Content Marketing

Why Your Next Hire Needs to Be a Blog Writer

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Blog Writer
Image courtesy of mrsdkrebs

You’ve heard that “content is king”.

And you’ve also heard that it’s the backbone of online marketing.

But you still don’t blog. There are usually three reasons:

  1. You don’t have time.
  2. Your industry is “boring”
  3. Your customers won’t read or don’t care

All of these are just excuses. And they’re all incorrect. (As in, not true or valid statements).

I’m going to prove it to you in this post.

And I’m going to show you why your next hire should be a blog writer.

Here goes.

Why Content is the Cornerstone of Online Marketing

Online marketing begins and ends with content marketing.

Because before you can sell anything, you need to get attention and trust.

Blogging gives you all kinds of benefits. It raises your visibility in your industry, develops an audience by connecting with their interests, and builds trust.

But it’s hard to measure those.

So let’s focus on empirical metrics to satisfy all skeptics: traffic and customers.

If you don’t have traffic to your website, then you’re never going to get a lead or sale.

And contrary to popular belief, traffic isn’t going to fall out of the sky. You actually need to take action to drive traffic back to your site.

One of the easiest (but expensive) ways to drive traffic is advertising.

So let’s see how that looks.

Driving Traffic with Google AdWords

Major keyphrases are worth a lot.

For example, if you wanted to run a Google AdWords campaign on a popular term like “online gambling”, then you need to be prepared to spend at least $50 per click (which is probably a low estimate).

So to get 10 visitors to your site, you need to spend $500.

Now how much does it cost to acquire one customer? Let’s assume you have a high conversion rate of 10%.

That means you need to spend $5,000 upfront to acquire one customer.

But for your business to break-even, you need hundreds of customers (not just one). So you would need to spend thousands each month to bring in enough customers to make a profit.

Do you really have the funds to acquire hundreds of customers with advertising?

Not likely.

The organic search listings are even more valuable, because about 70% of people click here first (before clicking your AdWords listings).

But the obvious problem is that it’s extremely competitive. You don’t have a chance at ranking organically on the first page unless you’re (1) big, (2) well funded, (3) use “black-hat” tactics.

That’s okay though. You don’t need these.

You can blog.

The Power of Long-Tail Search Traffic

One of the greatest benefits of having a blog is because you can get long-tail SEO traffic.

Here’s what this strategy has done for me on a relatively new site.

In the past month, organic search was the largest source of traffic for my website (accounting for about 1,200 visits and 37% of my site’s total traffic).

But the largest keyphrase that sent me traffic only accounted for 1.3% of my overall. That means I’m getting search traffic from a ton of long tail keyphrases that aren’t difficult to pick up, and aren’t subject to danger from Google’s algorithm updates.

That sounds great. Now how do you do that?

SEO for blogs revolves around two major things:

  1. Optimizing each post for one relevant long-tail keyphrase
  2. Getting links back to these posts with specific anchor text.

And that’s it.

Use a long tail strategy when you’re doing keyword research. Then take your keyphrase and do on-page optimization on your blog.

Now you’ve got your own site under control. It’s time to get some links and traffic.

The Power of Referral Traffic

Before you’re getting consistent traffic from SEO, you need to rely on Referral Traffic. (Luckily, it’s also a main way to build links back to your site.)

There are two major ways to get Referral Traffic:

  1. Getting links (or recommendations) from other sites
  2. Getting social media referrals, shares, and links

The problem is that you won’t start getting a lot of traffic through social media (#2), until you start getting links from other sites (#1).

Most people have this backwards, and end up wasting a lot of time.

So you need to figure out how to get featured on other sites, and get in front of their audiences. That’s why the new social media definition is business development, not community management.

One of best way to get backlinks from high-quality, relevant sites with the specific anchor text you want, is by submitting content (blog posts).

Here’s where that writer comes in.

Look for large independent blogs, community and news/media sites. You’ll find that a lot of them accept guest submissions… because they’re always in need of good content.

You provide the media site with high-quality content, and in return you can strategically place links back to your own site.

These links will boost your SEO. But if the site is large and targeted, then they’ll also get you traffic.

In 6 – 12 months, you can use a content strategy like this and easily get 5,000 monthly visits.

That sounds a lot better than 100 visits from AdWords.

Conclusion

Now let’s revisit our example.

Using Google AdWords, you would have to spend $5,000 in a competitive niche to acquire 1 customer.

You could also take that same amount, hire a writer after conducting a job trial, and use a content strategy.

I’ll cut you a deal and lower the conversion rate, because this traffic won’t convert as well as your AdWords customers. So let’s use a low conversion rate of 2%.

That will still net you 100 new customers each month (vs. 1 from AdWords).

However there’s a problem.

This strategy won’t work if your content sucks.

So don’t expect great content from shitty writers you pay $5 per article. You’re just wasting your time.

Because good writers know how to:

  1. Write quickly and efficiently to publish several posts per week
  2. Write more “broadly” to focus on what your product/service does for other people
  3. And make it appealing for your specific audience

Invest in a great writer or content producer who understands online marketing, and they will be one of your best sources of getting more leads and customers.

Get long-term ROI.

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