Do you have a business blog?
Are you happy with the role it plays in boosting your content marketing results?
If not, you are probably not utilizing it the right way.
Content marketing is often described as a pull strategy as it helps you attract potential buyers to your business using customer-centric content as a magnet. But to attract and engage prospects with your blog content, you need to create and promote magnetic content.
What do I mean by “magnetic content,” you may ask?
Magnetic content focuses on what your ideal buyers are interested in and are actively searching for. Instead of creating content that only promotes your products, services, and offers, you should focus on making your blog relevant and helpful to your target audience.
In this article, I’ll discuss why you should make your blog the center point of all of your content marketing campaigns and how to do that.
Why Should You Make Your Blog a Content Marketing Magnet?
Blogs lay the foundation of the content marketing initiatives of most businesses. And there are reasons why they should.
Blogs are owned media. Everything you publish on your blog is yours. Other platforms may shut down, change their publishing rules, or cut you out of their circles, but your blog will always be there to pass on your brand’s messages.
Blogs offer
Blogs can fuel social media content needs. You can easily share your blog posts on social media without extra effort. You can also repurpose your blog content into impressive graphics and videos to boost social engagement.
Blogs support sales processes to some extent. You can use blog posts to explain how a particular product from your brand can add more value to the readers’ lives. You can also end educational blog posts by pitching a relevant service that the readers might be interested in.
It is easy to drive traffic to your landing pages from your blog posts by interlinking them (wherever relevant and not overly-promotional).
Blogs are indeed the best traffic generators. Use your blog effectively and see qualified traffic and revenue-generating leads coming in.
It’s high time to turn your blog into a lead magnet.
Here’s how to do that:
How to Turn Your Blog Into a Lead Magnet
All you need to do is build a solid, responsive blog, plan, create magnetic content, optimize it, distribute it in the right channels, and track your content marketing efforts.
1. Build a Strong Foundation for Your Blog
Before you start a blog and make it the center of your content marketing plan, you’ll need to lay a strong foundation for it.
Incorporate your blog into your self-hosted business website. If you don’t have one already, you should get your own domain name right away. This will help you ensure that your blog is fully-functional even if a third-party blogging platform like Blogger decides to shut down their services.
You can easily and quickly set up a self-hosted blog using WordPress.org as it offers:
- Hundreds of beautifully-designed templates
- Customization options
- Drag-and-drop builder
- Responsive themes
- Lots of useful plugins for
SEO , social sharing, Google Analytics integration, spam check, data backup, etc. - A well-planned content management system (CMS) to plan, create, schedule, and publish your blog content.
- Access to multiple users who may have different roles (admins, editors, etc.)
And the best part?
You can have all the resources you need to set up and get your blog running on WPBeginner. This resource site hosts lots of WordPress tutorials to help bloggers, small businesses, and non-techy website owners run their blogs effectively and even make money from them.
Pro tip: Don’t focus on perfecting the look and feel of your blog. Start blogging when you’re done with the basics and keep customizing and optimizing the design and elements over time.
2. Understand Who Your Ideal Buyers Are
To convert your blog into a content marketing magnet, you should get to know your target audience first.
- Who are your ideal buyers?
- Who are you writing for?
- What are they interested in reading?
- What information are they actively searching for?
- What channels do they use to look for educational content, products, and services?
Once you know who you are trying to attract and understand their content consumption behaviors, you’ll be able to create magnetic content to pull them to your blog.
Pro tip: Monitor the evolving audience demographics and content behaviors of your ideal buyers from time to time. This will help you stay relevant to the right audience.
3. Strategize and Create a Robust Content Marketing Plan
You need to figure out a lot of things to come up with a results-driven content marketing plan for your blog.
You should:
- Map out your blog’s content calendar for at least three months in advance.
- Search for topics that you want to cover and the products and services you want to promote.
- Plan blog posts specific to particular seasons, holidays, and other important events based on your industry and to cater to the everyday lives of your target audience.
- Decide on the types of content you are going to offer to your audience, such as listicles, how-to guides, infographics, ebooks, webinars, podcasts, expert roundups, etc.
