Your website tells visitors who you are and where to find you, but an effective blog strategy could also bring in new clients. Adding articles to your site (whether you call it a blog strategy or content marketing) is a great way to attract regular readers as well as search engine traffic. If all goes well, those readers may eventually become clients.
Content marketing can be overwhelming at first, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. The strategy works best if you manage your expectations and focus on high-quality content.
Benefits of a blog strategy
Publishing original content allows you to share your message with readers interested in your products and services. If you’re successful online, you may not need to rely so much on traditional marketing methods like direct mail or networking. You might not even need referrals from your top clients or centers of influence.
By executing an effective blog strategy, visitors who come to your site will have the chance to get to know you. You’ll have an opportunity to demonstrate your expertise and help people before they ever meet you. Some visitors will come to know, like, and trust you (and others, who may not be your ideal clients, will avoid wasting your time).
If you already have a website, additional costs could be negligible, so any growth goes to the bottom line. Still, it takes time to write, and you might pay to outsource certain tasks.
Set realistic expectations
Unfortunately, getting readers is harder than the hype might lead you to believe. A blog strategy can be quite successful, but success comes slowly for most. If you approach your blog strategy with the right expectations, you won’t burn out or give up before your blog strategy efforts bear fruit.
Plan to wait at least six months before you get organic traffic to your website. Once you start getting traffic, only a small percentage of readers will become clients. However, that might eventually be enough to drive the growth you’re looking for. It can take several years for a blog strategy to completely support your practice.
Write great content
The best way to get traffic to your site (especially organic search traffic) is to provide valuable information to readers. Answer their questions and help them solve problems. The search engines will notice (by recording visitor activity), and readers might even share your content on social networks.
In the early days of the internet, it was easy to rank for competitive terms with “thin” content and shady tactics. Now, you need to be one of the best resources on the internet or focus on niche topics to get search traffic. It’s that simple (but it’s not easy).
Blog posts and articles should focus on your clients’ needs — not on you (provide your firm information on an “About Us” or similar page). To see examples of what works online, search for the topics you intend to cover and read through the first few results. This is your competition. Notice how the top results cover the topic (for example, what tone do they use, are they helpful, and do they assume the reader already knows about the topic?). Pay attention to how easy it is to navigate the top sites and whether or not they’re pleasing to the eye.
Not sure what to write about? Start with a few articles that answer the most common questions you get from clients.
If you need help, hire a ghostwriter to write articles in the way you would write them, or have an editor polish up your writing before publishing.
Be consistent
Readers and search engines will reward you for making regular updates. You don’t have to write frequently, but it’s best to be consistent — whether you publish daily, weekly, or monthly. Figure out what you’re realistically capable of, and make it a routine. Nobody wants to see a “Blog” section that hasn’t been updated in six months.
A content calendar can help you stay consistent. Create a plan for the coming months (or the entire year), and you’ll always know which articles or blog posts to write next. If possible, write articles several months before they’re “due” so that you can publish your best work and avoid stressful deadlines.
Optimize for search (within reason)
Search engines can drive readers to your site, but you’ll need to provide an excellent reader experience. Great content will do more than anything else to bring in search traffic. Beyond that, you can use additional strategies to improve search results.
Find out what readers are searching for using tools like Google’s Keyword Planner. If you’ve got content related to those searches, make sure the relevant search terms appear on your pages (in the content itself, the page title and subheads, and the page’s metadata). But don’t overdo it — search engines will penalize you if you try to game the system. Several other characteristics can affect your rank in search results:
- Other sites linking to your site can signal that you provide high-quality content (especially if the links come from high-quality sites).
- A speedy, malware-free site offers a better user experience. Frustrated users leave quickly.
- When people stay on your site, search engines assume that you’ve satisfied the user’s need.
- When people click the back button and choose a different search result, your rankings suffer.
- Duplicate content that you’ve copied from other sites signals a low-quality site.
- A site structure that makes it easy for search engines to find and scan your content. Most website products handle this automatically, and things only go wrong if you (or a software plugin) change your site’s settings.
Be mindful of search engine optimization (SEO) as you build your site and write articles, but don’t obsess over it. You’ll get more mileage out of well-crafted content than you will out of SEO tactics, and search engines can (and do) change their preferences at any time.
Your site vs. other sites
It’s crucial to have your own website and publish blog posts or articles on that site. If you’re going to write great content that appeals to readers and search engines, you want to reap the long-term benefits of your work. Plus, your own domain name looks more professional than a free blogging platform. Free platforms can be helpful for testing the waters and deciding how much to tackle on your own, but you’ll want to use your own domain as soon as possible.
That said, writing articles for other sites can help you grow your audience and build search engine authority. If you go that route, share your work with high-quality sites that have a large following. Well-established influencers might allow you to write a guest post, and LinkedIn allows you to publish articles and make contacts in your area of interest.
Fortunately, you don’t have to pick one or the other: it’s possible (and wise) to write original content for your own site and publish posts on other sites.
Compliance concerns
Articles that you publish on your site or another site may be considered advertising or communications with the public. That means you’ll need to follow the rules set by government and industry regulators. If you’re part of a broker-dealer or RIA, your firm may have additional rules that are even more restrictive.
Find out what you can and can’t do before you spend too much time blogging. Broker-dealers have evolved in recent years, and you can probably publish anything on your website that you would put in a newsletter. However, you may need to have articles reviewed before you post, and you’ll need to include specific disclosures.
As with any other form of marketing, you’ll need to avoid misleading statements and keep records of articles you publish.
Unfortunately, compliance hurdles can make it difficult to provide content to other sites — which is one more reason to run your own (compliance-approved) website.
