Your Company Blog Is Still Just as (or More) Powerful Than Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook

Today, it can be easy to disregard something like blogging as un-sexy and outdated in terms of being a viable channel to market your business. Plus, with a new social media platform arising virtually every year, neglecting blogging is easier now than ever before.

Despite this, having an active, curated company blog is just as important today as it was 10 years ago (if not more important).

In this article, you will discover a handful of reasons why you should still blog even if you’re killing it on much newer, hipper social media platforms. You’ll also learn four strategies on how to maximize blog traffic and the influence of your blog.

Why You Should Still Write a Blog

1. Longer Lifespan of Content

For the most part, Instagram and Snapchat content doesn’t show up in Google’s search results. On top of that, the lifespan of a Snap is a mere 24 hours. On Instagram, posts are lucky to stay relevant longer than 13 hours.

The short life cycle of this social media content is certainly a double-edged sword: the fact platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat are so real-time means they facilitate the fluid exchange of ideas and information. All this makes them timely and relevant, thus powerful tools.

On the flip side, it also makes content on the same platforms fleeting, causing it to be difficult for businesses to keep up with the “digital Joneses” when it comes to social media. It is in the best interest of these social media platforms to ask for more content. It is in the best interest of Google to ask for the best content.

By having a company blog, customers could potentially be reeled in years down the road, all with a single piece of high quality content.

2. Impact on SEO

Image Credit: VerticalResponse.com

Despite the amount of media attention given to Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook and company, you shouldn’t forget that there are approximately 3.5 billion Google searches conducted every single day.

Comparatively, Facebook sees an estimated 2 billion searches per day, and Pinterest approximately 2 billion searches per month. Instagram’s total monthly user count just recently reached one-fifth of Google’s number of daily searches, and Snapchat is even further behind.

It’s clear Google is still the world’s top search engine. In order to get the most out of Google, you should be taking SEO (search engine optimization) into close consideration. When it comes to SEO, writing quality blog posts is a terrific way for your company to climb up the search rankings.

The higher your SEO, the higher your probability of landing a client who stumbles across your work through Google in the future.

3. Ownership

Time and again, history has proven that the relevance of social media networks is a hard thing to predict. Just remember, Myspace was king from 2005 to 2008, Tumblr was popular from 2007 to 2013, and Vine was hottest from 2013 to 2015.

Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, and the rest are all terrific platforms to use in order to garner the attention of your audience and to grow an audience, but using them as your company’s “home base” could prove unwise.

Blogs are much different. They are yours and only yours. No one else can take them away from you…well, except GoDaddy or Google Domains, but you get the point.

Successful Blogging Strategies

Now that you know a handful of reasons why blogging is still an indispensable marketing strategy, the real work begins. To help you, here are some tips and best practices to use to make sure your blog is getting the maximum exposure it deserves.

Leverage Platforms Like the One You’re Reading on Right Now — Medium ;)

It’s no surprise that today’s online landscape is saturated, and the blogosphere is no different. That’s why fresh platforms like Medium are such a valuable asset to have to increase the traffic and influence of your company blog.

Medium provides the perfect venue to showcase your own blog because it is (more or less) a blog in itself. It is a channel designed specifically for written content.

Additionally, Medium provides users with something they can’t automatically get from a standalone blog: a built-in audience of more than 30 million monthly users. Medium gives users the scale that would otherwise take years to build and nurture with a standalone blog.

Ready to get started? Here are some pointers:

1. Read Quincy Larson’s article, which analyzes the best practices of the top 252 Medium articles in 2016.
2. Use tools like Rabbut and Upscribe to seamlessly capture your reader’s emails, preferably after offering them a freebie (ebook, video course, etc.) in exchange for their email address.
3. Use Medium to republish content from your company blog, and be sure to include a link to the original post so readers can stay in touch with you.
4. Try your very best to get published on a large, relevant publication. To do this, reach out to the respective editor (via email or Twitter) with a link to your 100% completed article. Include a quick pitch going over why your content would be a great fit for the publication.

Don’t Be Afraid to Pay

Don’t be too shy to pay to promote your blog in the form of social media advertising (via Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, and Twitter ad, etc.).

Social media moguls like Gary Vaynerchuk think Facebook advertising is single most valuable commodity in the online marketing world today, so it could definitely be worth your while to put some dollars behind the medium.

To get started, watch this short tutorial video covering how to create and manage Facebook Ads.

Use Quora

Neil Patel, digital marketing expert and founder of four multi-million dollar companies, preaches to his audience to search on Quora to discover which questions are being asked most often in your niche. You can find these questions in the Top FAQ section of the website.

After you find a question you like, write an answer to it in the form of a blog post. This will increase the likelihood others will search for and see the post, find it valuable, and come back for more.

Network

You never can go wrong with networking, and tools like Meetup.com, Facebook Groups, and LinkedIn Groups make meeting like minded people easier now than ever before. Set aside an hour to search for groups and meetups in your niche.

If you enjoyed reading this post, please recommend and share it to help others find it!

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Call to Action

If you really enjoyed this article and want to receive the shortened, PDF version of The 7 Mindset Shifts Needed for Successful Social Media Marketing, then click here to receive it now!

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This article was originally published on Inc.com.

https://themission.co/your-company-blog-is-still-just-as-or-more-powerful-than-snapchat-instagram-and-facebook-2caa4a60a316

Improving your internal linking strategy

Is an internal linking strategy paying off for Mail Online?

