Why Blogging is Still an Important Part of Any Marketing Strategy

To many, blogging is passé. It seems so yesterday. For those that have blogged, and stopped, and started again, you know what I mean. But blogging remains one of the most impressive ways to build content for your marketing platform and website.

So let’s start by rephrasing the headline:

Why Blogging (Content) is Still an Important (Crucial) Part of any Marketing Strategy (Platform)

or

Why Content is a Crucial Part of any Marketing Platform.

Here’s the fundamental reason why: Blogging adds content.

Websites with more content almost always outperform websites with less content.

And because Google and other search engines rank pages, not websites, you can build a content strategy around the keywords that you want to rank for.

Now, there’s a lot that goes into Google’s ultra-secret algorithm, but certain fundamentals such as keywords, long-tail keywords, authoritative links, website age and new content are pretty much bullet-proof. When Google’s famed Penguin revision came into play, it threw many shadier practices (such as link farms) into question, but not content. Building great content has always been key.

If you’re first getting started into blogging, here are 5 important factors to consider:

• Start with a list of 50-100 keywords that you want to rank for, and quickly build it from there
• Identify low competition keywords with high traffic for best results
• Build content around keywords and focus on a few selected keywords per blog. Don’t overstuff keywords.
• Consider keyword density in your blogs (generally around 10% in the first paragraph).
• The more consistently you blog, the more it trains Google and other search engines to crawl your site.

Traditional blogging against a keyword list is a great way to start.

But you can (and should) use YouTube as part of a video content strategy. When using YouTube for posts, make sure you create your own YouTube channel with custom graphics, and make sure you use your keywords in the title, description and tags (keywords) that best describe your video.

And give your blog or video blog other chances to be seen. Make sure you tweet it, post it on LinkedIn and share it on Facebook.

If you consistently blog and therefore add content, in any format, you will eventually see your web footprint grow, your sales leads increase, and your overall impact improve.

What are your thoughts on blogging?