It’s been a well known fact that blogging is a seriously cost-effective way to gain solid exposure on your brand. Blogging is a great way to market your business because when implemented correctly, it’s a natural process where visitors want to spread your content to their friends and followers and the it works great.
Marketers who have prioritised blogging are 13x more likely to enjoy positive ROI
Companies who blog receive 97% more links to their website
So what is it exactly which separates this blogging phenomenon from other marketing methods? Advertising, while generally a more invasive format can still be highly informative, relevant and valuable to a user – particularly online.
We’ve all been in the situation where you have been looking out for a shirt on Amazon only to find on the next few websites you visit a whole load of brands advertising their shirts. Sure, it might feel like they are interrupting your browsing experience but sometimes that ad can be exactly what you’re looking for.
The real secret to the success of Blogging is that content can feel great to share. Sharing content which has valuable statistics or useful information from a credible source puts you in a respectable position. Likewise sharing entertaining or funny content makes you yourself look witty. Sharing great content is cool. People are much less inclined to share an advert, unless it really is truly exceptional.
However, for all the great success stories there are with blogging there are plenty of failures too. Yes, not every Blog is given the time it deserves. Yes, web traffic can fluctuate so you’ll not necessarily gain the consistent numbers you have earned.
But ultimately, some Bloggers are just simply not good enough at writing or do not have the time to devote to good writing. That’s why if you are not having the success you are looking for I think that it’s worth seriously considering Podcasting.
Podcasting has many of the same qualities as Blogging. It is still a shareable, entertaining and potentially resourceful platform. Remember, there’s no shame in being a poor writer or even a podcaster. What’s important is to cater your marketing to what skills you do have and to develop those skills over time. If you’re going to do this properly it won’t feel like a chore that’s when you’ll know you’ve found the best platform for you.
67% of podcast listeners don’t mind sponsorship messages and occasionally find them useful, compared to 6% of television or commercial radio listeners.
During an annual survey, 15% of adults listened to a podcast in the month prior to the survey in 2014, up from 9% in 2008.
Podcast consumers index very highly for social networking behaviors.
Only 3% of marketers use podcasting in social media marketing, but 32% have a desire to learn how to use podcasting and 23% have plans to increase podcasting.
While it’s definitely true that more people tend to read blogs than listen to podcasts, it’s still fair to say that podcasting is booming right now. Not to mention that the volume of content created in the podcasting space is significantly less than blogging. Yes there are less listener’s than readers but you have a lot less competition in the space to make up for it.
So if you decide podcasting is for you what’s the best way to go about it? SoundCloud seems the obvious choice with over 175 million monthly listeners and over 200 countries listening each hour there is definitely the potential to shift huge volumes of traffic from SoundCloud.
Not to mention the service is free, is easy to set up, has a solid infrastructure due to the large organisation behind it and comes with deep, detailed built-in analytics. When it comes to making some noise in the podcasting space, SoundCloud is the clear choice.
Hopefully this will be useful for those of you out there who understand that digital marketing is a highly effective route to generating leads but just isn’t comfortable with writing a blog.
Of course there are other means of marketing digitally but pod-casting is one of the cheapest in the long term, much like blogging.