Blogging Archives

What Niche Publishers Know That Mass Media Overlooks

While publishers continue to battle for audience, relevance, and engagement, some niche publishers are quietly making an impact—and money—from narrowcasting. Consider, for example, the following:

Emu Today & Tomorrow, a magazine for emu farmers

Twins, a magazine for parents of multiples, which launched in 1984

Spudman, a publication for potato farmers

The Chimney Sweep News, serving a decidedly niche market of chimney sweepers as the name suggests

These and other publications are finding success by casting a narrow net to appeal to smaller, more exclusive market segments. Publishers can draw inspiration and insight from the retail sector.

Continue reading “What Niche Publishers Know That Mass Media Overlooks”

Tips for Using Content Calendars

Social media marketing is an inexpensive and effective way to engage with your target market and position yourself as a thought leader. But to make it an effective tool, you need to be diligent in keeping your content up-to-date and post regularly. An infrequently-updated blog or social media page with stale posts can actually do more harm than good to your brand and engagement efforts. But many small business owners struggle to find the time to keep their social media profile up to date.

One solution to this is to use a content calendar.

Continue reading “Tips for Using Content Calendars”

Get Results With These 10 Tested Copywriting Tips

Whether you’re writing a brochure, copy for a newspaper ad, a script for a radio announcement or a page or blog for your website, there are some tried and true techniques that can help you make sure that your copy gets the results you’re looking for.

Think about writing copy as making a sales pitch to a customer. Your goal is to persuade that customer to do something – most likely to purchase your product or service. Here’s how: Continue reading “Get Results With These 10 Tested Copywriting Tips”

5 Steps to a Better Blog

We’ve been writing this blog for a long time – since 2009 actually! It actually draws more traffic than our website and we’ve also been recognized over the years, most recently by Feedspot as a “Top 30 Communication Blog.” Recently we were asked by a reporter to share our top tips for effective blogging; we thought we’d share here as well. Here are our “Top 5 Tips for Building a Better Blog”: Continue reading “5 Steps to a Better Blog”

How to Build a Blog That Generates Results

So you’ve finally put in the effort to develop a respectable blog. You’re posting regularly and consistently, and you’re posting about topical material relevant to your target audience. But nobody’s reading it. A common challenge we see with businesses trying to beef up their online presence is that they haven’t done enough to drive traffic to their blog. Here are some basic tips to help boost your blog traffic. Continue reading “How to Build a Blog That Generates Results”

Building a Better Blog

Keyboard - small It’s hard to overstate the value of a good blog and the impact it can have on your business. Here when we’re talking about value, we’re talking about bang for your buck. A blog is essentially free, other than the time you put into creating content and the cost of the website on which you host it. And yet a quality blog can do so much to drive traffic to your website and to help establish yourself, and your organization, as thought leaders in your industry.

We’ve been blogging since February, 2009, and we’ve been doing it consistently (one of our highly recommended strategies for success). Here are our “top tips” on building a blog that will generate real results: Continue reading “Building a Better Blog”

Driving Valuable Backlinks Through Exceptional Contributed Content

As a strategic marketing company, we have promoted the importance of marketing for any business loudly and often. At the same time, we understand that small businesses are often operating on razor-thin margins (if they’re even in the black at all) and may not have substantial cash reserves on hand to fund an aggressive marketing campaign. Fortunately, a large war chest is by no means a necessity in successful marketing. Continue reading “Driving Valuable Backlinks Through Exceptional Contributed Content”

How to Build Thought Leadership Through Blogging

Blogs are so ubiquitous in the online world that it may seem like it’s not worth the effort to maintain your own. After all, blogs can take a lot of effort to maintain. You need to be current, consistent and relevant. Is it worth all that time and energy with so many blogs out there? Continue reading “How to Build Thought Leadership Through Blogging”

In Search of Viral Content: Is It Worth the Effort?

Online marketing is a crowded arena. Just check out Internet Live Stats to get an idea of the massive amounts of blog posts, websites, tweets, etc. It’s hard to stand out in the crowd, but every once in a while, some gem emerges that catches the attention of the masses and forms part of the collective consciousness. In other words, something goes viral. But how does that happen? Continue reading “In Search of Viral Content: Is It Worth the Effort?”

Blogs: A Natural Starting Point for Content Marketing

At Strategic Communications, blogging is a big part of what we do, both for ourselves and for our clients. A robust, well-managed blog is a key element of any content creation strategy. As we’ve discussed in the past, quality content is a must when driving traffic to your site. Blogs are a great vehicle for this.

Obviously, part of implementing an effective blogging strategy require developing quality content for the blog. Assuming you’ve got quality content, your blog posts can serve as a great starting point for repurposing content across a variety of channels. Here are some of the things that we do to leverage the value of our, and our clients’ blog content: Continue reading “Blogs: A Natural Starting Point for Content Marketing”