Dave ChaffeyA blog can range from a personal online diary, a regular series of articles on a company site a frequently updated news articles on a publisher.
It can be compiled by one person, but in larger businesses there will be often be an editor with an internal writers or external guest authors.
A marketing blog is directly aimed at achieving business goals for brand awareness, lead generation, sales and brand preference. It will often be in integrated into the site, for example, accessed through a subfolder, https://www.domain.com/blog, but is also sometimes located on a sub-domain, e.g. https://blog.domain.com or a separate domain.
A blog has different blog articles or posts, often shortened to ‘blogs’, that are usually placed in different categories. They can also be tagged to show their relation to more specific topics.
Typically, comments can be added to each blog posting to help create interactivity and feedback. Although this is less common today than when blogs first rose to prominence. This is mainly due to problems with controlling blog comment spam.
Thinking about the Smart Insights blog, you can see we certainly update regularly which has given these benefits:
- Organic traffic: More than 80% of our c ½ million visits each month are from organic traffic which we don’t have any media costs for. The vast majority of these visits are direct to blog article\
- Content to engage through other channels: Blog content can be shared through social media and newsletter. It can then be amplified, particularly by influencers.
- External links for SEO: Other sites will link to quality content to support SEO. For example, we have several articles around statistics related to search and social media where each article can generate over 10,000 visits per month. Other bloggers link back to these as a reference source
- Internal links for SEO: A blog gives you an opportunity to link back to product pages to drive visitor interest in categories and products and also help through internal linking
- Lead generation: We’re able to use the blog to fuel our inbound marketing, adding more than 5,000 new contacts or leads each month through recommending free subscriber content
- Brand thought leadership: The blog helps position us as ‘thought leaders’ based on the topics about innovation we cover
