Looking for additional insight? Check out our checklist: A 15-Point Checklist to Evaluate Your B2B Technical Website

I attended the Inbound 2012 conference by HubSpot, and one of my favorite sessions was on blogging. The session was called Getting 100K followers to your Blog. As an author to this blog, they had my full attention – who doesn’t want 100,000 people reading their blog?

We’ve already established that increased, quality traffic fuels growth in leads, and that blogs are great traffic-generators. So how do you increase traffic to your site through your blog?

In reality, just like anything with marketing, there is no silver bullet. It takes consistent investment of time, creativity, and ideas to develop a successful blog and reach an increasing percentage of your target audience. Here are four ways that you can get more blog traffic from quality readers:

This graph shows the relationship between the number of blog posts TREW Marketing published in 2012 and our website traffic, with a strong increase in traffic over time.

1. Understand The Potential of Your Blog

Is your blog just another communications channel in your marketing efforts? Or do you have a defined marketing strategy just for it? For those who answer “yes”, and “no”, to these two questions, consider a mind-shift to think about your blog as much bigger. In the Inbound session, they used the analogy of galaxies. For example, when you first start a business, the business is the center of your galaxy, and all of your marketing efforts (e.g., email marketing, PR, website, and SEO) are the planets that revolve around and support your business.

A good marketing strategy includes a variety of efforts to support your business. Image: HubSpot.

In this same way, think of your blog as the center of its own galaxy, using all of the same “planets” as supporting planets.

The same marketing activities that support your business can be used to promote your blog. Image: HubSpot.

By making this shift, you see how your blog can be bigger than you imagined. If you start to think of your blog as such an asset, you’ll be able to grow and scale it. Case in point – the TREW Marketing Spotlight blog now brings in 49% of our monthly traffic.

2. Get Discovered

In the session, the HubSpot bloggers talked about creating “big hits”. That is, creating fresh content fueled by new ideas and data that make your content compelling for potential readers to ultimately find your blog. Here are some ideas to create big hits.

• Publish original data and findings. Create your own surveys and case studies and showcase this original data on your blog. If you created it, the content is sure to be new and fresh for your readers.

Create your own surveys to get firsthand data that you can share through your blog.

• Give your take on relevant topics. If there’s news topic that’s already popular in your industry, write a blog post about it so that when readers are searching for the topic, they come across your site. For example, if a prominent engineering school was granted $10M for its robotics program and your company makes robotic medical devices, talk about how you think that university could spend its grant to further medical advancements. Or, if you’re a software integrator and one of the platforms you integrate has a new release, write a post talking about how customers can use the features in that new version to better their businesses. This tactic is called newsjacking, capitalizing on the popularity of a topic to boost your sales and marketing success. Be sure to use the news topic in your headline for the best search results.
• Be one of the first to talk about a new trend. Is there a new idea in the marketplace? A new product? A process once used in another space that could be applied to your industry? Share your thoughts and best practices on the topic first with a blog post.
• Be interesting and use catchy headlines. It seems like a no-brainer, but it’s important to write about topics that would interest your potential customers. Think outside the box. For example, your customers may be manufacturing test and measurement equipment, but they’re also hiring experts to use that equipment, so consider, for example, writing a blog post about hiring the best engineer for the types of applications your customers are creating. And, a quick, eye-catching headline will draw a reader in to read the “must-see” material, such as “XYZ”.
• Continually promote your post. Is your blog auto-synced to your social media channels? While this is a great time saving tool, if you’re not careful, it can also be a trap. Twelve percent of HubSpot’s blog traffic comes from social media, but this doesn’t happen with just one auto-published post, they continually share their blog posts on both big and small social networks. Your audiences may not see your blog post the first time you promote it in your e-newsletter or social media, so make a note to promote it again via social media a few weeks later. Or, if you wrote in the past about a topic that becomes a buzz topic in the future, promote that post in social media and point people back to your thoughts on the topic.
• Use images and graphics in your posts. You can’t deny it – we humans love pictures. Pictures power social media. Visual content is revolutionizing social media and how web content is consumed. As an example, on average, links on Facebook with photos generate 4 times more shares than links without photos. Therefore, to grow the reach and sharing of your posts, use compelling images that showcase the points you’re making.

