Blogs Drive Engagement, Leads & Revenue
Today, with the competitive noise, spam and AI-generated material on social media, blogs, websites, customers need travel agencies or Realtors that are relevant, authentic and trustworthy.
Your blog is ideally suited to communicate the values they respect and the offer that matches their intent.
When a blog is designed to reflect these key values of trust, authenticity, relevance, and the best product/experience available, it becomes the driver and home of your content strategy. Rich, helpful, engaging blog posts result in visitors spending 10 minutes or more on your website absorbing your messages and building comfort with your brand. This dwell time is important to Google as well. In turn, this reusable content can aid in boosting social media post-impact and engagement, which appeals to the Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Linkedin feed algorithms.
Sugar Highs May Actually Work Against You
You might be thinking the sugar high they get from social media is all you need to deliver. However, prospects rarely purchase impulsively. Instead, they make decisions on the downside of that sugar high, which can make them more resistant to buying a travel package or having you as a Realtor sell their home they way they want. And are they buying a sugar high?
Blogs help with the transition to the real, solid value and trust they want. Too much sugar on social media erodes trust and makes your value uncomfortable. A blog might help provide the missing protein! A long-term customer is more likely to be the protein consumer.
Make it the Epicenter for all Your Marketing Channels
A blog can be at the epicenter of your marketing and lead strategy. And most conversions happen on your website where your travel packages are listed or a Realtor’s MLS listings are shown.
For customers in the travel industry, who may take up to 2 months to plan their trip, the blog can be a great home base for them. And your email, social media posts, and retargeting ads can all feed into your blog. Review some of the top travel blogs and you’ll get a gist of the content experience travelers enjoy.
Your social media posts and engagement strategy can be a continuous daily stream into your blog to keep you top of mind until your full value proposition is well-established in their minds and hearts.
You can entertain, inform, impress, encourage, attract their input, be dramatic, newsy, fun, and be helpful. In the end, the message is the value of you or your company. It’s high-quality brand building that can’t be achieved via email, Google or Facebook ads, or social media posts. The blog has a unique dimension and power that leverage all other content and people connections. It is limitless.
What is a Blog Post?
A blog post can be any type of communication or type of landing page. There are no limits on the material or the effectiveness of your blog posts — only creative imagination, resources, and strategic skills limit what you can achieve.
It’s a big reach tool and traffic generator — connecting you with a massive audience and the very best target customers. It impacts, engages, and makes you “the only provider they’ll ever want.” And this last point is extremely important. Because once customers get a full view of your value they will consider you indispensible. The competition will disappear, no matter how good they are.
Incredible lead generation: I’ve created several million-visit blog posts and the power they generate is amazing. They begin to possess a gravity that expands on Google and creates citations and backlinks on other industry websites. Blogs can launch your YouTube videos as well. Great blog content is the essence of advanced SEO, because Google prefers the fresh, updated life inside a great blog (Of course, I can fashion it into something even more powerful, based on your needs).
Consumers trust blogs as the authentic voice of your company/brand. They expect it to speak to them in a voice they trust about why your brand and offer is the only one they should want. Because blog posts are so adaptable, immediate and rich, they can better match the current intent of home sellers or travelers, or whatever industry you’re in. And your blog is where value, experience, personal significance, trust, authenticity, and more are conveyed more credibly.
They don’t get that from your static formal, homepage, contact page, or product pages. Prospects visit your blogs to “hear the real you.” Authenticity and trust are big priorities. After several sessions on your blog, they build a belief that you are the most significant provider for them. Significance precedes the purchase.
The Challenge: Committing to Create the Best Blog in Your Sector
The challenge then, is building a winning blog — one that communicates, engages, and helps customers, and ranks well on Google. Eventually, it will generate 90% of your traffic and leads, but first, you have to give a little love and support.
Below, I’ll show you how to keep it simple and stay on course with a 10 Step Blog Strategy.
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ou’ll enjoy developing your big-picture thinking while letting the details organize themselves. That’s what a worthy strategy does. It gets rid of the annoying detailed toil and micromanagement that are the hallmark of small-mindedness and unwillingness to deliver exceptional value. Blogs aren’t free. You’ll need to commit funds to build and support it, find expertise in copywriting and SEO, while promoting and supporting its value to customers.
You have a tremendous resource in myself. I can help you build the best blog in your industry and make it your most powerful business asset. If you keep the faith!
