YUG

When I sit down to write a blog post, I stick to a routine that has some flexibility. The way I write changes from time to time, but two things never change: who I’m writing for, and how to deliver the best experience. When you sit down to write, what are some of the questions you ask yourself? Are you keeping your audience in mind? For example, if you are writing for enterprise audiences, how are you framing that content to achieve your goals? If you’re writing for the professional who is part of a large organization, how does your blog cater to their needs? Though an enterprise audience is a smaller number of people to reach, blogging for those customers can be a huge driver for ROI and acquisition. Many marketers agree — blogging is an important part of their content strategy. Blogging does way more than populate your website with content. Did you know that B2B marketers obtain over 70% of their leads from blogging? Or that businesses that prioritize blogging are 13x more likely to see a positive ROI? When you blog for customers, you’re not only providing useful content. Properly optimized posts lead to an increase in brand awareness and conversions. Enterprise customers have their own set of unique needs and challenges, separate from customers in a startup. Your blog can assist with these needs, like how to manage a positive scale within a company. However, a successful enterprise blog stems from having a successful strategy. Implementing a process for writing makes your content stick to business goals. 1. Come up with the purpose of your enterprise blog. The good foundation of any strategy is to define the purpose of your goal. So, think about why your blog is going to exist. Are you aiming to build brand awareness and increase conversions? Content that serves a purpose is easier to write because it has a focus. For instance, if the reason for starting your blog is to increase the number of enterprise leads you earn, all of your content should support this goal. Having a clear purpose will also help you fill in some of the blanks for the rest of your blogging strategy, like distribution and topic research. To get started defining your blog’s purpose, think about the goals of your company and identify how your blog can contribute. For instance, if one of your goals is to bridge the gap between the awareness and delight stages for leads, think about how you can create content that gets customers thinking about the value of your company on a deeper level. Blog posts can be highly engaging vehicles to entertain and inform the reader, and with the addition of widgets like calls-to-action, offer your customers more ways to familiarize themselves with your company. Once you identify the purpose of your blog, you can finalize a goal that will allow you to create content that reaches them. 2. Determine your persona. Your business already has a buyer persona — a fictionalized idea of the perfect customer. Keep that customer in mind when you’re writing. If it’s appropriate, you might want to come up with an entirely different persona, one that’s solely based around your enterprise audience. If you’re creating a persona from scratch, ask yourself what your enterprise customer will find the most useful about your blog. What stage in the buyer’s journey do you want to target with your content, and how will a blog help you get there? When you have a persona to reference for your blog content, you’ll have an idea of how to put yourself in the customer’s shoes and focus on writing that’s going to serve them the best. For example, let’s say you create a persona called “Enterprise Ernie.” When you created Ernie, you identified challenges and pain points that keep him from doing his job better, like roadblocks that come up from being a marketing team manager for an enterprise. When you create content, then, you can focus on how to help Ernie be a more effective marketing team manager. You’ll brainstorm topics that solve those challenges and offer resources to reinforce that message. 3. Conduct keyword research. Optimizing your blog for SEO shouldn’t be the extent of how you’re using SEO for your blog. SEO can help inform better business decisions, including better blog topic development. This happens through keyword research. Keyword research is an SEO tactic that identifies possible words and phrases on the minds of your target audience. This is done by referencing the search queries your customers type in on Google. At HubSpot, keyword research informs the topics we write about each quarter. Use this process, with a tool like Ahrefs, to understand what to write about to better serve your customers. If, by performing keyword research, you find the phrase, “customizable chatbots” a common trend among audiences. You’ll be solving questions that are common among your audience. That way, when people in your audience use keywords in Google, your content has a high chance of ranking highly and driving traffic. 4. Think about possible topics. After conducting keyword research, you’ll have an understanding of what enterprise customers want to read. Come up with a log of topics your keywords will fall under, such as “Marketing Automation,” “Marketing and Sales Alignment,” and “Product Launches.” This does two things: First, it’ll help you organize blog ideas, and second, it’ll keep your content diverse. Diverse articles solve for your customer at every stage of the buyer’s journey. When you have your topics down, you can refer back to your list if you think of more or need more ideas. 5. Determine how to structure your posts. Keep the structure of your posts consistent. This aids your writing process and keeps the look of your blog aligned. An effective post format guides readers through your content. Use the tools available with your blog software to come up with a structure that fits your needs. When I first

