A major feature of Hubspot and one that is a cornerstone of inbound marketing strategy as well is blogging. Blogging is the most ideal way to add content to your site, while automatically updating subscribers to the new content and showing search engines what new information you have to share.
But for many Hubspot users blogging is an underutilized tool. Ramping up your blog posting can help your marketing efforts in a variety of ways:
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To get more search traffic, blogging is imperative.
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To turn visitors into leads, blogging gives the opportunity to present calls to action
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Blogging shows a company’s authority by providing specific knowledge visitors are looking for
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Blog posts are the most easily shared pages on a website
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Each blog post is another opportunity to attract your desirable visitors’ attention
Strategy and Best Practices
Simply writing blog posts to share what your company wants to share is not enough. The blog is not a place to boast about business, it is a place to educate prospects, answer questions they have about services and products you provide, and share useful information about your industry.
Therefore, blogging shouldn’t be haphazardly done. A strategy is necessary to get the results that your company strives to achieve.
Hubspot does a great job of describing how to put your blog together, what you should write and even how to format your blog posts. Here is a link that you may find helpful:
Download the Hubspot Blogging Kit
How Digital Inbound Can Help
In our experience with Hubspot and working with clients on their blogs, we’ve uncovered some best practices. Here are a few tips to get started:
Blog Titles
Hubspot will instruct you to include your keyword in every title. But more importantly you’ll want to create a title that will entice visitors to read more your post and provide information to search engines. For instance, this blog post could easily be called:
Blogging Tips In Addition to Hubspot Instructions
or we could make it:
5 Tips Bloggers Need for Success on Hubspot
The first title is boring and while it might get some people to read the post if they are Hubspot users. But knowing there are 5 Tips you NEED for Success is a more attractive offering.
Social Media Optimization
Thankfully Hubspot will automatically give every blog post social sharing links. But in addition to having these links users need to do more to get their posts ready for social sharing.
Include images for posting to several social media sites. Pinterest images should have text on them. Facebook and other platforms should have images related to the blog post itself.
Share the posts on your own social profiles and then ask others to do the same. There is no reason to have 0s in your social sharing numbers. Every blog post can be shared by you and anyone else in the company to get a jumpstart on obtaining visitor traffic.
Proper Formatting
Each blog post should be easy for readers to read. Articles should not look like they will be long and overwhelming just to read.
While Hubspot will give you suggestions about using headlines, sub-headlines, bullets and lists - it is also important to make your paragraphs short and easily digestible for the reader. People tend to read content in chunks online so short paragraphs help maintain your reader’s interest. With the short attention spans of consumers these days, bloggers should make a practice of considering readability before publishing.
Generally paragraphs should be 4 lines or less. Huge blocks of text will make it difficult for skimmers to find relevant content and they will leave your site. For others, who may take a break when reading, it is difficult to find your place when looking back at large blocks of text.
Blog Topics
From an SEO Point of view it is ideal to focus a blog post around a keyword, but beyond that approach, a blog post needs to present information that is useful to your visitors.
At some points, it is acceptable to brag about new business, describe services you offer or even share company news, but the best idea is to focus each post on a question your ideal client (or persona) has.
For instance, if you are a for profit college, prospective students want to know about:
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Financial Aid
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Course Offerings
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Job Placement
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Success Rates
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Success Stories of other students
Calls to Action
Hubspot does a great job describing how to use Calls to Action with blogging. But in our experience, we’ve found useful to consider these ideas:
Test Your Calls to Action
Pay attention to the CTAs that are getting clicks and conversions. Construct future CTAs based on results and data.
Closely Target Every CTA
We’ve noticed most companies are not using enough CTAs compared to the number of blogs they publish. Each post should end with a clearly related CTA that will naturally lead to readers becoming subscribers. The more effort there is here, the higher conversion rates you’ll see.
More Hubspot User Tips from Digital Inbound:
This post is part of a series about how to best optimize Hubspot usage for your company. Some other articles you may find helpful are:
Hubspot Software Tips: Making Email Marketing More Effective
Hubspot Software Tips: Building Successful Landing Pages
Hubspot Software Tips: Solutions to Having Trouble Using Hubspot Software?
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