Blogs are king couldn’t be more true in the travel sector, where it’s all dreams and where you must be their “best travel buddy ever.” You might be thinking YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram, but consider that anything that happens in those mediums can be brought over to your blog — where you create an unbeatable experience for your visitor and finish the sale.
What you put in your blog and what its specific purpose is, has to be thought through strategically. That’s a project.
When Blogs Became King
Remember Marcus Sheridan? Way back, he became a big success online and with his swimming pool company by leveraging his blog. He was very genuine, inspirational and led the way in blog strategy. His blog delivered value many different ways. It solved specific issues where Marcus himself was engaging with visitors to understand and solve their pool problems — this is the element of experience that Google is trying to capture in it’s ranking algorithm.
His blog wasn’t a static medium. He provided imagery and tips from real projects. His presence made it lively, up-to-date, authentic, and more relatable for pool customers. He spoke their language and they liked that.
Think of a blog is a human voice with its color, flair, zest, authenticity, experience and more that matches the intent of customers. In the AI era, this authenticity and trust have to be proven. The web and social media channel are filled with spam and fraud, but since a blog is connected to your brand, you can put a focus on trust and authenticity.
Whatever your strategic purpose for the blog is, it can fulfill.
The Bolt of Inspiration
If you haven’t felt the bolt of inspiration or joy of big traffic and impact branding yet, I hope you’ll find this blogging strategy overview a pleasant re-introduction to the power of blogging.
The thing about blogging is how it encourages you to humanize your brand, bring joy to your customers, respond to their immediate issues, and inspires you to improve the quality of your content. It’s like the little brother you have to take care of, but who inspires great things from you.
If there’s one key change you can make for 2025, this will be the most important. And if you’re about to increase your ad spend on Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, your blog is a fantastic value add. Customers don’t connect emotionally with a landing page or product page.
And your B2B ad-generated leads don’t convert right away. Blogs are that soft, warm-fuzzy feel good effect that brings prospects closer to your offer. The experience is the presentation.
10 Simple Steps to a Powerful Blog Strategy
- identify your blog’s purpose – how does it serve your communications and sales goals? What values and emotions does it need to stimulate?
- understand your target audience – what do they want and what will move them toward trusting your brand and being ready to accept your messages
- establish your target customer profile and needs – what traits, lifestyle, and values drive their behavior?
- determine who will create the content and what they’re capable of producing – will you hire a pro blogger or have your in-house staff create it? Do they have sufficient topic expertise and where will they acquire it? Who in your firm or your client’s firms will educate you and support you in creating first-class, market-leading content?
- determine the topics and keyword focus – which topics are capable of attracting, engaging, and producing actionable results? Should your focus be broader to build sufficient ranking power and traffic?
- design your blog layout – what style and layout of your blog will impress visitors, immerse them, and make the blog experience important to their day? What level of visuals and graphics are needed to engage better and build credibility?
- get your content strategy right — be certain of the topical goal that sits at the peak of your visibility campaign — what value do you want to be known for and compete? Which subtopics/keywords will best support that goal? How will you impact and engage newcomers, and keep current customers loyal?
- set up excellent analytics for great insights — have a professional analytics pro set up your analytics (using Google Analytics?) so you aren’t mucking with that technical stuff. You just want a tool that lets you drill down as necessary for pure actionable insight.
- create a blog content strategy in writing — write down all the above in your one-pager and let it remind you of your core objectives so you work every day to achieve them.
- launch your promotional campaign — blogs can’t perform if there’s no support or reach to the audience. Social media posting will not be enough to reach new people. Reach out to influencers, buy some targeted ads, sponsor an industry magazine, and create an exciting visual campaign via your graphic designer to visually support the ideas the blog presents.
The Key Part of your Content Strategy
Two things you will find among very successful blogs such as Marcus Sheridan’s, Neil Patel’s, Larry Kim’s, or Ariana Huffington’s is really good information, perspectives, experiences, insight and good visuals.
Keep it interesting. Plan to create a lot of good content with a good selection of deep, epic level posts that visitors find endlessly fascinating. You’ll also need to create a lot of shorter blog posts to act as support for your major key posts. And, these shorter posts work better for viewing on mobile phones. It’s a fact that more customers and prospects are finding and viewing posts on their smartphones, mostly iPhones.
