Blog and content strategies with Stephen Turcotte of Backbone Media
October meeting of Boston SEO Meetup

Food sponsor CookieOutlet.com, coupon offer code: BostonSEO

Backbone Media, started 1996, didn’t realize were doing content strategies

Content strategy

Taking something you already have, know about, that your customers are interested in and make it useful to them

Every strategy starts with a goal

• Who are your customers
• What are they looking for?
• Solutions?

The Balsams.com resort in NH

• What else could be done to drive new people?
• Campaign: Take your family to get your kids off the wii
• Keywords
• Audience that you want to reach: i.e. Mothers concerned about “kids spending too much time …”

Tibco: biz intel software

• Write about trends in software space
• Find experts who bloggers
• Use diff angles, leverage content already out there in Forbes, Biz Journal, summarize and then add your angle
• ID keywords, which ones are you not hitting

Creating content

Best when company can write its own content, but it’s hard to do, takes so much time to find something to write about, publish it, and follow upon the comments

Great bloggers tend to peter out after time
Thanks for further clarification from Stephen Turcotte:

“Lots of companies think they have people who could be great bloggers, but they tend to peter out after time” it would be more accurate to what I was trying to say. In contrast, a common trait in successful bloggers is that they maintain a strong commitment to listening, writing posts, and commenting regularly; month after month,year after year. It takes a special commitment to doing that.

Editor’s note: That is what he said, but my fingers couldn’t keep up. Back to our program …

Have someone relevant in-house, but clients know don’t have time to do it

Tie into Twitter and FB, get active on Twitter, push clients

Should be posting 2-4 times a week for difficult keywords, less if you’re in a niche

Planning

• Where see best bang for the buck?
• What topics can’t cover in the site but that are of interest to your customers?
• What’s relevant to customer in past 2 weeks, 6 months, 2 years: Example: Swine flu
  

Execution

• Think a little outside the box
• Have quality and be useful
• Don’t do what everyone else is doing, building content over time
• Be relevant to audience, even if you’re regulated, there’s areas of interest
• Talk about topics that affect your targets

Tracking conversions

• Help the company by creating a strong call to action, convert a visitor into a lead
• Get them into the blog: Can be tracked organically based on keyword
• Convert them to someplace: Really strong call to action: Go to form and fill it out, that’s a conversion
• 10-20 articles in second month, start measuring in months 3-5

Results

• Create a footprint for the business, goal isn’t to be the best blogger
• Publish where it’ll  stick, get into architecture that will last, won’t disappear, going to keep it for 2-3 years
• Think of how much traffic can this content send to my company for the next 1-2 years

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