Using blogs and e-zines to build traffic
Pick The Right College: example online advertisement
It is a well-known fact that high-quality inbound links to your primary online properties are a key differentiator in successful search engine optimization (SEO). It is also still a fair assumption that the search engines rank high-quality inbound link highly in promoting your site up in the search result return pages. The challenge is actually building high-quality inbound links (unless you have a large marketing budget), a tedious long-term endeavor that is never finished.
Pick The Right College blog
You can of course engage an offshore content/SEO company to help with link development (costly, someone does the work), or you can pursue the popular approach of writing articles for blogs and e-zines that contain links back to specific landing pages relating to your web properties, to which you wish to drive traffic (less costly, more work).
The latter approach involves substantial effort and only works if your blog and e-zine articles actually attract traffic and are therefore ranked well by the search engines you target. They will only do so if your posts are worth reading: this is a labor of love that will only bear fruit over time (unless you are again willing to accelerate the process by driving traffic to your blog and e-zine content using pay-per-click or email campaigns).
This author currently generates about fifty 500-word articles per month in support of organic search rating development, and positive results have shown to build slowly, but consistently. Companies have found it expedient to hire college/university interns with English or journalism majors to help write content for their sites as well as for their blogs and e-zine entries. However, this appraoch is only as good as the content these young folks without experience can generate.
Like any effort in Internet marketing, longterm the companies that will prevail are the ones that follow industry best practices and avoid cutting corners: if your content is excellent, if you meet your clients’ needs optimally, if the paying end-user is satisfied with the services acquires as the result of your lead generation, then your reputation will carry you across any rough spots. The opposite is true now, and will be true more so as regulations are tightened, competition increases, and search engines revise their algorithms to foil illegitimate ranking manipulations.
Blog posts and e-zine articles that receive traffic because they are of high quality and satisfy their readers constitute a much higher barrier to entry and sustainable competitive advantage than meaningless filler posts that no one reads or ever returns to.
For more information:
- San Diego Adult Education Examiner
- San Diego Internet Marketing Examiner
- San Diego Neighborhood Photography Examiner
