INSIGHT
THE POWER OF BLOGGING
Content marketing can be a powerful strategy for any online business but only when done right, writes
90 Digital CEO Aferdita Pacrami, who provides her guide to effective leveraging of blogs to gain more
traffic, trust and conversions.
CONTENT MARKETING HAS been a
buzzword for as long as I’ve been involved
in SEO; yet, over the years, I’ve seen few
examples of content done right, especially
with affiliates. Sometimes this is put
down to lack of budgets or resources,
or a resistance to breaking away from
the norm. If every affiliate under the
sun has ‘unbiased’ bookie reviews, your
equally ‘unbiased’ reviews won’t give you
a competitive advantage. Mainly, I think
there’s a misunderstanding of what ‘good’
content is and the value it can add to
your site.
on sports events after the fact, you’re not
competing with operators that have big
budgets, you’re competing with big sports
news publishers that are far more trusted
and established than you or operators.
You can now start putting together
a strategy. How are you going to get
readership? Creating really great content
is just one element; you need to think
about building links to your articles,
leveraging social, and using PPC (owned,
earned, paid). Also, what do you expect
users to do when they land on your blog?
Reading and leaving isn’t really a strategy;
“PPC can work very well with content marketing.
The keywords you can target are less competitive
and cheaper than betting keywords.”
In this article, I’m going to focus on
blogs. Most affiliates will have at one
point decided to set up a blog on their
site because they know that content can
help gain traffic. The problem is that
there’s usually not much thought put into
blogging, either outcomes haven’t been
properly defined, a strategy hasn’t been set,
and ways to convert readers have not been
identified. Without this, blogging could end
up being a waste of time and money.
Planning
With any marketing campaign, you need
to first define its business objectives. Why
are you doing this? It shouldn’t be because
this is just the norm or many marketers
recommend it. With a strong blog you
can generate additional traffic to your
site, create a community with returning
visitors, as well as show legitimacy and
thought leadership.
In this step, you need to identify a USP
for your blog. If you’re just writing articles
50
iGB Affiliate Issue 55 FEB/MAR 2016
they can continue reading more articles,
bookmark your site to return later, follow
you on social. And lastly, what are the
ideal outcomes? Here you should think
about micro conversions, such as signing
up to your newsletter, to macro conversions
like signing up to a bookmaker using your
affiliate link.
Creation
As mentioned above, just having articles
on sporting events isn’t enough to gain
readership. You need to identify what your
competition is doing, be objective about the
quality of their content, and figure out if
you’re able to do it better. There’s no point
in creating a comprehensive history of the
Grand National if there are already very
detailed resources out there, but if you can
access archive news, images, or recordings
of past events from libraries, then you’ve
got something unique.
If you’re writing an article, beyond just
assessing the competition and researching
your target audience to identify their
interests, questions, and where they
hang out, you should start with keyword
research. While your main site targets
transactional and possibly navigational (if
you’ve got a strong brand or if you rank
well on bookies’ brands) searches, your blog
should focus on informational searches.
Informational searches (ones where the user
is trying to find the answer to a question or
looking for more information on a sub ject)
make up between 50-80% of all searches. A
lot of affiliates will focus on transactional
searches; informational searches offer
a much larger search volume and if the
content and calls to action on your site are
handled right you stand to gain more from
these users than the ones that are only after
getting the best deal.
The key here is quality over quantity;
if you don’t have the budgets to compete
then invest in one high-quality article
(graphic, right media, microsite) instead of
writing loads of generic articles that will
never get read.
Alternatively, find cheaper ways of
getting things done. If you’re at an event
(or watching it on TV) you can provide
live coverage from WordPress on your
smartphone, using If This Then That
(ifttt.com) recipes to automatically post
specific tweets to your blog for a curated
list of relevant updates. In fact, you can
automate a lot of your blogging efforts
using IFTTT recipes.
Promotion
Once you’ve got something strong to
work with, you need to start promoting
it through link building, social, and paid.
Good content alone will not bring users
to your site. You’ll find that building links
to your content will be much easier than
building links to your site. People don’t