If there’s one thing that rings true for businesses across all sectors, is that the level of competition is high. This has been propelled by factors such as fewer barriers to entry and easier access to markets, even for small businesses thanks to digitization.
In a world that’s fast becoming more and more digital, businesses too are required to adapt or become obsolete. One of the best forms of reaching consumers today is through content creation. Even though traditional ads are still effective, consumers also want to learn about brands through content. This is why companies that actively blog have up to 97% more links to their websites than those that do not.
As such, for brands that are in pursuit of sustainable growth, a blog is a bare minimum requirement. It gives you a platform to market, brand, and most of all, generate high quality leads that can translate into long term customers.
There’s a lot of work that goes into starting a website, but the true work revolves around keeping a blog active and vibrant. In some way, starting a company blog is much like starting another business. It requires investments in time, money, and efforts. Considering such demands and lack of know-how, most business owners and executives shy away from starting a blog.
Whereas it can be challenging to start and run a blog, you do not necessarily have to be actively engaged for your company’s blog to function. By leveraging a blog management company’s services, you can capitalize on the immense opportunities that blogging offers without turning your attention from the job you love.
What Is Blog Management?
The opportunities that blogging offers are unquestionable. However, it remains a challenge for businesses to start or maintain a blog. For some, it is due to a lack of technical expertise and knowledge on how to start and run a blog. With others, it goes down to a lack of time to manage the blog or resources to hire in-house personnel to do it.
Either way, both sets of businesses end up losing ground to competitors that operate blogs successfully. Blog management can be defined as addressing all the functions and processes necessary to start and run a blog. Such activities include site setup, managing domain names, platform configuration, content strategy development, social linking, and SEO.
Blog management companies perform such services on behalf of their clients. The types of services and extent to which they are performed depend on each company’s individual needs. As such, your blog management service provider can handle one aspect, such as content creation, or perform the full suite of services, depending on your needs.
Types of Services Blog Management Companies?
If done effectively, blogging can increase sales significantly. Data shows that marketers who focus on blogging have ROI 13 times higher than those who do not. However, before you can enjoy such returns, many things must be done to ensure success.
Some of the key elements of blog management include:
1. Content Strategy Development
The success of a blog can be directly linked to the quality of the content it offers. The first step in ensuring that your content is effective is offering what your audience needs and wants. Analyze your target audience to determine what their pain points and interests are. Your content should be geared towards providing solutions without sounding salesy.
The process of actively planning, identify suitable topic ideas, and creating content is referred to as content strategy. One of the best ways to get topic ideas that will resonate with your audience is by reading their comments on your social media pages and website.
It is also important to integrate analytics into your content strategy. This will give you more insight into your audience, allowing you to create suitable content. Such insight includes their goals, needs, and expertise level.
A brief overview of the tasks involved in a comprehensive content strategy include:
- Defining content categories
- Gathering topic ideas
- Content creation
- Sourcing accompanying images and videos
- Scheduling content
- Reading and responding to comments
- Monitoring success of the content strategy
2. Content Creation
Once suitable content categories and topics have been identified, all that’s left is content creation. In this regard, quality is key and non-negotiable; otherwise, readers will lose interest in the blog. Various factors influence the quality of content, and ultimately its success. To begin with, all articles and posts should be well written and without grammatical errors.
Articles should also be relevant to the users’ needs and insightful as well. This should be topped off by observing the best Search Engine Optimization practices. This is what will ensure that your content ranks high in search engines and easily found via organic searches.
A crucial element of SEO is keyword use. Keywords are the terms or phrases people use when searching for content or products online. With each category and article, identify the best keywords, and incorporate them.
3. Product Management
Whether your store is purely online or you have a physical store too, managing products can be very engaging. After sourcing, product descriptions must be created, prices set, and any customer inquiries addressed, along with providing ongoing support.
Along with those services, content management companies also handle shipping, ensure payment gateways are up to date, and manage the e-commerce platform.
4. Social Media Management
So, you’ve created content, but how does it get to your target audience. With every new post, you must market it aggressively for it to get viewership. With 3.6 billion users, social media platforms are one of the best places to promote content.
Your blog manager will share your posts on social media pages and upload videos and podcasts on YouTube and other platforms. To guarantee maximum ROI, they will determine the social platforms to focus on, based on your target audience.
5. Theme and Plugin Selection
Other factors that affect the performance of your blog are the appearance and functionality. Your blog should not only look good, but the appearance must also be suitable for your niche. And, a good appearance should be accompanied by security and functionality. Otherwise, your marketing will attract people to the blog, only for the site to chase them away.
In this regard, blog management companies help you choose appropriate themes and plugins. They will also adjust the plugins depending on evolving needs.
6. Ad Management
One of the ways you can generate revenue from your blog is through ads. If your blog manages to attract high amounts of traffic, such revenue can become a reliable source of income. There are plenty of affiliate programs that you can join to have ads displayed on your blog.
Blog management service providers will find suitable programs and ads that fit your brand and keep updating them.
How Much Does Blog Management Cost?
At this point, the question that often lingers in most business owners’ minds is how much blog management will cost? Charges for blog management services can vary significantly depending on the services you need and the service provider.
The important thing is determining your needs and finding blog management that meets them and fits your ideal budget.
How to Decide What Level of Blog Management Is Right for Your Business
Before approaching a blog management service provider, you must determine the type of services you need and the extent to which you want them to be involved. To do this, you must answer the following questions:
1. Am I a Writer?
One of the most engaging activities with blogging is creating the content. There’s no shortcut with this. It’s either you produce a consistent stream of posts to keep your users returning for more or settle for little to no traffic.
With this question, it’s not about whether you can string cohesive sentences together, but whether you can actually commit to research and write posts regularly.
2. Do you Have the Technical Expertise to Maintain a Blog?
Even after your blog is up and running, there will still be a lot of technical involvement required to maintain or address issues. If you have such skills or qualified personnel, you should focus on other blog management services.
3. How Much Is Your Time Worth?
Even if you have all the necessary skills required to run your blog, you determine whether your efforts are worth more if channeled to other activities. Calculate how much your time is worth, then determine how much time you will need to dedicate to the blog.
Focus your attention on where you gain the most value. If this is not with the blog, hire a blog manager to handle your blogging needs. This way, you will be able to grow your brand without compromising any area.
4. Can You Train Someone to Manage Your Blog?
If you have the necessary skills to manage a blog but not enough time to do so, you can explore the option of training someone. However, it would be best if you were very careful with this as it implies you are highly proficient will all aspects of blog management, from content creation, managing themes and plugins, and SEO, among others.
More importantly, you are good enough to train someone to become good enough to help scale your business.
Are Blog Management Services Worth It?
As a brand, it is essential that you stay ahead of competitors, or at the very least, not lose ground to them. In the digital era, blogging is a bare minimum requirement. However, it’s not just about having a blog but having an active blog filled with content insightful and engaging content for your audience. Considering the importance of a blog and the amount of time required to manage them, an investment in blog management services may be a great choice.
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