CONTENT MERKETING

START A CORPORATE BLOG & GIVE YOUR KNOWLEDGE AWAY FOR FREE

Rule #1. To do marketing, you need to have something to market. This is especially true when it comes to content. Creating a corporate blog provides the following benefits:

  • It gives you something to talk about and share
  • It allows you to transparently share your knowledge and begin the process of establishing you (and by association your company) as a leader in your space
  • It keeps your site fresh. This is an important trust factor as it tells people that you’re actively working and “out there”.
  • It extends your reach (other people will share your content if it’s good)
  • It provides a base for organic search marketing

Read this post to get some inspiration for types of blog post that you can add to your calendar.

WordPress is the most popular blog platform and you will find a detailed guide to getting started quick at http://onenightsite.com/ (note that some of the content is a bit out of date – but the steps are still relevant).

NOOB INSIGHT: Blog from the start – Don’t wait until you have a launched product to start your blog. Start it on day one and try to write about things your future customers will find beneficial.

14. SUBMIT CONTENT TO SOCIAL HUBS

Getting traffic when you’re starting out is often the biggest challenge new companies face. To get a traffic boost, write a great blog post and submit it to social content sites such as Digg, Reddit, Sphinn, SERPd and Mixx. The community then votes for your post if they like it. If you can get this right it’ll be a source of valuable traffic.

Each site has a different audience and naturally likes different types of content. The best way to learn is to see what types of content are being consistently voted up and try to shape your own ideas to fit the desired format. This could be using the right structure (such as a list post – x ways to blah blah) or including an infographic (discussed below).

NOOB INSIGHT: Don’t submit crap for the sake of it as it won’t get any votes and you risk being booted from the system for flooding it selfishly, and don’t only submit your own content. Try to become a useful and generous member of the community by submitting other great content you find.

15. BOOKMARK YOUR CONTENT ON DELICIOUS

Delicious is a social bookmarking site that lets people keep their bookmarks in a consolidated online location (as opposed to being stored in the web browser on your computer). Bloggers, researchers, PR marketers (and general users) use Delicious as a research tool to uncover great content.

You should get in the habit of submitting all of your content to Delicious and tagging it with relevant keywords so that people searching for content will find you. Social proof plays a role here once again, as the number of times your content has been bookmarked is displayed (giving people a reason to believe it’s quality content once the number climbs). For this reason you’ll want to set up your blog so that others are prompted to bookmark your content (which helps them remember you and bumps up your bookmark count too).

Here’s an example of searching for the tag “landingpages” on Delicious:

Here you see search results broken down by bookmarks I’ve made myself and the highest ranked results from the rest of the community (along with a count showing how many people have done it in total). It also shows what tags have been used to classify your content, which you can use to explore further or just gain some insight into how your readers are describing you.

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