Whenever you think of me, Gord Collins, remember this graphic below. This is my brand. It’s hypergrowth of traffic, hypergrowth in impact, and hypergrowth in customer loyalty. Currently, I’m working on my content after working for someone else trying to rebuild the magic. In 2025, the marketing budget is a factor even when you have stellar content. It has to reach people to fascinate them.
Your Blog’s Purpose
Big Picture: The key purpose is to communicate your unique value proposition and generate a branded content experience they will enjoy. It’s not about isolated blog posts, even if Google looks at your site as a series of disconnected articles. Visitors do scan your blog for topics that matter to them, which is why your analytics solution is so vital.
Besides your main goal or purpose, your blog will have many objectives: informing, impacting, engageing, building Google rankings, generating more Google traffic, generating interest, making impact, greeting social media users, announcing news, creating engagement with the content, building visitor’s intent, and pre-selling/convincing them to become a customer.
Establish Your Customer Profile
If your like most businesses, you have no customer profile. You need to visualize who it is you’re speaking to. If they’re not in a particular industry, then speak to their work role, and their own interests and specific needs and values. You need this insight to develop rapport and get them to respect and listen to you. Their age, income, job title, gender, and geographic location are key. Did you know you can deliver special content to visitors based on their geographic location? Check your current web stats to see what visitors are interested in and ask your sales staff about the customers they remember the most.
Who Will Create The Content?
If you’re not a topic expert with a panache for beautiful descriptions (homes or vacation destinations) then hiring a creative writer/content developer will be needed. Many travel companies hire travel writer who have experience with a destination and can provide stunning photos of venues and travel experiences. And real estate bloggers can produce content that resonates with the desires and hopes of home owners.
Sometimes a talented marketer can produce content that’s competitive. In our case, we may have outsource production to experts (video producers) who create branded visual templates that I can edit and repurpose. The value here is low-cost, fresh content for your blogs and social media use.
Determine the Best Topics and Right Keyword Focus
Selecting the right topics is paramount and it might be a matter of instinct and experience. My research will help us develop your full keyword focus and SEO strategy. You’ll enjoy my 26 years of experience in this, and I can help draw an unbelievable volume of traffic and leads.
The topics have to be of specific, immediate interest to prospects and allow your business to appear to be the best solution. It should be relevant to your solution. Study your top competitor’s blogs for ideas and see which keywords they’re focusing on for Google rankings. You may need the help of an SEO expert to discover hot keywords and topics that can bring big traffic.
Choose your topics carefully, because visitor’s believe you are your topics. The topic itself speaks more loudly than what you say.
The Ideal Blog Layout?
Is there a perfect page layout for blogging? Some experts believe there isn’t a perfect template that fits all users. And your blog’s purpose, assets and target audience are unique. Templates and consistency kind of point to mediocrity and ChatGPT generated blogs have the same structure, voice and flavorless blah that search engines identify and demote.
Think in full color, like you were creating content for a cooking site or a travel site. This is where flavor, taste and human experience celebrate the reasons why your customers do what they do and their intent and wishes.
Whatever layout(s) you choose it should appeal to your audience, engage, inspire them, and make them anticipate your continuous releases. If you know exactly when most of them read, then scheduling for that specific time/date might work well. Your analytics will tell you about their engagement and whether you’re getting it right.
Assume all rules and expectations can and will be broken. The real success is learning from your data about engagement, enjoyment, sharing, and sales. And you’re looking for great customers, not low-quality leads which have low LTV. Marketing is a big financial investment, which means quality customers and clients are the top goals. Think like a market leader and prospects assume you are one (for them).
It doesn’t hurt to have a layout like this one below in mind as you create your blog posts. This layout is simple, scannable, and easy to consume. Sometimes less is more.
More Ideas for your Blog Content Strategy
See these posts to help you power up your powerful blog:
The above posts focus on the travel marketing sector, however they provide a powerful new angle on your content.
Travel is an exciting area of content given how emotions, desire, experience, and more are involved. Appealing to these human emotions can be effective for your SaaS software company, real estate brokerage, retail business, or financial services firm. People want to experience real, genuine emotion for personal satisfaction.
See more on the travel blog, real estate blog, or financial blog. Read more on the value of content strategy for your company.
📞 Contact Gord at 416 998 6246 for a free review of your blog opportunity and how I can help you!
Title graphic courtesy of Wannapic.