TREW Marketing’s 2013 B2B Marketing Infographic is informative and engaging for readers

3. Convert Readers to Subscribers and Keep Them Coming Back

If you can convert your readers to subscribers, you’re creating a base of potential customers who will likely keep coming back to your site, and share your blog with others.

To earn subscribers, make a subscription option available on your blog page above the fold so that it’s easily noticeable. In addition, consider sending an email to your contacts, encouraging them to subscribe to the blog.

To keep your readers and subscribers engaged, we recommend you blog at least once a month, and more frequently if possible. The more frequently you blog, the more often you’re giving those subscribers a reminder to come back to your site, and share your information with others. 

4. Empower Subscribers be Your Advocates

Speaking of sharing, how can you make it as easy as possible for your blog subscribers to interact with and pass on your quality content? The easiest way is to use social sharing buttons to for readers to share your content via LinkedIn, Twitter, email, and other outlets.

Include social sharing icons and a subscription form on your blog, above the fold.

In addition, seek guest blogging opportunities, and offer your expertise to other bloggers. If you post on their blogs, there’s a good chance those readers will come back to see the rest of your ideas on your site. And, have guest bloggers write content for you. It’s likely their loyal readers will come to your site to see what their familiar author penned, and then become engaged (and hopefully even subscribe!) to your content.

There’s no silver bullet to growing blog traffic, but by making your blog the center of its own galaxy, careful planning and idea-brainstorming, you’ll be able to attract the readers most relevant to your business, and convert them to subscribers and advocates.

Looking for additional insight? Check out our checklist: A 15-Point Checklist to Evaluate Your B2B Technical Website

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Content and SEO Fuel Inbound Marketing Results

4 Ways Pictures Power SEO and Social Media

Did you know that 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text? (HubSpot, 2012)

You can’t deny it – we love pictures. Visual content is revolutionizing social media and how web content is consumed. Facebook recently reported that their users upload an average of 300 millions photos everyday, and the rise of photo sharing social media sites like Pinterest – now the third largest social networking site, behind Facebook and Twitter, and Instagram – bought by Facebook for $1 billion this year, tell us that there’s real power behind pictures.

So what does this mean for B2B marketing? It means that pictures are a viable content opportunity for your marketing mix of web pages, white papers, videos, webinars, case studies, and blog posts.

Read on to learn 4 quick ways to optimize and effectively integrate photos and visuals in your B2B marketing activities.

1. Name the file appropriately. Pick a related keyword for your web content and use this in your file name. Many users will name their image as “image1” or “logo.png” or “screen-shot 2012-10-22.” Is this you? Search engines, like Google, rely on textual cues to understand what the image is about. So if you leave your image file name like the examples above, Google will not know what to do with them.

2. Add alt text. Use keywords in the “alt tag” text box when you upload an image to your blog or website. By adding descriptive alt tag text, search engines can better identify what the image is about and how it relates to your content.

The image below shows how a blog, dynamometermanufacturers.com, found an image of TREW client, Wineman Technology’s dynamometer system via Google search and used it for a blog post. The blog attributed the image to Wineman Technology by linking to winemantech.com, which generated web traffic that spent more than 11½ minutes on-site and viewed an average of 6 pages per session. This cyclical effect of posting and tagging images helps increase your backlinks, gain third-party credibility, and generate highly engaged web visitors.

3. Add context for the image in the page text. In addition to naming the file correctly and adding keyword rich alt text, Google also recommends you add text on the page where the image is located. Referencing the image in the page text ensures that Google understood your alt text correctly. See tip #2 above for an example of referencing an image in your page text.

4. Use rich visual snippets for Facebook posts. Using visual content for Facebook helps increase fan engagement with your page. The more engagement you receive on your page, the more positively Facebook’s EdgeRank Algorithm will favor your posts, thus expanding your reach.

TREW Marketing tracked our Facebook page content metrics to learn what content generates the most engagement. The results are very telling of engaging visual content on Facebook. Updates with photos receive 2X more total impressions versus posts with just a link. Additionally, our photos receive 12X more engaged users (people who like or comment on the image) over the link posts.

So here’s what you can do. By snapping a quick shot of a chart or image used in a blog post, you can upload it as an individual image and link to the blog post. This makes your Facebook post stand out more in the newsfeed and in the timeline. Below is an example of this, from Rand Fishkin’s presentation at Inbound 2012.

