Small business marketing to me is about sharing information with the people who could be potential customers in a way that makes me an authority and them better marketers (and making more money). That said, A LOT of the time I post things on my that are just things that I need everyday. These tend to be evergreen marketing posts AND get a lot of clicks from the Google because if I am interested in them, probably other people will be interested too! So here is...
How To Write Authoritative Blog Posts
How to pick a topic
First off, you know the questions that people ask you all the time? Those are authoritative blog post topics. For example, in my world people want to know how to get their emails opened and read. The first step for that is to have a GREAT email subject line. With that in mind, I wrote a post that, well, has 100 great email subject lines!
Usually if there is a tool you need or something you would reference often, that is a great authoritative post topic. I use the email subject line post almost every time I have to write emails (and even when I need to do Twitter tweets...hey wait, 100 great Twitter tweets would be a super topic....hmmmmm must write that post next!!!)
How to know if it is working
So the first one you write will start out slow. DO NOT get discouraged! This is what the email subject line progression looks like over time...
If you can read the tiny little numbers you can see that there have been over 19,000 views on this post. BUT, you don't have to see very well to know that that number grew over time. I had to work at it to get it ranked in Google. Which leads us to...
How to make your posts popular
Here are just a few of the ways that I have promoted this post!
- Posted it to Facebook multiple times
- Posted it to Google+ multiple times
- Posted it to Twitter multiple times (on multiple accounts)
- Posted it to Pinterest multiple times
- Posted to LinkedIn multiple times
- Internally linked it in my blog (like I did above - just means I made a reference to it in another post)
- Wrote an email course that includes a link to it
- Tell people about it when I speak and then send them the link
- Submitted it as a URL to the Google Webmaster tools
- Send out as a link in our email newsletter
Those are just a few of the things...one more I can do easy peasy...do a youtube video and share THAT to all the other places. Oh, and write about it on my other blogs. Generally, you should treat these like the "hero" blog posts they are and promote them on a weekly basis until everyone loves them as much as you do!
How to know what is working
So I use a plugin call SEO Search Terms Tagging that shows what terms people used to get to my blog posts. These are what the searchers were looking for:
- best email subject lines ever (7)
- email subject lines examples (not on page 1 - probably getting hits because of social connections)
- great email subject lines (not on page 1 - probably getting hits because of social connections)
- email subject examples (6)
- best email subject lines examples (9)
- subject for leave email (not on page 1 - and not sure what they were looking for)
- email titles (5)
- good subject lines for emails (not on page 1 - probably getting hits because of social connections)
- newsletter subject lines (page 2 - 5)
- good email subject lines (not on page 1 - probably getting hits because of social connections)
The numbers after are where I rank on google for those terms (I used a proxy server to check, your results may vary)... As you can see, I don't rank number one for any of these, BUT because I am listed across multiple keywords, they all work together to get me lots of hits. Here is why some are getting more clicks when I am connected to the people searching:
So, if you are writing Authoritative Hero blog posts, hopefully these tips can help!
