Webinar Review: Hubspot on Blogging
I’ve got to tell you, blogging is tough business. A lot of research and careful crafting goes into putting these bad boys together for you all. That being said, I recently stumbled across a webinar by HubSpot about Blogging that I felt I should share with you all.
In summary, the webinar was about an hour long and covered three main blogging points:
(1) Why Blogging is so Important
(2) How Has Blogging Changed?
(3) What You Should Adjust in Your Blog
Why Blogging is so Important
So to get started, the purpose of blogging as defined by Hubspot is to serve people with education so that they are more empowered to make a decision. They define the success of a blog by how well it travels through the 4 stages of Inbound Methodology. Inbound is simply creating and sharing content with the world, so since your blog is content, how it travels through the Inbound Methodology determines its success.
The 4 stages of Inbound are Attract, Convert, Close & Delight. Producing relevant content in your blog will help you attract readers, convert them into leads, close them into subscribers and delight them into promoters. Sound familiar? This is basically blogosphere talk for our good friend, the groundswell!
Let’s take a look. Applying the groundswell, you should listen to what people want to read from your blog, create content on these topics, create a support forum via enabling comments on your blog, energize your readers by responding to their comments, and embracing them by taking suggestions about future blog posts topics from them.
How Has Blogging Changed?
Blogging used to be about the quantity of the traffic you got, not the quality. Now, search engines like Google are pushing bloggers to optimize their content for people rather than search engine results. Google has made several changes over the years to drive bloggers to do this whether they want to or not. One of these changes is the Hummingbird update.
Now what do birds have to do with blogging? Just as much as snow leopards & lions have to do with Apple’s operating system; it’s just a code name. Hummingbird is a Google algorithm that makes Google and people care more about context rather than specific keywords within the question; it makes Google intuitive. So let’s say you want Chinese food, but you accidentally Google just “Chinese.” Before Hummingbird, Google would have populated results about China and Chinese culture. Because it’s intuitive, it knows to automatically populate Chinese restaurants near you. Go ahead and comment with your results!
Another big change that Google has made is Google Authorship. This allows you to have an image of yourself (rich content) next to your blog in the search results. Hubspot says that this increases your click-through rate by 35%, meaning people like to get to know the blogger. PS - if you’re wondering why I keep referring to Google, they hold 70% of all search engine traffic on the Internet.
What You Should Adjust in Your Blog
Finally, let’s dive into what exactly you should adjust in your blogging strategy. There are two main types of content in the blogosphere: Topical Content & Evergreen Content. According to our friends at Hubspot, 85% of blog posts should make up Evergreen Content. This content focuses on keywords people are searching for, and includes blogs about ‘How To…,’ or ‘Top 5 Reasons…’ Topical Content is great for a short-term traffic boost, but is basically news jacking, so your blog is only as valuable as that one relevant post related to the day’s news.
So there you have it, an hour of Hubspot’s tips and tricks for blogging condensed into a single blog post. See what I did there? If you would like to watch the entire webinar, you can find it by clicking here and going to the second video in the list.
If you’re interested in starting a blog, which of these tips did you find most helpful? What about if you already have a blog, which tricks are you already using? What topics will you write about in your blog? What will you change?
Sound off in the comments below!
- - -