- Plan to include articles related to ongoing events and conferences that you might participate in.
- Determine channels that you’ll be promoting your blog content on such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Medium.com, Quora, etc.
- Create a proper editorial calendar that defines which type of content will be published on which days.
- Plan the entire process of content ideation, creation, publishing, distribution, and up-gradation. Define the roles of all team members involved in the process (including writers, editors, designers,
SEO experts, social media professionals, tech specialists).
A well-documented content marketing plan can help you channelize all of your blogging efforts into generating qualified leads for your business. That’s how you can convert your blog into a lead magnet.
Pro tip: Re-evaluate your content marketing plan at regular intervals and optimize it to ensure that your blog attracts, engages, and converts a decent number of prospects.
4. Create Magnetic Content and Optimize It for Google
When it comes to blogging, most marketers focus on writing for the search engines to rank higher in the SERPs and get more exposure for their content. But they forget that Google focuses on improving user experience and favors content that solves their users’ problems.
To turn your blog into a lead magnet, you need to create content that addresses search intent. You should keep your blog content relevant, valuable, and helpful to your audience at all times.
It is also a good practice to write in a conversational tone. It’s more engaging and can help you rank for voice searches too.
In all, the key to successful content marketing is to find the perfect balance between content that engages users and content that Google understands and ranks for your target keywords.
Here are a few content creation and optimization tips for your blog:
- Conduct extensive keyword research and identify the ones your target audience is searching for.
- Find semantically-related side words that complement your keywords, which can include adjectives, variations, geolocation, etc.
- Analyze search intent. See which type of articles is ranking high for a particular keyword.
- Optimize your blog content like the top-ranking articles (but do it even better).
- Create the perfect title for
SEO and the readers. - Optimize your metadata for search engines and provide enough information to compel users to click on your blog post link.
- Create an outline of your blog post topic and the subtopics you want to cover. Define your content flow using H2s, H3s, H4s, and optimize them for your keyword and side words.
- Write an engaging introduction to draw readers’ attention and find ways to keep it till the end of your post.
- Avoid wordy sentences and paragraphs. Use bullet points and visual content (whenever possible).
- Do not push sales from the beginning. You can naturally fit in your product or service in a way that it seems to be useful for them.
- Include a few calls-to-action (CTAs) to direct readers to related articles and landing pages, increase page views, and reduce bounce rate. It can help you improve your
SEO as well. - Make it easier for users to share your content on social media. You can add and highlight Tweetable quotes in your content.
You need to follow this process for every blog post you publish. You can also hire professional writers on a freelance, part-time, or contract basis to scale your content marketing efforts.
Optimizing your heading tags for target keywords can help you make Google understand what your keyword is about. Adding relevant information, examples, statistics, and references from authoritative sites can help you provide value to the readers.
Use a combination of these to excel at content marketing.
Pro tip: Don’t focus on creating one blog post. Focus on your overall content marketing plan and publish a cluster of articles on different trending topics in your niche.
5. Track Content Marketing Results
You can’t improve the performance you don’t measure.
You should track how each of your blog posts is performing using analytics tools, and analyze what works for your target audience and what doesn’t.
- Which topics get the most traction, traffic, engagement?
- Which content types are bringing you better results in terms of page views, average time spent, bounce rate, and conversions?
- Does your audience like listicles, or do they look for educational “how-to” guides more often?
- Which target keywords are your blog posts ranking for?
- Which articles are getting shared the most on social media?
This practice can help you optimize your content marketing strategy and your blog’s editorial calendar for better results.
Pro tip: You can look for ways to monetize the top-ranking pages on your blog. You should also focus on updating the content of blog posts that aren’t bringing you decent results.
Ready to Convert Your Blog Into a Content Marketing Magnet?
A blog not only supports search results, lead generation, and sales processes but can also act as a content marketing magnet when appropriately used.
Are you ready to make the most of your blogging efforts?
Get to work now.
If you have any questions about channelizing your blogging efforts into generating leads, ask them in the comments below.
DepositPhotos – content marketing strategy