SEO 08 Jul 16 | Graham Charlton

 
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Combining hub pages for key topics with well-planned internal linking can be a very effective strategy to secure consistent search rankings for target keywords. 

It’s become an essential tactic for publishers and others, especially when you are regularlycreating content around a particular topic.

The risk of producing a lot of content around the same topic is that you can end up with multiple pages which have similar keywords which compete against each other in Google for the same search terms.

For example, USA Today has ten different articles ranking for the term ‘Kylie Jenner’ during a six month period last year. As each new one comes along, it battles with the existing article, with the end result being a very inconsistent search performance.

The answer to this problem is to decide on a page that you want your site to rank for a given keyword or phrase, and concentrate on that. This hub, category or landing page (however you want to describe it) can then be the page that ranks for the term.

Sites can then consistently link to that page from new articles on the topic, eventually creating a useful resource, and one that stands a better chance of gaining high rankings than lots of individual pages.

One such example is the BBC’s Euro 2016 category page. Here it is:

It’s a repository for all of the site’s content around the tournament, and it ranks consistently.

It should also be noted that the groundwork for this was carried out well in advance of the start of Euro 2016 in early June so that, when the spike in interest around the term happened, the BBC was in position to attract plenty of traffic.

This is the BBC’s search rankings for the term ‘Euro 2016’ for the five months up to the start of the tournament. Nice and consistent.

This well planned use of hub pages along with consistent internal linking can really pay off. In the BBC’s case, it has ensured that its Euro 2016 page is in a great position to capitalise in increased interest from searchers around the tournament.

Of course, other factors have to be in place too. The BBC is an authority site with some excellent content and a formidable number of backlinks. Effective linking and theming will help any site, but other factors have to be in place to achieve high rankings for competitive search terms.

That said, it should not be beyond major publishers to profit from this strategy, and the example I’m going to use here is Mail Online. It is, by some accounts, the most visited English-language newspaper site on the web. Make of that what you will.

Mail Online and internal linking

Mail Online, until late last year, hadn’t been implementing a hub page / internal linking strategy at all.

We know this thanks to Dan Barker (@danbarker on Twitter) who pointed this out. He estimates that Mail started this strategy around October 25 last year.

Mail Online creates and publishes huge quantities of articles about celebrities and news. While each new article performs relatively well in search, they do so for a limited time only. So the article becomes old and search positions drop until the original article is usurped by a new article, and so on. This is where the proper strategy can help.

As we can see from the example below for the term ‘chelsea news’, ranking was inconsistent until early November 2015.

The chart shows search results for this term across the entire Daily Mail domain.

The consistent results post-November are for this hub page, which collates all the articles around that term.

Essentially, Mail Online has sent clear signals to Google, through (relatively) consistent internal linking, that this is the page it wants to rank for the term in question.

The hub page had existed before, but without the right linking strategy to promote it. Here we can seethe difference in performance before and after the Mail improved its linking strategy. 

The charts above (all charts are from PI Datametrics btw) shows performance up to January 2016, but we can also see how it performed in the last six months.

The chart below shows the Daily Mail’s Chelsea landing page performance for the term ‘Chelsea news’.

Since January, there have only been 26 URL changes, and a lot steadier performance. The visibility for this page has improved as a result by 33.28% and this URL is visible for 98.1% of the time.

The chart below shows the hub / landing page’s performance. It’s mainly consistent, but shows that for the odd day or two, the page wasn’t visible.

This landing page hasn’t beaten its previous ranking of number five on Google.

The reason? Inconsistent linking. For maximum effectiveness, all mentions of the term on new articles should be linked back to the hub page. If this is not implemented, then newer pages can end up competing with the hub page for rankings. This is why it was visible for 98.1%, not 100% of the period shown.

Here’s another example, for the search term ‘David Cameron’. As the British PM (though not for much longer) he obviously attracts a lot of searches and mentions in the news.

This is the Daily Mail domain view for ‘David Cameron’. As with ‘chelsea news’, performance is inconsistent until November 2015.

After November, the Mail is linking to a landing /hub page more consistently (maybe the result of a staff training day on SEO?) and it has led to steadier rankings.

Here’s one example. It’s easy enough to implement.

However, as was the case with the previous example term, inconsistent linking means that Mail Online isn’t getting the full benefit.

Here’s a recent article mentioning David Cameron. No internal links.

Here’s the view of the David Cameron landing page for the past (almost) 12 months.

There’s been an increased number of URL changes, as newer pages compete with the hub page,but the overall visibility of this URL has improved and the ranking has increased by two positions.

Thanks to the EU referendum, there has obviously been a lot more content produced about David Cameron recently. Had the Mail  linked consistently back to the landing page, this content would have been a lot more visible.

In summary: could do better

These examples show how effective the use of linking and hub pages can be, and demonstrate its value, especially for sites that produce a lot of content around the same themes.

They also demonstrate how quickly sites can achieve results with this strategy. However, consistent implementation is key for maximum effect.

That said, we can see how effective this strategy can be. When applied consistently across a range of popular terms, the result is higher and steadier rankings, putting the site in a position to attract more search traffic.

Graham Charlton is Editor in Chief at ClickZ Global.

https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/07/08/is-an-internal-linking-strategy-paying-off-for-mail-online/?ce_b4=*|EMAIL_B64|*&utm_source=Search+Engine+Watch&utm_campaign=89c1a56892-11_07_2016_NL&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e118661359-89c1a56892-17106041