If given a choice between publishing lots of dross, or a few pearls, small businesses blogs should invest time and money in creating high-quality, research-backed articles.
There’s no doubting that a blog is a powerful marketing and user engagement tool. Blogs can also be time consuming to manage and, if a professional writer is involved, they can be expensive. SEOs tell us that the most effective blog is one on which a constant stream of fresh content is published. Google tells us that the way to rank well is to create high-quality content.
Those factors in combination: the marketing potential, the time it takes, the money it costs, the need for frequent publication, and the requirement for high-quality content put many small business owners is something of a quandary.
Producing multiple high-quality pieces of content each week can be a significant expense. Let’s be clear what I mean by high-quality: of course anything a company publishes has to be reasonably well-written, comprehensible, grammatically correct, and relevant to the reader’s interest, but that’s the low end of what counts as high-quality. To be really effective, content has to be original, useful, thoughtful, perhaps provocative, and certainly valuable enough to readers that they’ll want to share it.
Unfortunately, many small businesses take SEOs at their word and, ignoring the other important factors, concentrate solely on volume and keywords. At worst the result is bilge that no one would possibly want to read or share, and at best it’s insipid hackwork. The reason behind this decision is understandable: if a business has a limited budget for blog articles and they believe that volume and keyword targeting are the best use of that budget, then the other factors fall by the wayside.
I’d like to advocate a different approach. It’s one taken by companies like Information Architects. They don’t publish a new post every day or every week. They don’t produce content just for the sake of it. They intermittently produce extremely high-quality and well-considered blog articles. Signal v. Noise publish more frequently but not more than once or twice a week, and again, the content is of a very high quality—considered, elegantly written and expressed, and shared widely (even though neither blog includes social sharing widgets).
If your company can afford to publish a mediocre blog article every day, or it can afford to publish a brilliantly insightful and useful post once every couple of weeks, I’d take the second option. The writers capable of producing such content are going to be more expensive, and it’s going to take more time, but business blogging is about providing something useful for leads and customers.
To be truly useful articles can’t be chopped up, rehashed, regurgitated repetitions of thousands of other articles on the web; they have to say something original and thoughtful, and ideally they’ll be based on serious research and data. That takes time, but the results are likely to garner much more approval and serious admiration than yet another WordPress plugin roundup or listicle. They’ll be shared, and even if they aren’t shared as widely as “The Ten Best Ways To Decorate A Cupcake,” they’ll be noticed and shared by the right people.
Author: Graeme Caldwell works as an inbound marketer for Nexcess, a leading provider of Magento and WordPress hosting. Follow Nexcess on Twitter at @nexcess, Like them on Facebook and check out their tech/hosting blog, http://blog.nexcess.net/.
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