Blogging is one of the most common content marketing strategies — and one of the most difficult to do right. According to the Content Marketing Institute's 2014 B2C Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends - North America, 55 percent of B2C marketers believe that adding a blog to the mix is effective for content marketing efforts. However, many companies repeatedly make the same 7 mistakes over and over when they're blogging. Marketing departments that move in without planning or who have misguided preconceptions about modern-day SEO that will result in the company's content being ignored or even penalized.

1. W W W . C L E A R P I V O T . C O M
of Blog Content
Marketing
(and how to avoid them!)

2. 2
Blogging has become integral to the content marketing strategies of a majority of compa-
nies. According to the Content Marketing Institute’s 2014 B2C Content Marketing Benchmarks,
Budgets, and Trends - North America, 55 percent of B2C marketers believe that blogging is an
effective content marketing tactic. On the B2B side, 76 percent of marketers are using blogs
to engage customers. The bottom line is, if a company is not blogging, it’s missing out on an
important content marketing tactic.
However, blogging as a business is very different than, say, being a sports blogger or
mommy blogger. There are seven deadly sins that many companies commit in their blog
content marketing that, at best, mean their content is ignored and, at worst, turns away and
squanders their relationship with their target audience. So what are these seven deadly sins
of blog content marketing, and how can companies avoid committing them?
In the ensuing pages, we’ll reveal these seven deadly sins and how companies can atone for
these sins. We’ll provide actionable advice that will help companies create content that suc-
cessfully carries forward their marketing strategies.
YOUR COMPANY
STARTED A BLOG.
NOW WHAT?

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Sports bloggers know they are writing for sports fans, and mommy bloggers know they’re
writing for other moms. But many businesses haven’t spent sufficient time defining who ex-
actly their target audience is. As a result, many go into blogging with a haphazard approach,
throwing content to the wall and hoping it will stick with someone, somewhere.
The saying “You can’t please everyone” certainly applies here. If the company doesn’t know
its audience, its blog at best is ignored and at worst discredits the company as an expert
resource. Content that is written for too broad of an audience either will bring in prospects
that aren’t a good fit for the company, or if it does bring in the right prospects, the content
will not address their needs and pain points. It doesn’t connect with them in any meaningful
way, so they will quickly move on elsewhere.
Instead, companies need to get to know their audiences using personas. That means
knowing who the target audience is: their occupations, demographics, pain points, needs,
research processes, and buying processes. Personas take that information and turn it into a
composite idea customer.
For example, a Medical Spa specializing in dermal fillers may create a persona for its ideal
client, “Susan.” Susan is a married mother of three in her mid-forties. She works full-time,
is fashion- and appearance-conscious, and is willing to spend extra to ensure she looks her
best. She is familiar with the concept of dermal fillers but has not tried them; however, with
the deepening lines in her face, she is willing to give them a try. Susan needs to know that
fillers are safe and effective, and because of her busy schedule, she also needs to know if
the fillers can be done during her lunch hour and if her appearance will return to normal in
time for her big presentation on Friday.
With that persona, the medspa could create a series of blog posts around fillers. Without be-
ing too sales-oriented, the blog posts could include information on whether or not fillers are
right for Susan and what she could expect during and after her first appointment.
NOT KNOWING
YOUR AUDIENCE
#1
Deadly Sin

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That is the kind of content that resonates with that medspa’s ideal audience, and when
“Susan” (a woman in her mid-forties) searches for information on fillers, she’ll find it on the
medspa’s page and be more likely to make an appointment.
In short, no matter what the business is, it needs to identify its ideal client or customer well
in advance of blogging efforts, then create personas documentation around the attributes
of those types of people. These personas will then ensure that the business can effectively
focus all their content to connect with the wants and needs of their most desired types of
customers.

