Blogs Drive Engagement, Leads & Revenue

Why would a blog be the core of your content strategy?

It’s because blogs speak directly to your customers on the issues most immediate and important to them. Blogs are more authentic, trusted, and engaged with. They’re fresh with helpful info, insights, resources, and experience. Visitors may spend 10 minutes or more on your blog absorbing your messages and building comfort with your brand.

A blog can be at the epicenter of your marketing and lead strategy. 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.

A blog post can be any type of communication or landing page. It can sell, inform or entertain. There are no limits on the effective of your key blog post — only your imagination and strategic skills limit you.

Consumers trust blogs as the authentic voice of your company/brand and they expect it to speak to them about why your brand is better than the others. And a blog is where value, experience, personal significance, trust, authenticity, and more are conveyed. They don’t get that from your homepage, contact page, or product pages.

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 visitors, but first, you have to give a little love and support.

In this post, I’ll show you how to keep it simple and stay on course with a 10 Step Blog Strategy.

You’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. The problem is most blogs suck from using a basic template that’s not designed for your branding and engagement needs.

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

marcussheridansmall — Marcus Sheridan launched his pool construction into a major brand by blogging. His big picture focus: Answering customer questions.

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. His blog delivered value many different ways, however it was solving specific issues where Marcus himself was engaging with visitors to understand and solve their pool problems.

His blog wasn’t a static medium. His presence made it lively, up-to-date, authentic, and more relatable for pool customers. He spoke their language and they liked that.

Of course, a great blog is hard work. It assumes you have the right offer, can build the content, keep it fresh and impactful, and have the time to engage with people. It does take dedication. It can be exhausting if your business isn’t developed. If you don’t have a clear value proposition or a brand, then your blog will come across as pointless and not credible. Having a specific product/service to sell and having the promotional resources to reach audiences is important.

That’s why building a powerful blog strategy is so smart. Treat it with respect and it will deliver. Starve it and you’ll suffer. People still love blogs given the variety of content included for a very rich, satisfying experience.

A blog is a human voice with its color, flair, zest, authenticity, experience and more. In the AI era, this personal, authentic value will increasingly be sought. The word authenticity has been bandied about for many years now. There are issues of trust, comfort, warmth, and ongoing engagement (comments, sharing, and you can reward readers for engaging with you).

The Bolt of Inspiration

A good mantra for bloggin too! — Simplicity and Big Picture Thinking: A good mantra for blogging too!

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.

5 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.

Big Picture Thinking Should Always Rule

Too many owners focus on tactics and specific signals. But these don’t correlate to blog success. When you go Big Picture Thinking, you build an unbeatable strategy that lasts. And you generate a wider base of support and more significant value in information and engagement for a fuller brand experience. It’s first-class for first-class results.

Get the big-picture strategy right, and the details will take care of themselves (with pro support because we’re competing).

Business people who think big picture are more optimistic, enabled, and energized. I really enjoy knowing and working with big-minded people. They don’t get weighed down with pessimism and restrictions and they make you think anything is possible. And really, anything is possible.

Captains of a ship don’t worry about waves hitting their boat. Their goal is to run right over barriers and issues by sticking to their plan and getting to a defined destination. I want you to focus on that defined destination when it comes to your blog. Focus on your unique value proposition whether you’re a professional or a small business owner and don’t let any details distract you. Focus on the rewards that will occur.

A 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, insight and good visuals. Don’t forget that blogs are a form of visual content. Too much text is tiring. These blogs often have a carefully crafted, busy hub look to them and quite a bit of expense has gone into their creation and growth.

Just like your overall content strategy and content marketing plan, you’ll have better performance by building a view of the perfect, high-performing blog, and by finding a real-world blog in your niche that is super successful. You can reverse engineer the content of these highly successful blogs to discover their secrets and then build out your own unique content plan. And if you don’t have graphic artists, videographers, or friends in high places, don’t fret, you can “curate” other people’s content. It’s a fun thing, this blogging!

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. I’m working on the engagement part! But a blog is time consuming and my value proposition is ever growing and evolving. You can get on this digital marketing train anytime you want.

sitetraffic — My strategic and dedicated approach to blogging is shown in this graph of weekly sessions.

Your Blog’s Purpose

Big Picture: The key purpose is to communicate your unique value proposition. And it will have many objectives: building Google rankings, generating Google traffic, generating interest, making impact, creating engagement with the content, building visitor’s intent, and pre-selling/convincing them to become a customer.

That’s the role of your website and your marketing, yet the blog is often expected to carry the load today. When the blog doesn’t carry that weight, businesses are forced to buy Facebook and Adwords Ads. The purpose then is to maximize revenue while decreasing expensive advertising. Your blog plays a key role in visitor conversion and is a vital cog in that wheel.

A bold goal is for the blog to carry your marketing communications by building relationships with customers in a transparent, trustworthy and comfortable way for them. If it’s all about them, then it makes sense that your blog will help you get closer to them. Compare that to your About Us + Product Pages and you can see the difference.

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?

This is no small matter. If you don’t really have the skill in-house, don’t burden them or yourself with the task of creating blog content. Most people are not cut out for deep research, content writing, nor have the stamina for it. Hiring a good content writer/creator who can learn your industry is wise. But they must love your industry. Otherwise, you need to designate staff and train them to create great content using their experience and knowledge. You’ll need to give them time to do this, enable them to get resources and information, and put them on a schedule to produce. The more they blog, the better the results — if it’s good quality. In the end, it’s the quality that produces top notch results.

Determine the Best Topics and Right Keyword Focus

Selecting the right topics is paramount and it might be a matter of instinct and experience. 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 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.

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.

It doesn’t hurt to have a layout like this one below in mind as you create your blog posts. Until it bores and disengages your readers, you can use it. Trying different layouts is wise. We need to learn everything we can about what impacts and energizes them.

Blogs Drive Engagement, Leads & Revenue

When Blogs Became King

A Key Part of your Content Strategy

More Ideas for your Blog Content Strategy