditional forms of advertising have in common: you have to continue paying in order to keep up the exposure.
For example, with Google Adwords and Facebook ads, the minute you turn off your payment source (i.e. your credit card) or pause your campaign, your ads will disappear from the platform.
The other common characteristic is that none of them provide long term, residual exposure. Once you turn off your ad campaign on Google or Facebook, or once your contract expires with a billboard or newspaper ad, your business disappears. That is, until you renew your contract and start paying again for the exposure.
Let’s contrast these traditional forms of online and offline advertising with business blogging, and more specifically, news article marketing on your blog.
Compounding Interest on Business Blog Post
Whenever you publish a new blog post, whatever the content may be, that post will live indefinitely within your website and on the web. Google will crawl and index that post, make it available in the search results, and make it available to visitors indefinitely. The more blog posts you create, the more pages (posts) are made available in Google and throughout the web for visitors to find.
We have a personal injury law firm client in Milwaukee who, after publishing daily news articles for 3 months, discovered the articles receiving the most traffic were those that were first published in our campaign. This effect is analogous to compounding interest on money. The more you invest overtime, the more your money grows exponentially as interest accumulates.
Local News For Highly Targeted Traffic
Finally, let’s talk about driving traffic and exposure to your website from highly targeted geographic areas. I mentioned already there’s nearly an unlimited supply of news happening on a daily basis in any given area. The larger the metro area, the more news available to cover. And by publishing geo-targeted news articles within your blog, you’ll naturally attract visitors from those geographic locations.
And the benefit of publishing these news articles on your blog is that your website receives 100% of the traffic.
Compare this to running an ad in the local newspaper and their online equivalent. If you ran an ad on that site, you would be sharing the exposure first with the publication itself, since they are the ones publishing the articles, and then with any other ads running simultaneously on the site.
Your overall equity share of the exposure is severely diluted since you have to share pageviews with many competing businesses.
But when you publish news article directly on your site, your website – and your business – achieves 100% of the brand equity from that traffic. Meaning, you do not share the pageview exposure with any competing entity since the articles are already published within your website.
Add in the compounding growth effect from publishing a steady stream of news articles over time, and your business will soon be receiving traffic and exposure from your local market that far exceeds the value of any paid advertising platform.
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