Considering All the Angles
Content marketing has many angles. Working with a WordPress blog is a great way to buff up your online presence and ensure traffic links back to your primary site. But you’ll be wasting your time if you don’t go about it correctly. Now, an easy way around this is to work with a professional content agency. They stay current with varying trends, and for a fee can produce content that will come pre-optimized for maximum success.
That said, such a thing isn’t cheap, and you shouldn’t expect returns—even with the absolute best content agency—in less than six months. A year is a more likely and realistic expectation of ROI or Return On Investment. Now some businesses can afford to tread water at a marketing loss for a year. Many can’t. They must start out by designing their own content-optimized blogs.
WordPress is a very effective tool in this regard. So let’s start at the beginning. One of the first things you’ll want to do when you’re developing an online blog for a WordPress site is to design, as well as manage, a content creation strategy. This strategy needs to include proper keywords, keyword phrases, and anchor texts. Additionally, you want links which have been optimized properly.
A good rule of thumb is to produce about fifty different blog posts a month. These don’t have to be ubiquitous, but the longer the better in most cases. Try not to go beneath 500 words. Going over 1,000 words is good, but you can’t produce pure drivel. You need actionable content that has an evergreen quality to it which lends itself to being shared.
You’re Making an Online Library
If you’re keeping track, that’s 1.6 articles a day between 500 and 1,000 words on average. This translates to between 1,600 and 800 words a day. That may not seem like much, but at the end of a month that comes to between 24,800 words and 49,600 words. Basically, you’re writing a 100 to 200-page novella in terms of blogging monthly. In a year’s time, you’ve designed a veritable library which clients and prospects can use as a resource.
But you don’t want them to read your blogs before they are complete. Even a single typo can utterly misrepresent your brand. A misplaced letter can destroy a 124-year old institution. You’ll be writing a lot of letters down on your blog—see that they’re all in the right place and that your blog isn’t visible until the time is right! On WordPress, you can select an option that will “Discourage Search Engines From Indexing This Site” until the time is right.
Next, don’t use condensed links. You want a WordPress site that says something like “MyBusiness.com/This/Is/A/Good/Blog”, rather than something like: “MyBusiness.com/?p=[identifying number or letter combination]”. The latter is less visible to search engines, the former is easier for algorithms to categorize.
Now, you may use PPC (Pay Per Click), or SMO (Social Media Optimization) in addition to SEO; but when it comes to WordPress, your primary focus is likely to be getting a higher SEO ranking in search engines. Search Engine Optimization has been mentioned earlier in the form of keywords, but there’s more to it than that.
Length and Composition Considerations
In terms of SEO, you additionally want to take into account the length of your blog, as mentioned earlier, and you want to take into account the length of paragraphs. Also, look at the words you use. Unless you’re writing to an audience that is primarily made up of collegiate graduates. You want to write at about an eighth-grade level.
Also, add pictures and videos if you have them. Even if you don’t have them, there are free picture websites like Pixabay.com that you can use to acquire royalty-free images for your blog.
Something else you want to do is provide a plugin of the .xml sitemap variety; this makes it easier for Google to parse through the multiple blogs—50 or more—that you’ll be producing every month.
Another technical consideration for WordPress involves not using hyperlinks that produce a “ rel=“nofollow” ” notification. These may not be reliable, and so search engines may lower your SERP—Search Engine Results Page—ranking.
No More Spambots and Proper Linkage
Another strategy worth employing involves ensuring that you block spam comments on your content. You’ll get these over time if you’re not careful. Automated bots will copy-paste a message that at first glance seems legitimate. But upon close reading reveals itself to be contrived and irrelevant.
Not only will Google reduce your SEO ranking if you’ve got a lot of comments like this, but general readers are unlikely to read your content as well, as they’ll figure the article itself has as much spin as the automated ‘bot comments beneath it.
Another idea that can really help buff up your WordPress blog in terms of SEO is linkage which references older, relevant blog posts. On that note, guest posting is a good idea, too—provided you find the right guest-posting blog. You’re looking for one with an audience that is congruent to your own. Also, reposting relevant evergreen (that is: continuously applicable) content makes a lot of sense.
Consultation and Assistance
If this is beginning to sound a bit complicated, that’s because it is. Sometimes the time involved in getting content right for your online WordPress blog represents a high opportunity cost. As they say, time is money. If you’re spending 40 hours a week managing your burgeoning business, and thirty hours a week on SEO, that’s a 70-hour week. How long can you sustain such a thing?
Or look at it this way: if your time is worth $50 an hour, and you spend an hour changing your own oil, even if you only pay $20 for it, you are still out that $20 plus the $50 you lost through the improper use of your time. In such a scenario, any rapid lube solution that costs less than $70 when you factor out the time necessary will end up saving you money, because of the opportunities that are available to you which wouldn’t be had you done the job yourself.
Maintaining your WordPress blog is very similar. At Rocket Pilots you can work with a professional organization which provides an entire suite of online marketing materials, including consultation pertaining to the best solutions for your particular business—in fact, this is how the company gets an idea of your needs; as the site says, “Your free consultation is where we learn about your current marketing efforts, challenges, and digital marketing goals.”
When it comes to digital marketing online, there are a thousand different ways to make an impact—some of them are certainly better than others. If you work with the right agency, you can avoid those measures which won’t be useful, and ensure you maximize the relevant online marketing tools available to you.