One major factor homeowners cite for buying instead of renting is the chance to build equity in their property. When you have a blog, every post you publish builds equity in your brand, eventually turning it into a resource with more value than the sum of its posts. With careful nurturing and excellent content, your blog isn’t just a bunch of dated news items about the sale you ran last year; it’s an ongoing source of traffic and a constant bump up the search engine results pages.
Ideally, visitors to your blog will have reason to leaf through older articles. That doesn’t happen when your blog is nothing more than a place for you to announce your latest sale or push a new product. Your blog absolutely should contain time-sensitive information; there’s no better way to spark interest for your regular readers than with an integrated marketing campaign that includes a prominent blog post. However, those posts should be interspersed with evergreen content, posts that will remain valuable and encourage readers to revisit them as they age.
To see an example of this principle at work, consider a clothing store that features almost daily sales and blogs about them regularly versus one that runs only occasional sales and otherwise uses its blog for style tips, do-and-don’t lists and other fashionista-friendly articles two or three times a week. At first glance, the daily blog might seem to have the advantage; fresh content draws traffic, and daily blogging seems like the right move.
However, a visitor to the blog isn’t interested in yesterday’s sales, much less last month’s. These time-sensitive posts don’t encourage readers to linger, so the blog builds no equity. Readers glance at it once to see today’s news and set it aside. Meanwhile, the other blog builds a little more brand interest and relevance with every new article published to it. Readers discover sales, but they also find out how to tie a scarf, what to wear with hot pink and whether gladiator sandals will be in this spring. If the content’s really sharp, visitors soon start to see it as a destination site.
Another advantage to using your blog for valuable content as well as company news is that you form an integrated web rather than a stack of posts. That article about scarves ties in – no pun intended – with previous articles about accessories, winter wear and cashmere. It links with static pages on the company’s site. WordPress categories and keywords are built around this concept of forming a network of interrelated posts rather than a sequential arrangement.
One reason not all businesses build equity with their blogs is that dashing off a few dozen words about a sale is easy. The same quick, time-sensitive statement can go out to the blog, on Twitter and on the company’s Facebook page. That’s an excellent strategy for getting news to customers quickly, but it doesn’t leave a lasting impression. Hiring a content provider removes the pressure of coming up with the valuable content that builds equity and puts your brand in professional hands.
It’s a given that every company needs a blog these days, but not all blogs are doing their owners a service. Why continue to make rent payments with short, time-sensitive posts when you could build equity with custom content that will have your readers browsing for minutes instead of seconds?
© Business Content, Inc. 2013 All Rights Reserved.
