Blogging is one of the most valuable platforms that businesses have to engage with their customers. Blogs are powerful assets for marketing; they help drive inbound traffic, establish you as a thought leader, engage with influencers and help you to build credibility with your customers.
As important as blogs have become for the success of digital businesses, effective blogging is incredibly time consuming and must be of high quality to attract and retain reader interest. In order to be a strong marketing tool, your blog must be relevant to your customers, full of valuable original content and supported by social marketing and outreach efforts. To ensure your success, it is wise to bring on freelance specialists to supercharge your blog! At MyCrowd, our blog is a key component to our content marketing strategy. To keep our blog growing with a small core team we leverage freelance talent. Here are some of the key ways we utilize freelancers to ensure our blog adds tremendous value to our business:
- Writing blog posts & content creation – To succeed, your blog will need regular updates with fresh content that is engaging. It is important your content strategy is crafted specifically to appeal to your target market and map back to the customer’s lifecycle. Creating a continuous stream of high quality content can be a
huge time commitment. If you are not a writer, you will need to hire a freelance copywriter to create content for your blog. At MyCrowd we leverage several writers to craft content around their individual areas of expertise. This gives our blog multiple voices and more depth than just a single author. We create an editorial content calendar in advance and meet once a week to assign and discuss topics. Taking this approach allows us to push out more content and benefit the entire team with an open discussion format.
- SEO – Blogging automatically helps you improve your presence in the organic search rankings. The more blog posts you publish, the more indexed pages you create for search engines to display in their results, which equals more traffic. This is a huge win as you can leverage your blog to grow your opt-in database and drive traffic to your registration and/or landing pages for customer acquisition. A crucial first step to improve your blog search engine optimization (SEO) is to install the Yoast SEO Plugin. The second is to analyze your blog on Quick Sprout and see what they recommend you do to improve your ranking. However, this will only take you so far and eventually you will need the help of an SEO expert. The art of getting your website ranked high enough to appear in web searches has become more complex with constantly evolving Google algorithm updates. If you do not know a lot about SEO, that is reason enough to seek outside help. Adding a freelance SEO expert to your marketing team can pay big dividends over the long run. Choosing the correct key words to get your blog noticed can be a daunting task, but is the building block for so much of your marketing efforts. Make sure you hit the mark and not take unnecessary risk. Hire a freelance SEO expert to take your blog to the next level!
- A/B testing – Once new elements for your blog have been created, how do you know it is optimized to appeal to your audience? In order to make data driven business decisions, you need to a/b test. We believe as much as 80% of what is on
landing pages and sites are someone’s, maybe a CEO’s, opinion. Using a freelancer with experience in a/b testing can help you set up and run experiments. We at MyCrowd use multiple freelance designers and coders to power our AB testing. Testing a variety of layouts, images, content subjects/length and aesthetic elements such as color can keep the needle moving and your business growing!
- Create guest posts – Although your blog ought to have a consistent point of view that visitors can rely upon, a fresh voice can inject vitality into your blog. Use a freelancer to create a guest post for your blog or as part of a blog outreach strategy. Both of these choices can be a very effective way to supercharge your blog traffic. Many freelancers are experts in a specific field, and therefore can contribute fresh
ideas or perspectives to your blog on certain subjects. If you engage a well known freelancer or influencer for a post, ask them to share the post which can lead to new exposure and traffic. At MyCrowd, we use freelance writers to compose white papers, conduct research and for journalistic writing. These can be then turned into posts and keep your content marketing engine humming.
- Video/graphics/animations – Another great way to supercharge your blog is by adding original video, graphic or animation content. Although it seems intuitive that this kind of content would drive interest in your blog, you would be surprised how few bloggers utilize these elements! Getting additional exposure on Pinterest and Youtube can be big sources of traffic; Youtube is the second largest search engine in the world. In reality, great graphics and videos get liked and shared. Contracting a freelancer to create original videos, graphics or animations for your blog is a smart move, as it will set you apart and distinguishes your blog from competitors. Check out these tips on hiring a killer freelance designer.
- Social Media – Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, YouTube, Digg, StumbleUpon….are you overwhelmed yet? Rather than spending your valuable time
creating a constant stream of fresh content, why not leave all the social media work to an expert! Hiring a freelance social media expert is an easy way to supercharge your blog by offering viewers multiple streams of additional content and touch points for your brand. Growth hacking for traffic by pushing your content to as many channels as possible is just good marketing, but it is time consuming. We use freelancers to gain more traction than with just our core team.
- Blogger outreach – When you have established your blog, utilizing freelancers to conduct blogger outreach is a super effective way to supercharge your blog. However, this is another marketing tactic, although very important, that is extremely time consuming. Having an experienced freelancer reach out to other bloggers and manage those relationships, while keeping you keyed in, can help you stay focused on the big wins. This activity will create awareness and increase your blogs visibility. Have the freelancer pass on contacts that have more potential and get more value by feeding your biz dev funnel.
- HTML /CSS – Use freelance front end developers to give your blog that refined look. If you are serious about driving traffic and are creating quality content, your
blog needs to engage your visitors. Good designs and layout can make the difference in getting email registrations and driving users to your main business site if you have one. There are a lot of front end freelance developers out there and at a good price. Hire one and guarantee your blog will look world class.
Supercharging your blog with freelancers is a smart way to get the most out of your blog. Put these lean growth strategies to work for your business. Get started now and use MyCrowd to hire and manage one of our 10 million qualified freelancers to supercharge your blog!
