Blogging experts agree that the #1 most important aspect of popularity is great content. But that seems like the easy part. The struggle seems to be: how do you get more people to your blog in the first place?

Business leaders struggle with how to increase blog traffic while leveraging social media – but it’s easier than it looks when you start with a strategic plan for creating content that's relevant to your ideal buyers - the ones you want to read your blog. When you start viewing the blog writing through the eyes of your prospects, you'll start increasing visitors. Here are some other tips.

Tracking metrics is crucial for effective contractor marketing. Unfortunately, many small and mid-sized businesses engage in contractor marketing without understanding all the metrics involved, or why they matter to their bottom line. Understanding and recording metrics is crucial for optimizing marketing spend and knowing where your efforts are delivering ROI. 

Let’s look at some of the critical metrics that are keys to evaluate home contractor marketing performance:

Those of you who know me well know that in a prior life I worked for a private equity company that focused on acquiring mid-size manufacturing companies.  I then became a small business owner/operator investing and running a specialized construction company.  I can tell you that it has not always been easy to make the long-term investment over the short-term instant results when it comes to marketing. Do you feel the same way?

Seeing my logo on a web banner, my name on a billboard, or hearing my voice on a radio ad made me feel like I was doing something to promote my business. So many eyeballs, and so many ears! It’s gotta be working, right?

Attribution is a huge buzzword in the marketing space right now, and for good reason. For many companies, metrics-driven challenges (such as generating leads and proving ROI) continue to be the biggest challenges in their organizations, and they lack tools to help them track concrete results for their spends.

Similarly, members of associations struggle to attribute the results of their association membership fees. Without attribution, members don’t see the value and your association might be on the chopping block for their investment in coming years.

The cliché phrase, “No pain, no gain” probably originated in one of the ubiquitous exercise videos from the early ‘80s. Jane Fonda, anyone? Still, the basic concept continues to apply across lots of different activities.

Ask any SEO company representative, and they’ll tell you that the fastest way to gain better rankings in search engines is to produce more content. More is better appears to be the motto when it comes to search engine optimization and rankings. And before Google (on which over 70% of searches is conducted) released its four major algorithm parts for search engine results quality, that was the truth.

Recently, the Content Marketing Institute released its 2015 B2B Manufacturing Content Marketing Report. The Institute discovered that businesses are developing new, sales-focused marketing approaches – but need to find innovative ways of attaining their goals!