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Anyone who buys a new computer knows all too well what shovelware is: poor-quality
programs pre-installed on their brand-new computer that they will never use and are just a
nuisance. Shovelware content is very similar. It is a large amount of content that has little to
no value for the company’s intended audience, and it’s just published so that the company
can say it publishes content frequently. Shovelware comes in two forms: thin content and
content that can more easily be found somewhere else.
Thin content is fluffy content that doesn’t mean much. It’s the 200 word blog post on a
financial services blog that makes a lazy analogy between baseball scores and investing,
which comes across as just filler that the company was using to try to attract users. It doesn’t
contribute anything to the conversation about commodities or bonds and instead is ignored.
Blog content that can be more easily found somewhere else includes real estate agents
auto-posting MLS listings, or financial services companies posting charts of the current day’s
bond rates or wheat commodity rates. These items can be found in a lot of other places, and
with a lot less hassle. The reality is, most customers are not coming to a company’s blog for
that kind of information. They are visiting one of the larger real estate portals like Zillow or
Trulia to search for homes, a news site for financial commodity rates, or somewhere else for
basic content.
What companies need to do is craft informative content that helps customers and prospects
make decisions. For example, a financial services company could post a reaction to a news
piece about the rising price of precious metals, or a real estate agent could offer tips on
choosing the perfect home, what to do before making an offer, or how to choose a home
inspector. This is content that will help your intended audience and establish a long-term
relationship with them. That relationship is what leads to more conversions and more sales.
As part of a blogging content strategy, companies need to write blog posts around their cus-
tomers’ concerns. Someone in the market for a backyard swimming pool may want to know
SHOVELWARE
CONTENT
#2
Deadly Sin

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what the advantage of an in-ground pool is over an above-ground pool; another customer
may be interested in why a fiberglass pool may or may not be the right fit for his backyard.
Again, it all comes down to what the customer will want to know prior to making a decision.
Rich, interesting, engaging content will be what tips the scales in a company’s favor and
make that company a trusted source for information.

7. 7
A company promoting itself is a good thing — until thinly-veiled ads infiltrate the company’s
blogs. On the heels of shovelware content, the third deadly sin of blog content marketing,
are advertorials. These are thinly-veiled ads that purport to be articles but are really just
advertising the company’s products or services. These blog posts are the online equivalent
of the “amazing” weight loss success stories found in the back of print magazines.
The biggest problem with advertorials is that they hurt credibility. A cosmetic surgery center,
for example, might write an advertorial blog post entitled, “What You Need to Know Before
Rhinoplasty.” But the article itself actually only talks about why that surgery center is the
best at the procedure and does not cover what a prospective patient would actually need to
consider before undergoing the operation. Instead of being an informative piece that would
inform the patient about the benefits and risks of such a procedure, the blog post is purely
promotional, and the prospective patient is left searching for actual information elsewhere.
Blog content marketing needs to be informative, not promotional. Prospective customers
and clients are searching for information that will help them make a decision, and if they
click on a link that purports to be about “What You Need to Know” but is instead a thinly-
veiled advertisement, they will feel cheated and angry. Any content that is overly promotion-
al will lead to high bounce rates, not conversions. And that is not effective content market-
ing.
Instead, companies need to pack their blogs with information. It may not be a sales pitch,
and it may not seem very direct, but it will build credibility and thought leadership, which
is the cornerstone of content marketing. A blog post titled “What You Need to Know Before
Rhinoplasty” needs to contain information on choosing a surgeon, possible side effects, re-
covery time, and and balanced discussion of the benefits and risks of the procedure. It could
be a customer testimonial or information about a new way of doing the procedure that
ADVERTORIALS
#3
Deadly Sin

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speeds recovery. What it needs to avoid is having the answer to “What You Need to Know” is
that the surgery center writing the blog is the best -- (even if it is!).
“We’re the best” content is best suited for an about page or one of the featured services
pages on a website. When it comes to the website blog, companies need to remember that
the content exists primarily to inform prospective and existing customers, and to build a
layer of trust that standalone web pages and advertisements don’t. Blogs are meant to help
companies develop a reputation for expertise, and the best experts never tout their exper-
tise directly on their blogs.

