Marketer John Pate has written a powerful article?outlining strategies to either build from scratch an effective construction marketing blog, or to recover a failed effort. His approach in Construction Company Marketing: 5 Steps to Fixing a Failed Blog?is amazingly systematic, requiring a fair bit of discipline and thought before posting, but the results should greatly enhance the probability that the blog will achieve meaningful market-building results.
He writes:
Blogging forms the backbone of any successful inbound marketing initiative. So if your blog is failing, your entire inbound efforts are failing too.
Common Reasons Why Blogs Fail:
- Most people who start blogs quit within the first 3 months. (Source: Social Triggers)
- So many bloggers fail to realize the importance of having goals. (Source: Writer In Charge)
- The reason they fail is because we?re all told to start a blog or business about something we?re passionate about. Except we?re never told that what we?re passionate about isn?t what matters. It?s what our audience and clients are passionate about. (Source: Life Hack)
- Case study after case study obscure the fact that successful blog-driven marketing campaigns are a rarity. (Source: Search Engine Land).
Publishing articles without a strategic plan of action often will result in your posts getting lost with all the other millions of blogs on the Internet.
Then he sets out to outline how you can achieve the strategic success in developing your blog. This involves setting clear, measurable goals, and designing the blog’s content. Notably, he advocates thinking from the client’s perspective — the “persona” of the ideal clients, and writing to appeal to these individuals, not to your own personal interests — yet the blog still needs to have the human feel.
There’s lots of content in Pate’s document and you’ll want to take some time to consider how to pull the threads together.
For example, under his section about writing the blog — before the all-important section about conversion to meaningful leads/orders, he writes:
The first step in writing a series of blog articles is (guess what) to strategize. Here?s how to start:
- Create a content calendar. This will keep you on track. Simply pick one day per week that you?re going to post one blog article to your website.
- Brainstorm 12 blog titles. Each title should: A) Be no longer than 70 characters (good SEO). B) Should address the need or pain point in your theme. C) Use one of your keywords both in the title and a few places in the body of each article.
- Write. There?s a lot of buzz from thought leaders now on ideal article length. What?s way more important is that your article is interesting, informative, not wordy, and not self-promotional. Your goal is to supply information making you the thought leader of the topic of your theme.
Why will this work? Why should I not self-promote? For one thing, self-promotion is a huge turn-off today; it?s just bad. Secondly, by supplying good information, you?re elevating yourself as a thought leader. Remember, visitors find information in your blog, on your website, not someone else?s.
From there, it?s natural that they?ll check out other pages on your website, bringing them you that much closer to having a lead.
I haven’t seen as clear and straightforward an outline of how to build an effective construction-oriented marketing blog as Pate’s presentation. It is worthy of note if you are serious about developing a blog that delivers real results for your business.
If you have thoughts or observations about this article and is usefulness, please email buckshon@constructionmarketingideas.com, or you can suggest?a comment.
Did you enjoy this article?
