Bill Belew is a content marketing, social media trainer and professional speaker. In 2013 he taught a Marketing with Social Media MBA course at a university in San Jose, the heart of Silicon Valley.
He wrote about his students’ experiences with blogging at What Happens to Your Traffic When You Stop Writing at Your Blog?
As part of their class, his students each started a blog and tracked its performance using Google Analytics.
The outcome?
Once his students had built up a collection of original, high-quality content that targeted the right audience, the traffic kept coming even when the writers slowed or even stopped writing
“The crystal clear message: Creating good content results in good residual traffic…
When traffic is purchased (think adwords) or pushed via social networks and social bookmarking sites (think referral traffic from other sites) traffic will come as long as it is pushed, driven. But when the buying and pushing stops, so does the traffic. Not so with good content that is on topic and created at the home site. It’s the content that keeps on giving, um, pulling.
Content marketing is inbound marketing. And it can’t be beat long term.”
– Bill Belew
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
1. You have to build up blog content
As Bill noted in his class, content marketing is not like advertising, where you are paying for traffic and hopefully, quick sales. Instead, you are earning website visits through consistent content creation and referral traffic.
2. Content must be high quality and targeted
Blogs that aren’t high quality or targeted well don’t work. As demonstrated in Bill’s class, it may take you time to figure out the best keywords and interests of your target audience (buyer persona). Once Bill’s students did, their website hits started to increase
3. Content Marketing works, but it takes time
Content marketing has the power to develop brand advocates- people who trust your brand and understand it. And, because they’re passionate about you, they will share your information. Although ad campaigns may yield short-term sales spikes, a network of brand advocates has lasting power as long as your content exists to provide real value, not just push a product.
Key Takeaway:
When you are planning your content marketing strategy, take the long term view.
Any solid content plan needs at least six months to yield impact.
But don’t forget, the day-to-day consistency is important as well.