Contact us today to learn more about TREW Marketing social media and search engine optimization programs.

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Content and SEO Fuel Inbound Marketing Results

Lasting SEO Results, Part 1: How PR Affects SEO

Inbound marketing strategies are fueling growth in conversions and leads for the savvy companies who adopt and implement them as part of their integrated marketing plan. However, there are holdouts in B2B marketing who still aren’t convinced that inbound marketing tactics are worth the effort. So let’s look at how two key inbound marketing activities, content and SEO, make a big impact in driving marketing results.

First let’s define inbound marketing. Wikipedia defines it as the concept of earning the attention of prospects, making yourself easily found and drawing customers to your website by producing content customers value.

1. Content — it’s probably our favorite word at TREW marketing and with good reason. Having quality content on your website is a staple for inbound marketing. And it’s not always for selling or marketing, it’s also for educating and/or establishing thought leadership.

One piece of well-written, well-placed content can have multiple uses. You can blog about it, use it as a call-to-action on social media sites, and repackage it in the form of a video, webinar, or white paper.  Just think about how that one piece of content used in multiple ways and channels can drive your search marketing efforts.

2. Search — Search engine optimization (SEO) is all about tweaking your website to make it more search-engine friendly and earning inbound links through stellar content. As our culture becomes increasingly digital, search is now one of the largest channels for demand generation. Ranking in top positions on generic search terms has a large impact on your brand and gains in customer mind-share vs. your competitors. How do content and search impact each other and how can you leverage them to drive your results?

Let’s consider blogging. One of the main benefits of business blogging is the rewards it delivers to SEO.  Having your SEO and blogging strategy aligned is key to ensuring that you are optimizing blog content with keywords for which your business is seeking to rank high in natural search. If you are pushing to rank for a specific keyword, your blogging strategy should support that. For example, let’s say you are a software developer; by creating content about best practices for software development, the best tools to use when developing software, etc. and working in using specific keywords about your software, you will optimize that blog post and earn higher SEO results.

3. Measurement. Now that you’ve created content, and are optimizing SEO to your advantage, how do you measure results? The most effective way to make sure you’re getting the most from your inbound marketing efforts is to regularly analyze data across all of your marketing channels so you can see how your integrated campaigns perform, and make adjustments to your marketing programs on an ongoing basis. Key inbound marketing metrics include web visits, time on site, leads, and sales conversions.

Need help building your inbound marketing strategy, or managing your integrated marketing efforts? Contact TREW Marketing or explore our services, including:

• Marketing audit
• Virtual marketing manager
• Search engine marketing
• Content development

Don’t be a hold-out — join the inbound marketing revolution. You’ll not only see an increase in awareness and conversions, but you’ll build a cohesive customer experience that will lead to long-term loyalty, and bottom-line results.

There are many benefits to blogging. From a database marketing perspective, blogging provides a streamlined platform for you to reach a targeted audience – those visiting your website – about relevant topics such as common technical challenges and technology trends. This content can build credibility and interest in your company and products. A lesser-known fact, however, is that you can use your blog as an email marketing tool by pushing it directly to subscribers’ email.

Here are 3 tips to improve the reach and quality of your blog:

1. The Feedburner widget
2. Creating quality content
3. Reaching your target audience

1. The Feedburner widget – You can use tools such as Feedburner, a free service that provides email subscriptions to your readers. Simply create a Feedburner account and then follow their instructions to set up a “subscribe to posts via email” widget for your blog (see top right of page for example). Readers who subscribe will receive each new blog post that you publish as an email, allowing them to engage with your company via their inbox and giving them the opportunity with each new post to click through to your site.

2. Creating quality content – A blog shouldn’t be a sales pitch. It should be a way to show your customers and prospects that you are knowledgeable, you understand the challenges and solutions of specific applications, and you provide effective results.

3. Reaching your target audience – Your blog should be hosted on your site as a culmination of your company’s content. As you establish the foundational marketing outlined in this white paper, and you expand into areas such as social media, your blog can also be a hub where other online outreach vehicles (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and so on) point. This not only drives traffic to your blog, but also gets prospects to your website where they can interact with other information including your products, case studies, and white papers.

