Content Creation

Your Blog Posts Can Be Used In Multiple Ways

CopyPress

March 7, 2013 (Updated: January 26, 2023)

Blogging is work, there is no doubt about that. Sometimes it is hard to sell why “blogging” is important to businesses, but the truth is blogging is a great investment because the articles can be used in multiple ways. If you plan well and put some strategy into blogging the investment of time and money is truly worth it.

Email Marketing

When you have a strong blog you don’t have to recreate the wheel with email campaigns because your blog articles can be used in email marketing. All businesses should have their emails broken up into groups or lists, for example:

• Current Clients
• Past Clients
• SEO Clients
• PPC Clients
• Web Design Clients
• Infographic Clients
• Blog Readers
• Business Acquaintances

Basically, you create email address category lists so when you send out newsletters you can make sure the content will be of interest to those that receive it. When you put your address into categories (or lists) you can plan ahead with blog posts and make sure that the information will be useful not just for your readers, but also for people on your email lists.

Example:

Let’s say you sell infographic design services and you blog about infographics and their design four times a month. You most likely will be blogging about things that appeal to and also educate your current and potential clients.

So if you email your “Infographic Client” list once a month you could briefly touch on perhaps a discount or news about infographics and then you can choose one informative article to be the main content of your email. You could also include links to your other infographic articles for the month within that email. Essentially, the blog posts serve multiple purposes:

• Appealing to current readers and bringing in new ones
• Adding to your SEO and online marketing strategy.
• Educating and enticing your email list to invest in your services – with informative articles you create trust, which is a necessary part of making a sale.

Ebooks

Ebooks can be a great marketing tool. They allow businesses to share great information, create trust, work on reputation/branding and pull in audiences a business might not have had access to before.

Businesses can also use their blog posts to create eBooks. A future Ebook should be a part of the planning and strategy process of blogging. In the earlier example I mentioned blogging about infographics four times a month. Let’s look at how those articles could be used.

Categories / Chapters / Services

With planning, in a year’s time you would have 48 possible infographic articles to choose from for your Ebook. If you blogged about content marketing 48 times a year, SEO 24 times a year,  PPC 24 times a year and web design tips 48 times a year you now have 5 subject/chapter areas for your Ebook and a lot of articles to choose from. You might choose 12 articles per category and have at least a 60 page Ebook with your branding all over it. Each page could list your URL, contact information and social accounts.

A Chance to Sell

You could offer this Ebook for free on your blog, on social platforms and in email marketing. This free Ebook could reach a large number of people that would have never known who you were before. If you blogged to educate and target potential clients (part of your blogging strategy?) your Ebook could also sell each of the main services or categories you wrote about.

Now you have another way your blog posts can be used, Ebooks.

Blog Planning and Strategy

In my current industry, many writers blog to appeal to others that work in our industry. Basically, in our blogs we prove that we “know” what we are doing. This isn’t a bad thing if we want to create trust with our industry (and if we want a lot of website traffic), but all businesses should have a goal of blogging to sell the services they offer.

What do potential customers need to know, see and hear to invest your services? Blog posts should address these issues. Blog posts that do are great for selling through the blog, email marketing and Ebooks.

It is important to look at blogging, articles and content marketing as a long-term investment, because that is truly what they are. Your content can be used in multiple ways and it should be. Careful planning should give you multiple options.

Melissa Fach

Melissa Fach has been in the SEO industry since 2007. She created her own agency, was the Managing Editor at SEJ, worked as an editor for Moz with their community team, she worked at Pubcon as the Community Manager for 5 years, and is an editor for SEMrush US Blog.

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