Blogging for business has tremendous potential to grow your lead generation efforts. Content+ has found that blogs increase your indexed pages by 434% and inbound links by 97% on average.
Unfortunately, too many business blogs are inconsistent, poorly planned, and wander into irrelevance. All that potential for business growth is wasted because of a lack of discipline, execution, and strategy.
An editorial calendar is a must-have for anyone who’s serious about content marketing. But simply having that blogging calendar isn’t enough to squeeze all the value out of your content production efforts. Instead, your editorial calendar should include content promotion efforts as well.
Integrate Content Production and Promotion On Your Editorial Calendar
Clearly define your campaigns and blogging schedule on your editorial calendar.
- Campaigns: Who are you targeting, what is your goal, what content offers are required, when does it start, and when does it end?
- Blogging Schedule: How many times per week will you blog, what time of day will blogs be published, how long and in what format will each post be, and what is the sequential order for publishing?
But to get the most out of your hard work, you need to go beyond simply the campaign outline and blogging schedule. You need to also schedule social media messages and tie those to your events, content offers, and individual posts.
Use a social media publishing tool like Buffer or Hootsuite to bulk schedule messages on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus, etc. Customize each message for the platform you’re publishing on and the audience on that network.
For example: your tweets need to be limited to 140 characters, including your URL. It’s not a good move to repeat that exact message on Google+ because you should be using images and better descriptions, plus Google Plus has a whole different way of handling links.
Make sure every message doesn’t look identical and understand the shelf life on each platform. It’s okay to tweet the same blog post out three times in a week, but that doesn’t fly so well on Facebook, LinkedIn, or your Google+ page.
Measure Your Results and Improve Your Process
Don’t assume that you got it right the first time. I guarantee you can get better.
Define your key performance indicators (KPI’s – just a fancy way of saying “what really matters and how can we quantify that?”), measure accurately, and schedule time to review those numbers, adjust, and improve.
Ultimately, content marketing isn’t rocket science. It takes thought, discipline, practice, and a willingness to put in more thought, discipline, and practice to keep improving.