Social media has become two words which I am beginning getting sick of. "Social media" is all you hear these days, social media for blogs, social media for a job hunt, social media for networking, the list goes on and on. It's no secret that using social media platforms such as Twitter, Linked-in, Facebook (among others), if done properly, help individuals, look for a job or attract people to their blog. Additionally, more people will read this article than, let's say, a basic sales or marketing article. The reason is that everybody wants to execute social media, though they don't keep their eyes on the prize. In this case, the prize is money - nothing more, nothing less.
The entire purpose of a blog is to monetize your content in one way or another. This revenue generation can either come from people navigating to your blog via a Google or Bing search or having a popular, heavily visited blog or webpage link to you. Though, for most companies, the blog is not a "be-all end-all."
The main reason is that their business stems from their website, not their blog. If a blog is the person's main business and source of revenue, than making a lot of money via web advertising is exceedingly competitive and is proving to get harder by the day. Conversely, in some cases, many bloggers who are successful have a lot of blogs and can sustain a healthy living.
Before even worrying about the click through rate (how many people will visit the blog and be interested enough to visit the main website a.k.a the main business), the social media guru has to drive traffic to the aforementioned blog. More importantly, the traffic the individual drives to their blog has to be decision makers within companies who are looking to purchase a particular product or service.
However, the blog owner has to be firmly aware that for this traffic to come in the first place, they must implement some sort of SEO strategy.
Since ranking on the web is so competitive, you have to be dedicated to search engine optimization. The overall analogy I like to give regarding social media is that the individual is hosting a party and, that same night, 40 million other people are hosting one as well. How are they going to be special? This question must be answered by anyone trying to implement social media. The best answer I can give is that to be considered special, the individual hosting this get together has to be easily accessible via Google search. Nobody is going to want to go to a party 3 hours away if something similar is happening down the street.
The first way to be special is to have the search engines like your blog via implementing some sort of search engine optimization. Unless this person is in retail, they have to focus and market your blog to B2B product or service decision makers. This means that they have to give the aforementioned reader a reason to take time out of their hectic schedule which is not an easy task.
Again, if this person is going to optimize anything, it should be their website. When buyers look into buying a particular product or service, they search for websites. At this point, since our clients come via our website (the easiest way), I can write these articles both as a hobby and for back links to our website which helps in our Google, Bing and Yahoo search rankings.
For the moment, let's get back to the blogs. For the individual, to ensure that their blog ranks highly, they must use keywords both in the title and throughout the text. For instance, if this person and subsequent company are selling engineering software, they must ensure that having keyword phrases throughout the piece such as "software for engineers," "engineering software," and /or something like "engineering technology."
By the individual implementing the aforementioned, they will help the search engines better determine what their piece is about. Then, once the s.e.'s feel comfortable with the content a.k.a. consider the individual a reputable source on the topic, their blog posting will being to rank highly and, thus they can then scrape some business via that route. Again, I do suggest that anyone serious in truly implementing a social media plan should, before doing so, make sure that they optimize their website.
