Blog Marketing

Project description
Assignment: identify a blog of your choise and critique it in about 500 words. In the critique, describes how your chosen blog is tuned to target audiences, focused on attraction and backed by consistent quality.

Information to complete the assignment: Blogs are essentially websites that are regularly updated and displayed in reverse-chronological order (e.g. most recent updates are displayed first). The content is broken down into posts and published simultaneously to many sites (syndicated) using an RSS feed that alerts subscribers when new content is posted. Each post hosts a comment section where readers are encouraged to provide feedback or engage in a discussion.

As a predominantly top-funnel asset, they provide marketers with great opportunities to showcase their expertise and build trust one small chunk at a time. And as blogging expert, Jeff Bullas, states blogging gives the introvert a voice. Limited effort and personality strain is required to get on this stage. Any reader advice or helpful tips can be offered in the language of your own voice but in an unintimidating format resembling that of a Word document.
For many firms, a corporate blog is the centerpiece of their content marketing strategy. Blogs can be readily shared on almost any social platform. And they often serve as an aggregator of all other content in the form of downloads, links, embeds and recordings. This not only provides a central repository for all of your media elements, it contributes to search results. But more than an aggregator of searchable content, blogs also function as the center of conversation as well. Because of the audience feedback and ability to host new topics, blogs provide an excellent opportunity to trigger discussion while gauging audience sentiment.
An examination of the most popular types of blogs will reveal the following twelve archetypes. Since its early beginnings, the how-to’s continue to dominate the archetypes especially if they offer detailed information not easy to find elsewhere. These blogs normally average around 1,500 words and incorporate short video clips to reinforce visual learning. These how-to blogs could be more readily scheduled than other blog types as its tips are not tied to external events. Others like industry news, ratings and reports often require a significant time lapse between releases.
Among the key benefits of blogs over alternative communications methods are the following:
1. Easy of Publishing and Updating. Blogs are hosted on very user friendly platforms, like WordPress, Blogger and many other free sites, so that almost anyone can setup and maintain their posts. Even the process for embedding, linking and moderating comments has reached the point where little, if any, web master support is required. And in contrast to that required for editing video content, updating blog posts is not more difficult than crafting an email.
2. Easily Scannable. Unlike podcasts, webinars and videos, a quick scan of a blog post can let a viewer know if the content is relevant. And by skimming text, parts of the blog could be skipped. This is more challenging in audio and video where rewinds and bouncing across content leads to more time consumed in reaching relevant points.
3. Easily Found. Blogs can be syndicated through blog directory services and subscribed through RSS. This makes blog content more readily discovered while saving viewers time in search since they are alerted of any updates. The ability to optimize blog text around key phrases makes it highly discoverable by search engines as well. Google’s Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird algorithms place a premium on continually refreshed content.
4. Easily Linked. Blogs are more oriented to the topics of interest to your audience, thereby attracting far more inbound links to its postings than can be expected for a more self-serving website landing page. And with the ability to easily cross-link postings, bloggers can interconnect a series of related posts. This further boosts the search engine performance.
5. Top-of-Funnel. Blogs are a great way to establish connection with target audiences early in their buying stage. Because they are less resource intensive than mid-funnel content, they can be more regularly published.
6. Owned Content. With the exception of blogs hosted on LinkedIn, Tumblr and other social networking platforms, most are hosted on domains owned by the blogger. This limits the risk of unexpected and undesired changes made by platform suppliers. A good practice when establishing your blog domain is to ensure you have your name in the URL and not that of the software platform supplier (e.g., blog.yourcompany.com vs. blog.wordpress.com). Otherwise you are merely building traffic for the platform provider.
7. Conversation with Targets. Unlike a web landing page that hosts comments, blogs are designed to facilitate conversations with its audiences. In the process, this often helps build communities as responders feel connected to each other. It also provides greater opportunities for the blogger to identify, monitor and connect with target audiences.
8. Word of Mouth Spread. More than news articles and subscribed content, blogs can have the most viral impact on a content marketing strategy. Messages are highly portable, making them ideal for sharing across any device and across any platform. And with word-of-mouth being twice as effective as traditional marketing in terms of more lasting results and new customer acquisitions, blogs offer a great opportunity to improve the bottom line.[i]
9. Trail of Trustworthiness. In his book, Youtility, Jay Baer discusses the use of bricks and feathers in content planning.[ii] Blogs serve as feathers, or a lighter content that allows readers to check you out before digesting a 45 minute webinar.
Small businesses, in particular, benefit from blogging as the cost and time consumed to host a blog is far less than most content marketing alternatives. And since each post serves as a continually refreshed website page, websites with blogs have 434% more indexed pages in which to attract the attention of search engines. Other notable statistics especially encouraging to small businesses are the following:[iii]
€¢ Small businesses with blogs generate 126% more leads.
€¢ 81% of US consumers trust advice from blogs.
€¢ 37% of marketers believe blogs are the most important type of content marketing.
But with an estimated 400 million blogs registered globally, the challenge to small businesses in particular is syndicating, socially sharing and advertising their blog posts in an ever growing noisy blogosphere. The following Blog Series describes what it takes to ensure your blogs are tuned to target audiences, focused on attraction and backed by consistent quality.
ASSIGNMENT REQUIREMENTS:
Read the blog series found at:

http://bit.ly/1qJrLfn

http://bit.ly/1m4ZiOl

http://bit.ly/1oAaX7k

Then identify a blog of your choise and critique it in about 500 words. In the critique, describes how your chosen blog is tuned to target audiences, focused on attraction and backed by consistent quality.