Blogging is Critical to Becoming a Successful Inbound Marketer. Blogging Boosts Inbound ROI.

What is a blog?

A business blog is a collection of articles that provide helpful, valuable, educational, and remarkable content to your target audience.  By providing this value, blogs can easily and effectively draw prospects to your website.  A blog is an integral way to attract more traffic.  This traffic will eventually turn strangers into customers.   “79% of marketers with a company blog reported inbound ROI for 2013” (HubSpot).  Each blog post that you write gets published and indexed, and the more of these pages the more opportunities for people to find you.  Every published blog post is an opportunity for someone to find you.  

I heard a great metaphor to explain the concept of generating leads and gaining traffic and it involved a bakery.  Imagine a bakery.  If 50 people walk into the bakery, this represents traffic.  If 5 out of these 50 likely customers buy a pastry, this means they were converted from a prospect to a customer.  This is an example of conversion.  I would compare blog posts to the smells the bakery generates.  I used to work at a bakery that was right next to a forest preserve.  All day long I would get runners and bikers that had been led to the bakery just because the smell of the baked goods had led them there.  

So we must remember to think about SEO when blogging as well.  Blog with buyer personas in mind, but don’t forget about optimizing for search!

SEO BEST PRACTICES FOR BLOGGING

• Keywords in the title (55 characters):  This will help potential visitors find these posts.
• Meta description (140 characters): Meta description are HTML attributes that provide concise explanations of the contents of web pages.
• Image file name and Alt tags:  these were designed for blind internet users, but Google bot can read these tags to determine what purpose the images serve and help optimize also.  Search engines cannot read pictures, so this helps them to do so.  
• Links and anchor text
• Focus on mobile optimization:  Google has begun to de-prioritize websites that aren't mobile optimized.

So we will keep SEO in mind while blogging, but we will also need to write compelling titles.  A title is the first chance to attracting someone to read your blog. You want it to sound interesting for the user to click and find their way to your blog.  There are 6 types of blog titles you can write:  actionable, keyword-conscious, brief, clear, definitive, or intriguing.  Blog titles can be a mixture of a few of these types of blog titles.  Make sure each blog post is only about one topic.  If you feel that your post covers more than one topic you may separate them and publish them as two separate blog posts.  

The final tip to becoming a successful inbound marketer by using blogging would be to blog consistently and frequently.  If you would like to get found online very frequently, you must publish just as frequently.  “Consistent blogging boosts Inbound ROI.”

We discussed alt tags, adding meta descriptions to each individual post, and adding an email subscription "gadget" in class this week.  Here are the links to where I learned how to do these tasks: 
How to add alt tags to Blogger images – Alt attributes for image SEO   
The "follow by email" gadget: an easy way to add an email subscription to your blog
Add Meta Description In Every Post In Blogger