Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
There’s a new kid on the block in the inbound marketing space. While practically every marketer worth their salt knows about inbound marketing, the new concept I’d like to introduce is inbound blogging and its multifaceted techniques.
A critical aspect of every business’s marketing toolkit, inbound blogging is a cost-effective and powerful way to attract your target audience without being annoying, intrusive or noisy — and without spending as much as you would on paid ads or other outbound marketing methods.
Below, I dive head-first into what inbound blogging is, explain its importance and share my techniques, plus a case study of success. Let’s get started.
Related: Inbound Marketing — What is it and Why Does it Matter?
What is inbound blogging?
Inbound blogging is a strategy that aims to drive traffic to your website through high-quality, value-adding blog posts organically. Through this approach, your audience comes to your business for answers and is more likely to convert into paying customers. Ultimately, it’s a way of attracting rather than interrupting prospects while offering exceptional value. That’s why inbound blogging should not be underestimated.
Ever since the term “inbound marketing” was coined, every experienced marketer has focused on the steps of attracting, nurturing, converting, engaging, closing and delighting leads.
While there may be numerous variations of these steps, the idea is the same: to leverage pull techniques that earn your business attention and not pay for it through traditional or digital “outbound marketing” techniques.
Why is this important? The answer is quite simple yet hard to swallow: Today’s audiences are becoming blind to advertising. The more you try to push a product or service on them, the less likely they are to convert.
That’s where inbound blogging shines.
The importance of inbound blogging for your content strategy
When you’re using pull as opposed to push techniques, your business is much more likely to attract and retain customers. Also, through inbound blogging, your business can establish itself as a thought leader in your industry, earning you trust, credibility and much-coveted leads. This positioning is not only great for your brand, it’s also essential for your bottom line.
Using inbound blogging as a vital part of your content strategy helps in the following ways:
-
Give your audiences a more authentic way of reaching you and foster trust in your business.
-
By using channels your target audience uses, you have a higher chance of connecting with them.
-
Empower your customers by offering them a tailored experience that gives them greater control over their interactions with your business.
-
Generate qualified contacts and leads through inbound blogging efforts.
-
You’ll own the channels for your own organic and direct customer acquisition and a database of qualified contacts.
-
Grow the reach of and community around your brand and boost brand loyalty.
-
Position your business as an expert in your sector.
-
Increase the quality and quantity of traffic to your website exponentially while improving your search engine optimization (SEO) to improve your search engine rankings.
-
Drive more conversions with lower advertising and customer acquisition costs.
-
Track results and key performance indicators more easily and modify blogs through a continuous feedback loop that gives you a chance to learn and evolve.
-
Increase revenue and profitability and enjoy long-term value for your business.
Related: 3 Inbound Marketing Myths You Can’t Afford to Overlook
Inbound blogging techniques to revive your content strategy
If you are ready to enjoy all these results, there are several inbound blogging techniques that I use as part of my process to help clients get to the top.
1. Keyword research and analysis
There is keyword research that uses keywords without high value or a great chance of ranking, and there is keyword research that identifies topics that resonate with your target audience. Ideally, the factors I consider when doing keyword research for companies’ blogs are:
Here, I’d like to add that analyzing the search intent and studying the results is an exceptionally powerful way to get the process started. When we choose a primary keyword to target for a blog post, we look at whether it’s informational, transactional, navigational, etc. We also consider the type of content that is already ranking on the search engine results page (SERP) and analyze its style and format — be it sales pages, tutorials, guides, videos, etc.
2. Creating the content brief
When we create the content brief for writing, we carefully study various aspects of the future blog article. This involves evaluating the ideal article length and which secondary keywords should be included in the content. We then create an outline for the article based on an analysis of other articles that already rank on the topic for the same keyword. In these outlines, we make sure to avoid unnecessary or fluff content, add information that’s valuable to the user’s search intent and generate a unique angle to make the article stand out.
3. Content creation
Once the keyword research and outline are completed, it’s time to craft your blog article. The ideal blog post will always balance out aspects such as copy length, the brand’s tone of voice and ideal buyer persona profiles.
What it should not be is superficial. Instead, it should be shareable, solve problems, be educational and informative, and also offer high levels of value and expertise to build trust in the brand.
4. SEO-optimized content
The article has been written, but it is still not yet ready to be published. We now turn to some cutting-edge SEO tools to help optimize the content additionally. Some of the tools that are a part of our daily staple include NeuronWriter, WriterZen, and SurferSEO.
A tool such as NeuronWriter, for example, allows us to pull top-ranking articles for our keyword, extract the main keywords used by competitors and insert them naturally into our content. It also enables us to optimize our meta titles and descriptions, not only by featuring the primary keyword but also by ensuring we remain within the pixel limits. All this boosts the overall optimization score and our chances of ranking high for the keyword.
5. Internal linking
Internal links are links to other articles on your website. They create the necessary link “flows and loops” within your blog articles and can enhance the speed of your rankings. However, what most people do is add internal links from new content to their old content. Meanwhile, they forget to add internal links from existing articles to the newly-published content.
6. Off-page SEO
As part of off-page SEO, link building is the next step to a successful inbound blogging strategy. Backlinks are links to your article, with an accurate anchor text, published on other websites’ articles. These websites must have high authority and domain rating.
Backlinks matter because they boost your link equity. In link building, there are certain white-hat strategies that Google loves. Several of these backlink-building strategies are:
Earning backlinks may be a slow and steady process, but it is highly worthwhile in the end because they help improve your position on search engine results pages. By building quality links, you are signaling to Google that your website is credible and trustworthy. And your audience will appreciate this as you climb up the rankings.
7. Content audits
The final step is to constantly monitor and analyze the performance of your blog articles. What I normally do is go back to the same article within six to 12 months and analyze its performance.
If it is not ranking well, we try to understand the reasons why. We explore whether it contains unnecessary information or needs additional talking points. If it has a poor structure, we may not have answered the search intent. Additionally, the article may be too short or too long, and we need to revise that.
Only once we’ve fully understood the causes of the low rankings and optimized the article to as great an extent as possible compared to our competitors, we move on to building backlinks (if necessary, and if we notice there are too few of these links).
All in all, it’s a long-term game, but the results are highly worth it.
My team and I implemented the exact techniques for our client Brosix. And based on this inbound blogging strategy, we increased the organic traffic for this client from 19,727 to 86,428 — signaling 348% growth in one year.
Тhere you have it — the impressive results of inbound blogging in a nutshell. It’s not about a haphazard approach. It is a detailed and holistic strategy that involves in-depth work, analysis and continuous improvements. I encourage you to start implementing these inbound blogging techniques in your own content strategy to experience the true potential of this approach.
