Week 7: Creation-- Check, Promotion-- In Progress

After spending a few weeks finding a writer, training her to write for us, and finally settling into a cycle, I’ve become familiar with the content creation side of things and it’s running smoothly. Content promotion, however, is an area which I haven’t been able to explore yet.

The potential with effective content promotion is truly astounding -- after all, even if you’re producing the best content in the world, it won’t help your business if nobody’s consuming it. In fact, some digital marketers even recommend spending twice the amount of time on promotion as you do on creation.

My mentor wanted all the creases to be ironed out with the blog’s content creation before we moved to to content promotion, so we’re finally starting to brainstorm methods to get traffic to our blog and increase interaction.

The main method we are planning right now is leveraging the size of our preexisting email list, which includes many qualified leads and potential readers/clients. We’re working on setting up an automated email campaign which will run over approximately two months in an effort to expose our leads to blog content, case studies, and the LeadQuizzes brand in general. Hopefully this will help nurture leads and generate sales in the future, while bringing us more traffic as well.

Week 6: Establishing a Cycle

This week was steady, although rather uneventful in terms of new advances or new areas of work. I’m continuing to work with our writer to edit and publish three articles per week, and I’ve been focusing on improving SEO functionality within the blog. This means including only relevant images -- graphs and charts are great, but stock photos and other random images only serve to interrupt the flow of the article.

I’m also working on including long-tail keywords into the blog, which we can rank for more easily by going up against sparse competition. By focusing on phrases that are more unique and contain more words, we’ll come up higher on Google search when someone happens to search for one of those phrases -- this brings us more organic traffic. In contrast, if we try to compete on phrases which are concise and extremely popular, we’ll generate virtually zero organic traffic because we definitely won’t make it onto the first few pages on Google search. Those spots are already taken by the established companies with greater size and resources.

The LeadQuizzes team has also finished development of a new feature which allows users to embed quizzes directly into their web pages. This is proving to be highly useful to many of our clients, and I’ve started embedding our own quiz into all new articles.

Week 5: Consistency With Content Creation

This week, my mentor and I discussed our strategy for content creation at Yazamo, which revolves around our blog. Although we have just one writer, which could be a risk in case of an emergency with no backup options, she is doing well and our communication is improving.

I’m continuing to act as the editor for our publications, assigning our writer topics and providing feedback each time so she can improve in the future and align the style with our company culture. I’m also adding content in when necessary and finding relevant data charts and images to act as visual additions.

The editing time is steadily decreasing and our overall efficiency is climbing. I’ve asked the writer to submit four articles per week instead of three, which means one article goes into our backlog each week. We published three high quality articles this week, although I haven’t yet begun to promote them heavily (only through our Facebook page). It’s exciting to think about how the blog will help boost our SEO and bring us more traffic in the long run!