Blog Hacking 101

by Sam Hull
October 13, 2016

If you ever find yourself tasked with writing a blog about something that you may not be familiar with, you need to do your due diligence to ensure accuracy of your content. This can come from other relevant blog articles, interviewing industry experts, and backing your statements up with data and examples.  You can call this process whatever you like, but I call it Blog Hacking. Essentially you are piecing information together from multiple different sources to define your own opinion and learn more about the subject while completing a challenging assignment.

Relevant Blog Articles

Obviously there is some sensitivity here because you can’t just copy and paste direct from someone else’s blog article. You can pull some quotes and give credit to the author for context, but what I like to do is to read through each article and find what stand out most to me.  Then I put that piece into my own words and link back to the article with a quote or relevant text link. This is how you can develop your own opinion based on facts and evidence from other articles.

Expert Interviews

This is something that we do a lot at Revenue River Marketing. Here’s an example, I recently completed an article on Google AdWords campaigns. I am by no means a PPC expert and have limited experience with Google AdWords so I reached out to our Paid Search Manager, Drew Erickson, for a quick 30 minute call to discuss the topic.  The keyword there is discuss, Marc Herschberger always says, “you never want to go into these calls as if you were completing a book report for a class. Make it a discussion and do your research on the topic beforehand.” Before jumping on the phone, I made sure to do as much research as possible on Google AdWords campaigns so that I was prepared to have a conversation with Drew. I always use Uber Conference so that I can record the conversation and not be distracted by taking notes during the call.

Back it up with Data

Before you write your article and commit to your findings make sure to test your theories and back up your statements with data or examples. Anyone can come up with some good ideas but experts can demonstrate their knowledge by proving their findings. For example, in a recent article I stated that “it is important to know who you are trying to reach when you are crafting your Tweets.”  I backed this up with the example that  “if you are marketing for a travel agency that works mostly with families and groups, it is important to identify what those people are looking for and what’s going to be relevant to share with them. Just sharing industry specific trends and relevant articles may not get them to click through to your landing page or content offer.” Understanding how to prove your theories is how you can become an expert in a new subject.

Blog Hacking is all about diligent research and using your network. The most important thing to remember is that there will never be a subject that you cannot write about if you follow these best practices. If you want to read more articles like this, check out Revenue River Marketing’s blog.

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