For more helpful tips on direct marketing, you can download our free guide, Smart Marketing for Engineers.

The five-word phrase has come up in marketing discussions in every company across America: “We should start a blog.”

Marketers smile. A new vehicle to reach our audience. Sounds great.

PR professionals cheer. A low-cost way to specifically explain our business! Let’s do it!

Executives and engineers cringe. Waste precious time on blog posts, only to get lost in the information overload that is the Internet? No, thank you.

The last thing that TREW Marketing will advocate for is wasted time, but, one of the first things that TREW Marketing will advocate for is a clearly communicated message to your target audience.

Creating Quality Content

Blogging allows for a streamlined platform where companies can talk to a targeted audience about industry challenges and trends in order to advocate for their company and products.

For example, we can use content that we have put together over time on the TREW Spotlight blog to show you best practices in print advertising, email marketing, style guides, pay-per-click advertising, and public relations. This content doesn’t talk directly about TREW products and services; instead, our blog provides best practices and talks about industry challenges, solutions and trends. A blog shouldn’t be a sales pitch, it should be a way to show your customers and prospective customers that you know what you’re talking about, that you understand the challenges and solutions of the industry, and that you provide measureable results.

Reaching Your Target Audience

Your blog should be hosted on your site as a culmination of your company’s content. The blog is a hub where other online outreach vehicles (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) point, so that when someone engages with your tweet or Facebook update, they are directed to your blog, where they can find more information than what can be expressed in 140 characters, and can interact with the rest of your site, including your products, case studies, whitepapers, etc.

The TREW Spotlight blog.

A lesser-known fact about blogs is that you can use your blog to get your content directly to your audience through their email, like a basic e-Newsletter with a simple format, using a service like Feedburner. Feedburner is a free service that provides email subscriptions to your readers. Simply create a Feedburner account, and then follow the instructions to setup a “subscribe to posts via email” widget for your blog.

The Feedburner widget.

Readers who subscribe will now receive each new blog post that you publish via email, allowing them to engage with your company via their inbox, and giving them the opportunity with each new post/email to click through to your site. If you’re interested in Feedburner, you can read more about how to use the service.

If you’ve visited the Google search page today, you probably noticed some big changes. Google has updated their look with a new left-hand side panel which offers search tools to help customize and refine results. more…

December is here and will quickly fly by.  If you have marketing budget dollars to spend before the year’s end, you are feeling the pressure.  We’ve put together a list of quick, effective marketing investments for you to consider.

1.  Invest in Google Adwords.  Not only are Adwords ideal for reaching a very specific audience, and easy to measure; you can have them live within 24 hours using your corporate credit card.  Be sure to follow best practices — see our Spotlight blog post on this topic for more details.

2.  Reach out to your database. Send an end-of-year email to your customers and prospects.  Be sure the message is not too sales-oriented…offer valuable information such as tech tips and industry news.  Or simply say thank you for their business.  Have not been keeping up with your database?  Use December to update your records, determine ways to segment your target audiences, and perhaps begin plans for a 2010 quarterly newsletter.

3.  Start a blog. December is a great time to set up the back-end mechanics of your new company blog (which would launch in 2010).  These include creating a WordPress account and feeding that account into your website.  Your blog should match the look and feel of your website, which likely means a small amount of creative work.

4.  Refresh content on your website. Conduct a head-to-toe sweep of your website, updating messages and improving your writing (active voice, tighten phrases, etc.).  While looking through your site, uncover lead acquisition opportunities, such as existing white papers and presentations, and post them behind short forms for web visitors to complete.  TREW Marketing writers/editors can be a great resource for this work.

5.  Thank your staff. Has your team gone above and beyond to meet their goals this year?  Be sure they are recognized for their efforts.  This can range from the very simple, such as bringing in bagels and coffee for a surprise treat, to gift certificates or a formal holiday/appreciation event.  An appreciated team will be a motivated team for you in 2010.

6. Gather 2010 marketing plan feedback from an expert. This is an ideal time to bring in a TREW Marketing consultant as a sounding board for your 2010 plans.  During the one or two-day session, we review goals, major marketing campaigns, core messages, and investment by media.  We uncover ways to strengthen your messages, integrate innovative marketing tactics, and measure impact and success.

Contact TREW Marketing and put your December and 2010 marketing plans in motion.

