Blog posts are the first step on the conversion path as they drive prospects towards your landing pages and forms. They are also an excellent opportunity for an organisation to show thought leadership and provide unique industry insights. But, how do you attract people to your blog feed in the first place? Unless prospects have subscribed to your blog, you’ll be unable to directly notify them when your latest post is published.

So now what?

Well, don’t fret. Blogs are a fantastic demand generation tool and fit comfy at the top of the sales funnel. This means that they are most effective when targeting prospects in the research stage of their purchase. As the prospects in question may not be able to name their exact issue at this point, they are most likely using search engines to just research their pain points. And this is when blogs become highly valuable in your lead generation activity.

Firstly, get to know your prospects, leads, and customers. Find out what their concerns, issues and pain points are. Ideally, identify the business-related keywords and phrases what they are most likely to type into a search engine or did so during the early stages of their buying process. This information can be gathered by speaking to current customers, reviewing the popularity of certain phrases on Google Adwords, or analysing the source data on your marketing automation software.

Once you have this information you can begin to create engaging blog posts that focus on these keywords and phrases. Using SEO best practice it’ll be possible to ensure your blog post ranks highly on the search engine results pages for this keyword.

Now, when one of your prospects uses a search engine to research their business issues and pain points, they are likely to see one of your blog posts which directly references their query.

It’s important to remember that blog posts are not e-books. They are not meant to be 1000s of words long. They are about providing top-level insight on a particular subject and ultimately driving the reader to convert to a lead by downloading a larger piece of content.

Be sure to only focus on one keyword or phrase per blog post, as otherwise, search engines will become confused and not rank the post as highly relevant to the prospect’s search phrase. It’s also worth noting that if you are starting a new blog, each post should ideally be 1000-1500 words long. This gives the search engines a good amount of content to digest and understand, so they can rank future blog posts more accurately.

Once the blog is more established you can reduce this to between 600-1000 words, but never less than 300. If a blog post has less than 300 words, the likelihood is that the search engines won’t even bother ranking it for their results pages.

Although SEO is an excellent way to ensure your blog posts are found on the search engine results page, there are other ways to ensure the maximum number of people see your latest post. Start by sharing the title and a snippet of text on all of your social media channels.

Only write a short teaser post on social media and link the reader to your full blog post. Also, when sending a lead generation email to your database, add a link to the blog at the bottom. All of these methods will help to increase your subscription rate and build interest in your blog.

A blog is an excellent tool, but only as part of a multi-channel marketing campaign, so to ensure you generate the best results from your activity. To learn more aboutB2B sales, comment if you have any queries.

How to Improve Your Social Media Channels For Maximum Online Visibility

We all know the importance of social media optimization. So it’s time to get down to nerve nails in it and start implementing some tactics and top practices. Let’s get started with one social media platform stages.

How To Optimize For Facebook

Facebook page is already filled out with your profile, there is always some area for improvement, having a good cover photo than just smacking something. Your cover image should be 851 pixels wide by 315 pixels tall, choose an image that clearly communicates what your blog or brand is all about.

If you want budding followers to give their email address or to visit your promotion which is currently running, consider swapping out your cover photo to promote it. Facebook offers many different- different call-to-action button options which include -

• Sign Up
• Book Now
• Contact Us
• Play Game
• Watch Video
• Use App
• Shop Now

How To Optimize For Twitter

There are a lot of ways to optimize Twitter as a traffic driver. Here are a few you can put into use right now, in this, there’s an art of writing a good Twitter bio, and it isn’t easy to do in under 140 characters. Using of hashtags are essential for helping content to get found on Twitter. However, it’s important to use hashtags that people are actively using, and that are relevant to your content. Ensuring some posting links to the relevant content that you’ve created on a constant basis it helps you to influence Twitter and Google together to drive more referral traffic. Here are some helpful tools for using hashtag research-

• Tagboard
• HashAtIt

How To Optimize LinkedIn

If you are working for a business with a company page on LinkedIn, draw attention to your blog content on LinkedIn to participate in groups and join a bunch of groups and spam them with your blog posts. Make yourself a valuable member of those groups by engaging in genuine discussion. Then, when you have something that can legally answer a question or be of use to the group, go ahead and share it with incorporate keywords in your company description. If you write a quality description about your company, it’s likely you’ll including keywords relevant to your business or blog naturally.

How To Optimize Instagram

Instagram doesn’t have a ton of functionality outside of its mobile app. However, we do have one tip that can help to increase the visibility of your profile while making your blog posts more visually attractive. If you’d like to share an Instagram post on WordPress, all you need to do is copy the embed link and paste it straight into your blog post wherever you want the image to show up.

How To Optimize Google

Google+ is often getting too much popular in social media town. However, it does have an active user base, and there are topics and niches with highly engaged audiences. Google+ accessible offers a section for relevant links to other web properties.  As Facebook tends to reward shorter post copy, Google+ is just the opposite. In Google+ it treated almost like short blog posts, so feel free to write a few paragraphs if you want to posts easier or to find and read, use Google+ text formatting options which include keywords and structure of your posts with bolded headers. If a user is logged into their Google account and follows your Google+ page, your posts may appear in their search results and share your content on Google+ will help attract more attention to your content and it helps you to take up more space in the search results.

How To Optimize Pinterest

Pinterest is interesting from a social media optimization outlook. It’s highly a visual platform, but it comes up with some unique SEO considerations and makes the Pinterest profile to public so search engines which can find it and potentially rank your posts in relevant search results. If you’d like to keep certain panels private without blocking your entire profile to search engines then go to the board you’d like to set to private and click the edit board button and add a Pinterest widget to your site by adding a Pinterest widget to your blog or website can help draw more attention to your boards.

How To Optimize YouTube

YouTube is considered the second-biggest search engine on the Web (Bing and Yahoo). Make sure your YouTube videos rank well in search results and drive maximum traffic to your site or blog by following some tips -

Keywords included in your video descriptions help YouTube (and Google) understand what your video is about. First, think about including a full audio transcription in addition to a simple introduction (about a paragraph). Then watched a YouTube video and noticed a window with a link pop up? Those are annotation links, and they’re invaluable for driving traffic from YouTube back to your blog or website.

What did you want to say about Social Media Optimization?

The concept behind SMO is artless it implements changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines which included in relevant posts. SMO is similar to search engine optimization, in this sense that your goal is to maximize visibility and traffic to your site or blog from social media.