When I first got into the world of SEO, you could literally optimize your site for any term and rank at the top of Google within a month or two. But of course, that was ages ago. Now with Google’s ever-evolving algorithm, it takes more time and effort to get results. But what happens if you don’t have the luxury of time? Or you don’t have the financial resources to put in the effort that is truly needed. What should you do? Just forget about SEO? Of course not. Today, I want to call out 11 tools that will help you get an edge over your competition. But unlike most lists, I am going to get very specific on the feature I want you to use within each tool to make your life easier and help you get results faster with less effort. Let’s dive right in. Tool #1: Ubersuggest Projects You probably already know about Ubersuggest, but do you really have time to spend hours and hours each week to do your SEO? Chances are you don’t. So how do you improve your traffic with the least amount of effort? You set up a project in Ubersuggest. As you can see, it shows your SEO traffic over time. It will let you know if your rankings are going up or down, your link growth, and your SEO issues. With so many things going on in marketing, you don’t have time to manually check your rankings or if things are going up or down or even what you need to fix. Ubersuggest will do it for you all automatically and even notify you of what needs to happen through email. That way you don’t have to constantly check your SEO. Ubersuggest will do it all automatically. More so, you’ll get notified of what you need to focus on each week to maximize your traffic. All you have do is head to the dashboard and click on “Add Your First Project.” It’s as simple as adding in your URL. Then select the locations you do business in and want traffic from. Then add in the keywords you currently rank for or want to go after. And of course, set up your traffic preferences. And then you’ll be good to go. Then when things go great, you’ll be notified. And when things are going wrong, you’ll also be notified. Ubersuggest will even tell you what to fix. That way you get the maximum results in the least amount of time. Tool #2: Google Analytics Alerts You have Google Analytics set up on your site, but how often do you log in? And when you do log in, do you know what to focus on or what to look at? And if you do, do you know what to do with that data? Google Analytics is a great tool, but you don’t want to waste hours and hours looking at reports. Instead, you want to spend your time doing and getting results. But if you set up alerts in Google Analytics, you can save tons of time. If you watch from the 6:33 mark, it will show you how to set up alerts. I added the whole video as it will teach you how to set up Google Analytics in general in case you don’t have goal tracking set it place. Once you set up alerts, you’ll again get notified when anything good or bad happens. I usually have alerts set up for only when things go bad, so I know when I need to focus on fixing my marketing. Tool #3: Trello You’re probably thinking how the heck is Trello a marketing tool. It really isn’t, but it is a good project management tool. And with your SEO, you may have a team helping you out and Trello will help streamline the process, make you more efficient, and get your results faster. I keep my Trello board simple by breaking it into 3 sections. To do – what needs to be done over time. Prioritized – what I need to be done now (tasks at the top are the most important) Done – tasks that need to be double-checked to ensure they were done right. It’s that simple. That way you don’t have to micromanage your team. Some people have more complex Trello boards, but something simple like I have worked too. If you want to create a Trello board for your content marketing, assuming you want to write lots of content (such as 10 posts a week), this process works well. The columns I use for content writers are: Topics – this is where writers add topics they want to write about. Outline review – writers submit their outline before they write for approval. Draft – writers submit their rough draft. Draft review – editors review each draft. Uploaded, prepared, and ready to review – this is where the editor adds the post to your CMS (like WordPress). Scheduled – this is where you schedule the content to go live. Done – the content is now live. We’ve found it effective if you are managing dozens of writers at once. Tool #4: Content Decay Tool Can you guess how many articles I write each week? 1. Seriously, that’s it. 1 article a week which is roughly 4 to 5 per month (depending on how many weeks in the month). And can you guess how many articles my team and I update each week? 21. That’s roughly 90 a month. Just think about it… why would I have a team of 3 people updating 90 articles per month when I only write 1 a week. It’s because updating old content is an easier way to get more SEO traffic than it is to create new content. But what content should you update? The content decay tool will tell you that. It breaks down in order which articles you should update first, second, third… based on what will generate you the most