Recently, I was asked to present to a group of United Way volunteers about the basics of social media (SM) and advise them how best to take advantage of these new tools to further their mission and achieve their goals. So I thought I’d share a snapshot of my presentation here.

If you are actively using SM tools and have integrated them into your overall marketing strategy and plan, then this will likely be too basic for you. However, we have found that many are still struggling with what exactly all these tools are and how they can best be used to help achieve business and marketing goals. If you are in this latter group, maybe the information here will be helpful.

To start, one of the biggest challenges with SM is just trying to figure out what functionality these tools provide and how to effectively use them. As you can see from this image, there are hundreds, if not thousands, to choose from.

Three of the most common SM tools that I will focus on here are Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. In this post, I’ll talk about Facebook and Twitter. In the second, I’ll provide an additional Twitter case study, talk about LinkedIn, and then summarize with our recommendations on how best to take advantage of these tools to meet your goals.

So, let’s start with Facebook . Facebook is a free-access social networking application used by over 200 million users globally. In order to connect with people on Facebook, you have to “friend” them (yes, the noun just became averb) and they have to “accept” you as a friend. Once you are connected, you can begin networking: see their activity, who else they’re friends with, comment back on their updates, etc. Some cool features of Facebook include the ability to posts websites, images, and video right on your page. This is an important point and distinction from an environment such as email or even other SM environments, where you have to click on a link and go to another site to view it. On Facebook, it serves it all up right there on your page.

Another cool feature of Facebook is the ability to “become a fan” of pages. They could be company pages, cause-oriented campaigns, Hollywood stars, etc. This is not only fun for users to “become a fan” of groups they are associated with, care about, and/or want to promote to their friends, but they can be a very effective way for organizations and businesses to create an online community where they can keep users, donors, and constituents up to date on the happenings of the group. You can efficiently feed content to your Facebook fan page by linking it with your organizations’ blog, so blog posts automatically feed into your Facebook page.

Similar to fan pages, nonrprofits can create Cause pages that users can join. With Cause pages, interested users can join and thereby encourage their friends to learn more and join as well. While these Cause pages have not shown success in actually raising dollars for nonprofits, they can quickly and efficiently raise awareness and visibility of the work of the organization in a cost-effective manner. There are many more features of Facebook, and new applications introduced daily. We strongly recommend a serious evaluation of Facebook for your department, product, individual brand, or company/organization for these and many other benefits.

Secondly, let’s look at Twitter, which is a free-access microblogging SM networking tool. The essence of Twitter is short 140 character “tweets” very similar to the updates in Facebook. You can use tools such as TweetSync to have your tweets automatically feed into your Facebook page. Unlike Facebook, where you can only talk to “friends” who’ve accepted you, you can “follow” anyone on Twitter whether they reciprocate or not – ie, you can follow others even if they don’t follow you. Also unlike Facebook, Twitter provides great search ability and can be a very effective tool for quick research. As a simple example, a few weeks ago, I was trying to compress a video and having trouble. I sent a tweet out to ask if anyone had advice, and using TweetSync, had it also appear on my Facebook page. Literally within minutes, I had two responses – one on Facebook from a personal friend and one on Twitter from someone I had never met. I had my problem solved almost immediately.

There are many, many tips to effectively using Twitter and many perceived “rules” that you don’t necessarily need to follow. While I won’t go into all them here, a critical practice to using Twitter successfully is setting expectations for what your followers can expect from the specific account. For example, Dell Outlet uses their Twitter account exclusively for sharing deals on Dell equipment. That’s it. They don’t follow others, they don’t mix up the content of their tweets to be funny jokes, personal stories, and business information. They share great deals, and that’s it. And if the number of followers is any indication, it’s working. When I checked today, they had 583,428 followers. And how many do they follow, you may ask? 23 users.

Twitter is a very fast-growing, popular SM tool. In fact, Twitter saw 1M new users in December 2009 alone, and as of this presentation in early May, had a total of 4.3 M users according to mashable.com, including many stars, politicians, and some of the most well-known brands. We see huge potential for businesses and individuals to leverage Twitter for their business and marketing goals.

Look for the next post to cover another Twitter case study, a brief overview of LinkedIn, and a wrap up with our recommendations for how best to leverage SM tools to meet your business objectives.