How a portfolio of content can yield valuable dividends.

As the center piece of our online marketing strategy, the value of our blog cannot be understated.

So it makes sense for us to invest a lot of effort and resources in continually creating blog content for a number of reasons. These marketing investments have proven to be one of the most effective ways for us to:

• | Demonstrate our business experience, expertise and market success
• | Provide relevant information, tips and perspectives for our clients and prospects
• | Enhance lead generation
• | Support our search results ranking
• | Grow our social communities
• | Foster sharing and distribution
• | Build brand awareness

However, the relentless challenge of content marketing each and every week can sometimes be a bit overwhelming. Running a company, meeting the needs of customers and deadlines or sharing just a little too much on Facebook, can all relegate today’s essential marketing requirement of continuous and consistent blogging to a lower priority.

A proven investment strategy.

When that happens, we do our best to recalibrate our priorities and re-focus on blogging. Its’ importance to our content marketing strategy and how it produces inbound traffic and leads simply can’t be ignored. In fact, we’ve come to equate blogging as the equivalent of a dollar-cost-averaging strategy in financial products investing.

By spreading our investments in content over an extended period of time, we lower the average cost of these assets while at the same time capitalize on market swings of interest (sharing, comments, subscribes, etc.) in the content we create.

It’s a proven investment strategy that requires a longer-term commitment and discipline for success. And just like the more familiar financial investment strategy, it diffuses the risk of putting all of our content investment into one infrequently created asset that might not get the intended results we were hoping for. (Like buying Facebook shares at the IPO price?!?!)

ROI = recognition and extended reach.

Recently, some of our content has been reviewed and accepted into a curated industry blog with a significant following: Business2Community.com.  We are honored and thrilled to have our posts distributed through this highly visible and influential network. And we have already benefited from B2C’s wide reach with significant additional traffic to our website and blog.

In addition, we’ve now become featured contributors to SocialMediaToday. We look forward to continuing to provide relevant content, commentary, and insights to their site subscribers and visitors too.

A valuable return on investment.

By creating entertaining, consistently helpful, relevant and high-quality content on your blog and participating in distribution through different communities, you can do much more than drive traffic and leads. Over time, you can enhance the opportunity to become a credible and recognized content creator that drives influence and distribution through other industry blogs and other well-known publications. This is what is frequently described as “thought leadership” in a domain.

And when you systemize and structure the creation of content in a recurring manner that uses best editorial practices, keyword research, search optimization, and social distribution, the results can produce a viral effect that enhances both your personal and company brand.

By paying attention to your analytics and refining content that is meeting your goals, it can lead to more interactions, engagements and hopefully revenue for you and your business.

Hi-Yield dividends that keep paying out.

Continuous investment in content creation can yield even more amazing dividends. Because once created and published, these investments have permanency. This enables your content to be found forever when a search query is made on the Internet that contains your content’s keywords. When did you ever get that kind of return on your ads? Or shares of Zynga?

This amazing value is something we never take for granted. It often provides us with all the incentive we need to keep our blogging and content creation efforts consistent and frequent.

What return has your content delivered?

Have you found success with your investments in blog content? Is the effort yielding meaningful results over time? Share what has been working for you.