It all starts with blogging. With all the social media options out there, don’t overlook the obvious. Your Blog is still one of the most important places to stay active. Done properly, a blog can help with inbound marketing, and not just because people follow the blog.
Your blog should be the core of your social media strategy. The whole point of inbound marketing is to draw traffic to your website, but to bring in traffic, there has to be a magnet. That’s your blog.
It all comes down to Google’s algorithms. While those algorithms are some of the most closely-guarded secrets in all of industry, a lot of people have studied them empirically. Frequent changes and updates are important for ranking, and updating a blog regularly is one of the easiest ways to get new content on the website.
On top of that, with a little attention to search engine optimization while writing the blog posts will help with capturing that long tail. (We’ll talk about the long tail a bit more in a future blog post.)
So, we’ve seen that blogging helps with both ranking your site and being pulled up for related searches, but it also helps with social media. As we mentioned, the entire objective is to bring traffic to the website. Twitter makes a great bullhorn, announcing to your followers when you post to the blog.
Use your LinkedIn account to call attention to your blog posts in this business environment and build your reputation. It’s an important aspect to online networking, especially for freelancers. Write a brief leader or summary and link back to the blog.
Google+ is often overlooked as a social media site, but common sense says that a Google-owned property will impact search rankings, even if Google itself denies it. It’s easy enough to cross-post or use the same leaders you do with LinkedIn when posting to Google+.
As with all inbound marketing, the key is consistency. The posts have to be regular, or you won’t gain any traction, but it does all start with blogging.