One of the best ways to build trust and credibility online is through providing valuable content on a consistent basis.
Unfortunately, with so many bloggers and valuable content contributors, showing up consistently and providing your audience with information of value isn’t enough.
In order to make your blogs seen, and therefore make your voice heard, you need a promotional plan for your blog.
A promotional plan is driven by the type of content you are writing.
Content Types
As Mark Schaefer detailed in his Content Ignition session during Social Media Examiner‘s 2015 Social Media Success Summit (#SMSS15) there are three types of content:
- Hero: elite content – has the chance to go viral
- Hub: evergreen content – stories, case studies
- Hygiene: everyday content – how-to, problem-solving
My biggest takeaway from Schaeffer’s presentation was the relationship that exists between the type of content you’re writing and the amount of time you should spend optimizing this content for search engines.
SEO Importance Vs. Content Type
If you are writing mostly hygiene content, (everyday, problem-solving content,) SEO is critical.
Since people search for how-to guides and solutions to problems on search engines and social media channels, it is critical that you spend the time optimizing this content for search engines.
Search engines are going to help drive traffic to these types of posts, so you want to put in the effort to optimize these posts before creating the promotional strategy for how often you’re going to share them on social media.
Hygiene content (when optimized and shared often) helps you gain credibility online.
If you write a lot of evergreen content (hub content that will still be relevant and valuable for months to come,) SEO is important but not critical.
The reason being is that evergreen content is juicy; it provides your audience with a reason to stay on your website and click around to your other posts.
You want to be sure to optimize your hub content because search engines are going to help drive both traffic and trust for your website.
Hero content is tougher because, while it is incredibly valuable for a brand, it isn’t something that you can plan on since we have no way to predict what is going to go viral.
SEO is the least important with hero content because social shares (not search engines) are what drive views.
Search engines don’t drive traffic for viral posts, social media channels do.
That’s why when it comes to this type of content, it’s not as important to spend the time optimizing it for search. You’re way better off spending your time on your promotional plan for sharing this content across a variety of social media channels.
While SEO is always important, it is clear to see that the amount of time and energy you should invest in optimizing your content is dependent upon the type of content you are writing.
Planning for promotion
Once you have optimized your blog posts for search, you can decide how much energy and effort you should put into promoting and sharing these posts on social media.
A strong promotional plan details how important it is (based on your content type) to share various blog posts on social media.
As you can see from the example above, you want to spend the majority of your time and effort sharing your hero content on social media since social is going to be what helps these posts go viral.
By sharing all three types of content (hygiene, hub and hero) through social media, you will help position yourself as a diverse blogger who provides tons of value to readers.
While SEO and social sharing are important because they help drive social proof, you don’t want to end up spending time optimizing posts if optimization won’t lead to the ultimate goal of views.
Instead, focus on creating diverse content, creating content on a consistent basic, telling stories and providing backlinks.
By creating a variety of types of content (hygiene, hub and hero,) you will have a blog that is packed with value and keeps your readers coming back.
