All Employees Should Contribute to Website Content Marketing
Have you ever noticed that when you perform a Google search for popular keywords, news websites and large e-commerce websites rank highest in SERPS? This is because these websites add fresh new content to their websites everyday.
News websites often add new stories to their websites every few hours (or even minutes). Google’s spider loves to regularly visit and crawl these new web pages, index them, and deliver this fresh new content to its readership. The same applies to e-commerce websites or classifieds websites like eBay and Kijiji. Their content is added by users that are looking to buy, sell, or swap products. New products are added almost every minute. These listings are quickly indexed by Google for its users.
As such, if you provide Google with regular fresh new content, you can improve the search engine ranking of your website for relevant keywords. Most businesses that don’t have user-generated-content select an employee or contractor who is given the task of creating content. A free and important source of content that is often overlooked is the employees.
Employees sell the company’s products or services everyday. They know more about the product than anyone else. Each employee has a different area of expertise related to the product. They have valuable knowledge that can be shared on a company’s blog.
Allow employees to take part in creating content by sharing their knowledge with the world.
Employees don’t have to be professional writers. A blog post can be a very simple, conversational piece of less than 500 words. Of course, if some employees want to write longer, in-depth articles of over 1,000 words, that’s great. But it’s not necessary.
Let’s say each employee commits to post 1 short article each week. That would add up to about 50 articles per year per employee. Depending on the number of contributors, this can easily amount to hundreds of useful articles quickly. If some employees want to write more frequently, that’s even better.
What can employees write about?
They can write about any interesting task they’re working on that week. They can offer helpful tips to prospective customers. They can address frequently asked questions that they get from customers. There is so much valuable information that employees already have and can share on a company’s website.
Every employee should have a blog user account. Each user’s access can be restricted to being able to add blog posts without Administrator capabilities.
Each employee can also set up a Google Plus account and add a profile picture. In this way, when the articles shows up in Google searches, the snippet in SERPS will display the author’s name & picture, the post date, and an excerpt of the article. A name and picture increase the click-through rate of articles.
It’s important to also add an author byline to each employee’s articles.
You can use a simple plugin to automatically add an author byline to each article contributed by the author. The byline can promote the author’s area of expertise and provide contact information for readers to contact him. This can bring valuable leads to the business.
People love to self-promote and share what they know.
Let employees promote themselves by sharing their knowledge. This knowledge already exists in your business just waiting to be shared. The personal connections developed between employee writers and readers bring more leads and sales to your business.
When articles are written and published to the blog, they can also be automatically posted to all the company’s social media accounts. You can use a simple social media auto-post plugin to do this. The backlinks to the articles on social media will drive the company’s social media followers back to the website.
This strategy even works well for traditional professional services businesses.
Let’s conclude with an example where this strategy works well. Let’s look at a professional services business such as a law firm. Different lawyers at the firm have different areas of expertise. Each lawyer can write 1 short blog post each week. It could take less than 30 minutes.
He promotes himself to potential clients. Prospective clients can contact him about his services using the contact information provided in his author byline.
In this way, the lawyer brings in new leads and income to the firm. And he adds valuable content to the website which contributes to the website content marketing strategy of the firm.