Blogs are an essential element of the digital marketing mix as each post drives traffic to your website. It’s relatively easy to set a blog up and build a following but it takes time to ensure it receives regular traffic.

Successful blogs deliver quality content on a regular basis, which means they’re crawled more often by Google with the opportunity to generate potential leads higher. We take a look at what you can do to maximise your visibility and drive more traffic to your blog.

Write useful content your target audience will share

Your target audience can make a huge difference to the popularity of your posts. So do consider what kind of content is relevant to them and how you can make your posts more shareable. Evergreen content like “how to” guides, tips or education based posts are often popular choices although they’re not for everyone.

Content should be a key part of any digital marketing strategy. Having an editorial plan in place will result in greater consistency, whether posts are focused on a specific theme, topic or style for example. Google Analytics is, of course, essential to finding out where your visitors are from, their demographic profile and what kind of content is most popular among other things.

Make your content SEO friendly

There are a number of ways you can ensure your blog is SEO friendly starting with how it’s structured, what headings you use and which signal words are included. You should always optimise the length of your posts so they’re over 300 words and make sure you link to previous content where relevant.

Your featured keyword, which will help people find you, should appear in your post heading, title, URL, content and meta description. Consider what terms and phrases your target audience might type into Google when looking for the information they require. This will help you identify the best keywords to use. Research can also be conducted using tools like the Adwords Keyword Planner.

Reference your own content regularly

Readers appreciate blog posts with useful links so you should reference relevant content where appropriate, whether it’s a post of your own or someone else’s.  Links to relevant content are well received if they’re in context and provide value. They should never link to top-level web pages and any anchor text must be natural.

It might be worth creating a list of internal content for the purpose of blogging. If you haven’t already catalogued your own site’s content, consider an SEO audit or a website audit where a crawl will identify all your assets.

Let us know if you need a full website crawl, we can offer this as a standalone service or as part of a free website audit including performance, security, SEO and mobile-friendliness

Use social media to share posts and boost traffic

Leveraging your most effective social media channels is a fundamental way to boost traffic to your blog. Curating others’ content is great for encouraging people to share your content and interact. As well as the major social networking sites, consider social community sites such as StumbleUpon, Reddit or Pinterest as well. You will need to add value to these sites to get the return but the same applies to any social network. You get out what you put in.

Find influencers and join the conversation

Do you know who your influencers are? If not, you can easily create a Twitter list for example with the most relevant so you can start to build relationships. Joining relevant communities and Twitter chats is a great way to find new topics for discussion too. You should also research which hashtags are most appropriate to your industry. Including relevant @mentions in social media posts will also help increase your reach and visibility.

These are just a few ideas to get you thinking about how you can drive traffic to your blog. For further information, contact our Digital Marketing Manager, Paul Mackenzie Ross, at Woking’s Design Agency Clever Marketing on 020 3146 4341.

When you own a business, it’s common to have your fingers in many pies, to be part of its every function and process.You do the bookkeeping. You’re in charge of sales. You pioneer the product development. But when your business starts to grow, you might find yourself a little… stretched. It might no longer be possible to take on every single job within your business. When you’ve built it from the ground up, it can be tough to let go.

You do the bookkeeping.You’re in charge of sales. You pioneer the product development. But when your business starts to grow, you might find yourself a little… stretched. It might no longer be possible to take on every single job within your business. When you’ve built it from the ground up, it can be tough to let go.

You’re in charge of sales.You pioneer the product development. But when your business starts to grow, you might find yourself a little… stretched. It might no longer be possible to take on every single job within your business. When you’ve built it from the ground up, it can be tough to let go.

You pioneer the product development.But when your business starts to grow, you might find yourself a little… stretched. It might no longer be possible to take on every single job within your business. When you’ve built it from the ground up, it can be tough to let go.

But when your business starts to grow, you might find yourself a little… stretched. It might no longer be possible to take on every single job within your business. When you’ve built it from the ground up, it can be tough to let go.

But it’s so, so worth it when you do. Not only do you suddenly have more time to dedicate to the growth side of your business rather than the day-to-day management, you suddenly get a better perspective, both in terms of the bigger picture and your competition.

To get to this point, you might consider taking on some more employees to help you out. However, full-time employees can be expensive to pay salaries to, not to mention the time and money-consuming qualities of recruitment, pensions and paid leave. You might not feel your business needs a full-time employee just yet. In any one of these scenarios, a better option might be to outsource.

What is outsourcing?

When you outsource a business function, such as website design, accounting or SEO, you give the job to a freelancer or external company. The work is taken on by someone who is not employed directly by your company. You can either pay that party a monthly retainer or pay them by the work or particular projects they complete for you. The internet has meant that it’s more and more common to outsource things digitally.

What can I outsource?

Anything. Well, most things. It’s really down to how much you feel comfortable sharing with an external third party. A lot of freelancers or companies may have contracts drawn up, or you can have them sign your NDA (non-disclosure agreement) forbidding them to pass on any confidential information if you do share it. Here are just a few ideas of things you might choose to outsource:

• Website design and build
• Print design
• Print collateral
• Copywriting
• SEO audit and management
• PPC management

What are the advantages?

You can bring the best experts out there into your company only when you want them, and pay them only for the time you need them. This can save you a lot of money in yearly salaries and other employee-associated benefits. If you’re not keen on one person’s work, you simply don’t have to work with them again, without the need to dismiss them.

Outsourced parties can also bring a wealth of experience with them, and they are likely to be highly skilled and specialised in one particular field. They can offer fresh perspective and ideas as they’re a little bit further removed from the day to day running of your business.

On the other side of the coin, you might choose to outsource the dull, repetitive tasks that are crucial to successful management of your company but don’t really warrant a full-time job role. Things like one-off data entry projects can easily be picked up by agencies or freelancers.

What’s the problem?

The main issue with outsourcing lies with choosing your freelancer or partner business carefully. If you’re trusting them with company information or an important project, you need to make sure they’re reliable and can deliver. Read plenty of prior testimonials and speak to them about working together on a trial basis. Most good freelancers will expect this and welcome it.

In addition, it’s easy to tell if an employee isn’t pulling their weight, as you see them in the office every day. You need to have good, open and constant communication with your chosen company or freelancer to make sure there’s no disconnects or misunderstandings which could cause a project to derail. Be clear about deadlines and establish where everyone stands from the start, as it isn’t always so clear without the hierarchical structure of an office.

Where do I start?

If you think it’s time to start outsourcing, get in touch!

As a full-service graphics and design agency in Surrey, Clever Marketing are the perfect partner to outsource your print, web design or digital marketing needs. Just call 020 3146 4341 to see what we can do for you.