Are you struggling to get your company blog to deliver real results? Perhaps the current approach to SEO isn’t getting you the traffic you need. Perhaps the blog doesn’t feel cohesive, as there are too many topics that don’t connect well. Perhaps the challenge is conversion rates, and getting visitors to buy the product once they actually come to the site. Fortunately, you can overcome these challenges by developing your blog management.
What Is Blog Management?
Blog managing is a comprehensive, long-term, “big picture” approach to creating blogs. It delivers more far more successful results than simply creating posts and hoping something catches on. It utilizes strategy, execution, and constant monitoring and re-assessment of the blog’s success. It’s a deliberate approach to developing the blog as a whole.
Why It Works
This approach assumes that you want your blog to be working optimally for a long time––but it’s also not the way many freelance content writers attack the problem.
Hit-or-Miss: The Content Writer Approach
When small business owners want to drive traffic to their websites, they often turn to hiring a content writer. That writer begins creating posts based on topics relevant to the industry. This can sometimes yield some good results, especially if the content writer can get one or two posts to rank high on Google’s rankings. Unfortunately, that success may be inconsistent, because a solo writer may be unaware of how these posts are doing, or why they are doing well.
Deliberate Results: The Well-Managed Blog
While the content writer focuses on individual posts, a blog managing company focuses on the success of the blog as a whole. This is the key difference, because one single post will rarely make or break a blog. However, a cohesive network of posts can slowly compound into an extremely effective tool for drawing customers like a magnet.
How It Works
Blog management is a fairly large umbrella term, and there is no “one size fits all” solution. Different blog companies are going to take different angles on how they might manage a blog, just like different advertising firms might come up with unique ad campaigns for the same company. Still, there are a few core components of any approach to managing a blog.
Strategy
During the strategic phase, a blog company is going to take a look at the business, industry, and geographic location of the company they are working with. They’ll conduct research on current topics in the industry, and see what people most want to read about now. A successful blog should have topics that will interest a potential reader by delivering a mix of trending topics and “evergreen” topics––substance, while also staying relevant.
Execution
Obviously, it’s not enough just to have a good plan. You need to be able to execute it and deliver posts. Managing the blog is much like tending a garden. Planting the seeds is not helpful if you forget to water them. When a blog manager is able to deliver both quality strategy and quality execution, you are going to see results.
Monitoring
The last piece of management is monitoring and refinement. During this stage, the blog manager checks to see how your posts are doing and what could be improved.
3 Reasons Why You Need Blog Management
Why does this matter to the average business owner? Does your blog really require such a thorough level of oversight? If your company is relatively small, do these posts actually need so much attention?
In a word: yes.
A well-built blog is a key element of attracting customers in the internet era. It’s important enough that 55% of marketers report that blogging is their top priority when it comes to inbound marketing. When you have a blog that’s well-managed from top to bottom, you have powerful advantages that you don’t want to miss.
#1 – Well-Managed Blogs Make You Stand Out From the Competition
There may have been a time when companies could generate traffic from blogs simply by posting content on a topic that was related to their product. Those days are past, and the amount of content on the web is so great that simple volume is not enough. More refined, targeted techniques are necessary.
Consider: there are currently over 150 million blogs on the internet, and that number is growing every day. There’s a new blog post added every half-second. Of all the websites on the internet, a quarter of them are blogs.
Writing a blog and expecting it to stand out amongst the hundreds or even thousands of similar blogs is not going to be an effective strategy in the current landscape. Blog managers know this. They work around this challenge by developing your blog in a way that gets it seen by your customer base.
Targeted questions, long-tail keywords, and location-specific posts are just a few tactics that can help connect you to paying customers. When you work with a good blog manager, you will wind up with a blog that is able to reach your key demographic––your ideal customer––and increase your conversion rates in the process. When done properly, this targeted approach to marketing can drive a 14.6% conversion rate.
Of course, the key phrase here is “when done properly,” which leads us to our next point.
#2 – Well-Managed Blogs Do the Job You Expect of Them
We’ve all watched great sports teams fall apart in the postseason. How many times have we seen a situation that while they looked great on paper, they didn’t play as well as one would expect? A plan is only as good as its execution, and the next piece of managing a blog hinges on being able to deliver on the initial strategy.
So what does that mean?
Essentially, it means that after the SEO research and topic research has been done, you need to know that your content will also be delivered on time, and at a high quality.
When you hire someone to manage your blog, it’s crucial that you look at their ability to generate the content that they promise. This means having a system in place that meets your needs. If you need content in a particular niche topic, you may need someone who has writers who specialize in that area. If you have a large amount of content that needs to be written quickly, then you need a blog managing service that has enough writers to generate it by the deadline (even the best writers can only do so much).
#3 – Well-Managed Blogs Keep Improving
Lastly, quality blog managers will constantly be looking for ways to make your blog more effective. Even when you have a smart strategy and effective execution, you need that x-factor that will take you to the next level. This is why blog creators need to identify trending topics and also the blogging styles that are currently the most successful.
Recently, long-form blogs have started to become more popular. Readers know that the content value of a longer post is usually higher. As a result, they have started to move beyond 500-word posts, and are gravitating more toward these information-rich posts in the 1500-word to 2000-word range.
Of course, it is much better to have short-form blog posts than to have nothing. But longer posts translate to more leads. A key part of blog managing is adapting to these trends and changes in blogging in general, and making sure that these trends are represented in the content they create for you.
On top of that, blog managers will look to see how your pages are doing. They can monitor the success of certain keywords, and see which are generating the most visits for your site. They can work to improve the areas that aren’t working, but more importantly, to capitalize on the topics that are getting you the most clicks.
By refining their approach to creating your content, they can help your page rise to the top in certain key search lists. By consistently updating their tactics, blog managers will be able to provide a level of results that outpace what freelance or solo authors are capable of.
The Complete Package: Blog Management With SteadyContent
If you are looking to take your blog to the next level, then maybe it’s time to move from “having a blog written” to “having it managed.”
SteadyContent is a proven, successful content, and blog creation company that has been generating impactful, quality posts since 2010. During that time, we’ve created posts for hundreds of small businesses in a wide variety of industries and markets.
We strategize by working closely with our clients, researching the SEO in their industry, and finding the types of content that most resonate with their readers. We deliver results by mobilizing a writer pool of 550 individual content writers, who produce millions of words of posts on a monthly basis. We continually evolve and improve with our core staff of dedicated developers, experts, and editors. When you order content with us, you get more than a handful of randomly selected posts and topics. You get an approach to blog-building that pays off over the long haul.
Interested in finding out more? If you’d like to give our service a try, we have a special risk-free trial package for our newest customers. Get in touch with us today, and experience the benefits of blog management, with SteadyContent!
