Blogging is well established in the online/virtual space, but in my observation comparatively few Aussie businesses are successfully harnessing blogs as a traffic generation and customer engagement tool.
Some of our business clients have been blogging for over 2 years now and I have to say that I’m pleasantly surprised by the quantity of search engine traffic (particularly “long tail” traffic) that is now being generated (typically 25 – 40% of search engine traffic will come via a blog within 3-6 months.)
At this level of traffic, the strategy starts to become financially viable within a short timeframe. The biggest roadblock for most business owners is that they don’t have the time (or the writing skills) to keep up regular posting.
The solution is to either outsource the whole blog creation and marketing process, or to outsource just the content creation and manage the posting process yourself.
The strategy is pretty simple:
- Set up a blog on your own domain (WordPress or Movable Type are recommended).
- Get a bunch of relevant articles written (contractors can be sourced cheaply on Elance or Guru)
- Load the articles into your blog and schedule them to be published at a pre-set date. This means you can set it up once and the articles “publish themselves”.
- Make sure your blog is accessible from your site and to search engines.
- Organic traffic will start to trickle in and grow the longer you run the strategy.
Yes, there are much more “high-concept” blogging strategies that normally require the business owner to “drive” the content creation. My experience is that most business owners don’t have the time (or don’t prioritise this activity) for long enough to see results. For this reason, a “set and forget” strategy can be more practical.
Here are a few examples of sites using this strategy. The articles may not always be great writing, but they do get the job done of attracting long tail traffic and converting it into site visits and enquiries.