In Step 1 of our “Go Social” series, we discussed the benefits of integrating a blog tool into your website and how to distribute the added work among office staff members, while still maintaining control over final published work. We also pointed out that this will lay the groundwork for future social and viral marketing opportunities. This article will concentrate on content distribution through your website and social platforms.
So, you have your website blog, staff members are writing articles for various categories and an editor is reviewing and publishing them for the world to see. You are also providing industry knowledge and expertise to clients and prospects, as well as increasing your search engine visibility along the way. But we can still do more. The rest of your website has content that doesn’t change on a regular basis. To use an industry term, it’s somewhat “static.” We should point out that your blog tool uses a technology called RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to push the article content out to subscribers. Because of your blog tool and its RSS capability, you now have the opportunity to feed content from specific categories to various pages throughout your site. For example, the content from your “Press Release” section can be fed into your website “News” section. A section of this page could be titled “Latest Press Releases” and the user would see, for example, the three most recent article titles posted in your blog’s Press Release section. Clicking a title brings up the whole article in your blog. You now have the ability to bring fresh content to every page on your website!
You now have a blog and fresh content pushing out into your website, but people don’t always come to your website looking to see what’s new do they? The RSS function in your blog is one way to allow them to subscribe to your blog and get the updates, but let’s push it a little farther out and see what we can do with Facebook and Twitter. If you don’t have a Facebook or Twitter account, you should create them. In Facebook, you can create your own account, but then build a Fan Page or Group for your company and assign yourself or an employe who also has a Twitter account as Admin. In Twitter, you can create an account specifically for your company. Here’s where things start to appear tedious and you envision yourself and your employees logging in and writing in the blog, then logging in and writting in Facebook, then logging in and writting in Twitter, etc… We have been successful in integrating tools that will automatically pull your blog articles into your Twitter and Facebook accounts, thus giving you one central location to manage all content. Facebook is slightly different in that you will still want to log in periodically and write/respond to followers, but this gives you a much more streamlined workflow for daily operations.
You now have the following benefits:
- Increased search engine rankings
- Visitors to subscribe to your feeds and get updates every time you post something in the blog
- Fresh content fed from blog to various sections of website
- Facebook and Twitter accounts with fresh content fed from blog
- One location to post content
Look for “Web Marketing After SEO – Step 3” in the coming weeks!
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Nelson & Co. is a Sugar Land, Texas based graphic design firm serving the Greater Houston area with turn-key print, multimedia and web design projects since 2002 and is proud to be listed in the Houston Business Journal’s Book of Lists as a Top 25 Graphic Design Firm serving corporate, mid-sized and even start-up businesses alike with powerful branding and marketing tools. For more information on Nelson & Co. visit www.nelsonandco.net or contact us at (832) 532-7220.