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If there’s anything worse than shovelware content and advertorials, it’s content that is so
jam-packed full of keywords that the piece is rendered unreadable. Keyword stuffing not
only is bad for your company’s credibility, but it actually is bad for SEO purposes, too, and
should be avoided in any blog content marketing strategy.
In the early days of SEO, marketing departments could get away with stuffing their blog
posts with their targeted keywords to get higher search engine rankings. Then Google wised
up to this trick. It began releasing updates to deal penalize users who crammed their web
pages and blogs with keywords and keyword phrases for the sole purpose of gaining trac-
tion in search engine rankings. Algorithm changes such as Penguin, Panda, and others all
examine content to make sure it’s not just a bunch of keywords strung together to game
the system. On its support pages, Google plainly tells webmasters that keyword stuffing can
harm a site’s ranking, as well as create a negative user experience.
When marketers use keywords unnaturally, the text itself doesn’t flow well, and users get
confused and annoyed. No one wants to read content that looks like it was put together by
an algorithm rather than by an actual human. So not only is SEO ranking adversely affected
by keyword stuffing, but the bounce rate (ie. the rate of people who come to a web page and
leave without browsing to any other pages) is adversely affected as well. Users get to the
site, realize that they can’t read the text because it wasn’t written for humans, and immedi-
ately leave.
A better blog content marketing strategy is to write each blog post for an actual person,
preferably to a user persona created prior to embarking on the strategy. While keywords
have their place, they need to appear naturally in the text. For example, a landscaper trying
to game the ranking systems might use the keyword phrase “Springfield landscape design”
five times in a few sentences with little regard as to how it flows and appears in context. A
landscaper that is writing for humans would write, “Landscape design in the greater Spring-
KEYWORD STUFFING
#4
Deadly Sin

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field region can be difficult due to the rocky, sandy soil. However, a variety of native plants
carefully cultivated for the area and arranged properly can create a unique outdoor space
that requires very little maintenance.” Those two sentences use the keyword but don’t over-
saturate the text, making it naturally-flowing prose. This is a more pleasant experience for
the reader and they are more likely to take the time to read the rest of the blog post.
In short, keywords and keyword phrases are like dessert: it’s very possible to have too much
of a good thing.

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Content scraping is when someone finds content on a website, changes a few words here
and there, rearranges a few sentences, and publishes it as an original piece. Sometimes con-
tent scraping is done on a smaller scale: someone will use half of the content from another
website and attempt to write original content around it. But aside from the legal and ethical
issues surrounding content lifted from other sites, content scraping is damaging to an enter-
prise content marketing strategy and can result in SEO penalties.
Google is a pretty smart engine. Not only does it know when a piece of content is stuffed to
the brim artificially with keywords, it also knows when a page is a duplicate (or near-dupli-
cate). When it hits a page that is more than 50 percent copied and pasted from somewhere
else on the web, it does not index the second page it found. Google considers that a dupli-
cate page, and it ignores the page accordingly.
Instead, companies who want their blog to be indexed by Google and used as an important
piece of their content marketing strategies need to write original content. While quoting a
paragraph or two from another site (and attributing the paragraph) is fine, ethically, legally,
and for SEO purposes, the entire blog post should not be just those paragraphs. Original
content is what gets the search engines to index the blog post, not to mention what gets
people reading it, commenting on it, and sharing it.
For example, a dermatologist’s office may find a great blog article on a new acne treat-
ment on another website. Instead of posting the piece wholesale on its own blog, the office
would instead quote a paragraph or two and write a reaction piece around it: maybe the
new acne treatment really is wonderful, and the dermatologist cannot wait to prescribe it
to her patients, or maybe the treatment is something that should be used only with careful
consideration because of potential side effects. A reaction piece that uses a quote or two
from the original article not only alerts patients and potential patients to the new treatment
but also allows the dermatologist to demonstrate her expertise on the subject. She is able
CONTENT SCRAPING
#5
Deadly Sin

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to educate her patients and prospective patients about the pros and cons of the treatment
and highlight some of the other methods she uses to cure acne. It’s the kind of article that a
parent of a teenager may share with another, rather than skim over and move on to the next
dermatologist who may know more about the treatment.
A good blog content marketing strategy requires original content. Companies that scrape
content are only hurting themselves by diminishing their credibility and not allowing their
expertise to shine through. Reaction pieces allow them to do that, thereby avoiding the
scraping problem as long as there is primarily original content and new perspectives on the
subject of the content.

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Not having an editorial calendar for your content marketing program is like going on a cross-
country road trip without a map. The participants start off excited, until they miss their exit
on the Interstate. The driver frantically takes the next exit, ten miles away, and ends up driv-
ing on a back road in the middle of nowhere: no gas stations, no convenience stores, and
no place to rest or fuel up. If they’re lucky, it’s just a tumbleweed that drifts past the car. And
at the moment when they think it can’t get any worse, the driver notices that the needle on
the gas gauge is sitting on empty, no one has any cell phone service, and someone’s going
to have to trek through the desert or the woods in the twilight to get help. That’s when the
road trip falls apart, much like a blog content marketing strategy.
An editorial calendar is the official road map for any blogging strategy. It details when the
posts are to be completed, what the topics are, what calls-to-action to include, and what the
subject lines should be. It’s the lynchpin of a successful blog, both for enterprise and small-
to-mid-size business, and without it, companies are left struggling to create enough content.
What usually happens is that the marketing person churns out content for a few weeks or
months, building up a blog archive, then gets swamped with other initiatives and stops. The
blog fades away, and it no longer works for the company’s content marketing efforts.
Instead, companies need to plan each post and create an editorial calendar that will prevent
“blank paper syndrome”: the moment where the person in charge of blogging is staring
mournfully at a blank Word document and desperately trying to come up with ideas and
posts to keep the blog full of fresh content. An editorial calendar lets that person create a
series of blog posts and put them on hold, releasing them according to schedule and creat-
ing content in advance so that the company website can continually be updated.
Editorial calendars also keep blogging efforts focused. They allow marketing departments to
focus their content and strategically plan out subject matter that would be the most inter-
esting to their target audiences. Without the editorial calendar, the content subject matter
NO EDITORIAL
CALENDAR
#6
Deadly Sin

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becomes scattered and haphazard, and it doesn’t align with the company’s overall marketing
objectives.
The beauty of editorial calendars is that they are not set in stone, but rather are an agile
framework for blogging efforts. Successful content marketers revisit the calendar regularly,
meeting with different stakeholders in the organization, particularly sales, to find out what
topics will resonate with customers, then incorporate those into the blog.
This approach prevents content production burnout and helps marketing departments —
whether it’s one person or a whole team — stay on track for blog content marketing efforts.
It provides them with a way to keep the pump primed, the gas tank full, and should they not
hear from other departments in a timely manner to produce more posts, a way to have con-
tent at the ready as a backup. Companies that don’t have an editorial calendar risk getting
lost on the back roads, while companies that do are able to navigate through a successful
and sustained content production process.

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So your company has managed to avoid the other six sins and produce original, engaging,
interesting content for the corporate blog. Now what? If the content doesn’t align with the
company’s marketing campaigns, the blog is a wasted content marketing effort.
For example, let’s say that a dermatologist’s office that is writing a blog series about different
kinds of fillers or acne treatments but only writes about the treatments and the dermatolo-
gists’ professional opinions. But then they forget to include a call to action or a next step for
the reader, i.e. “Download our pocket guide to daily acne management,” “Contact us at (123)
555-1212 to meet with Dr. Doe for a free consultation on fillers” or “Sign up for our mailing
list here to be notified of new treatments.”
While blog readers are intelligent, they often need to be told what to do, whether it’s call
to set up an appointment, join an email newsletter list, or download a piece of premium con-
tent. No matter what, blog content marketing loses its effectiveness if the blog post is not
paired with calls to action for either more premium content offers to download, a next step,
a webinar, or a top-, middle-, or bottom-of-the-funnel marketing offer.
Naturally, these calls to action will align with marketing campaigns. A blog post may actually
be a portion of an ebook, and the call to action could be to download the rest. The blog post
could also be a piece to encourage email signups or providing information so that the sales
staff can contact the prospect to set up an appointment.
No matter what, a post on a corporate blog needs some sort of call to action paired with its
content. If the content is strong enough and the reader is engaged enough, the reader is
more likely to act. The call to action will depend on the organization’s marketing campaigns:
marketing a new filler or creating awareness of its skin services, respectively. As long as the
call to action is clear and strong, and it aligns with a marketing objective, it has a chance of
actually spurring action in the reader. This is how a content marketing strategy succeeds: by
getting the reader to act and generating leads that can then become customers.
NO CONNECTION TO
MARKETING GOALS
#7
Deadly Sin

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www.ClearPivot.com