The blog is one of the most powerful tools available to marketers. A well-executed blog can turn a brand name into a household name. The Huffington Post, for example, was started as a blog and even today, can still be classified that way.

A successful marketing blog has three critical components. The first is fascinating content–give them something good to read! Second, you need carefully selected SEO keywords that have been built into that content. Finally, it absolutely must be updated regularly. Search engines recognize stale or abandoned blogs and stop ranking them in results.

Midas Marketing has as many blogging packages available as we have clients. When we begin working with someone new, our goal is to learn as much as we can about the client’s business and industry so we can find that unique angle that makes their business special. Don’t worry if you’re in a glamour-less industry; if you have the knowledge, we’ll find the content that makes people want to read.

Next, we consult our state-of-the-art statistics software to find out what keywords people are most likely to type into their search bars when they’re looking for someone like you. It doesn’t matter if you’re an online services company that can serve customers anywhere in the world or a dentist with an office in a specific region. We’ll find the keywords that lead people to you.

Finally, we identify the blog’s most narrow, specific purposes so we can begin developing the medium-to-long-term shape and personality of the blog. How many posts per month will be best? How many words should they be? Should they focus more on educating readers or entertaining them?

A successful marketing blog takes more time and work than most independent business owners can spare. Even if they can squeeze enough resources into the effort, it’s easy for the blog to get lost in the chaos of the internet, making it a waste of time. That’s why it is so incredibly helpful to hire a professional who can both write shareable content and get that content seen by everyone who needs to see it–while you keep doing what you do best.

There are two main reasons for updating your company’s official blog with consistency. The first is simply the SEO value–more keywords published on your website means more chances to appear in search results. Secondly, a person qualifies himself as a warm lead when he searches for the keywords that bring him to your blog, and only gets warmer as he reads.

Now, as your blog grows and becomes relevant to more searches, the website it’s attached to will become relevant to more searches as well. We call this phenomenon “website authority”, and it’s a key measure of success in online marketing. In a nutshell, the more widely read your blog becomes, the better it–and your website–will be treated by search engines.

But besides that, it’s always in your best interest to keep giving the world more interesting content. A fan of your blog is immensely more likely to contact your company for a quote, even if they don’t do it after their first read. If they find themselves absorbed by your content again and again, they will come to realize your expertise and get more likely over time to reach out.

The price of a blog package at Midas depends on three factors: word count, number of posts, and special requirements.

For many small businesses, few if any blog posts need to be over 500 words.  For others, especially in more complex industries, that’s simply not enough space to say anything worthwhile; sometimes, a dynamite series of 2000-word articles is what will get the job done. During the planning stage, we review a client’s business, goals, and existing marketing assets to determine the optimal average length for their posts.

Likewise, one post a month is sometimes all that’s needed to get what we need from an official blog. Still other times, especially in more disruptive industries, content is king and a post or two or more every week is necessary. Again, it all depends on the business, its goals, and what it has already achieved.

Finally, certain blogs require specialized knowledge or research to write well. These and other such “special requirements” are the third factor that determines the price of a Midas blog. How hard is it to write about your company well? How much technical jargon will be needed? Will composing the blog be a matter of paraphrasing your concise explanations, or of generating content from the ground up through research? We’ll uncover these caveats–if they exist–at the beginning, during the planning phase.

Being a good writer is necessary to produce an effective marketing blog–but it’s not sufficient. Besides providing fascinating content, a successful marketing blogger includes carefully selected SEO keywords without compromising readability; they also understand formatting, image placement, image selection, metadescriptions for search engine indexing, and all the other moving parts of the marketing part of a marketing blog.

This is why marketing agencies hire dedicated bloggers–it’s not enough to upload an interesting article. Once it’s published, we have to make sure search engine users will find it; we have to make sure they’ll be the right search engine users (i.e., leads that qualify themselves by finding the blog); we also have to make sure that once they’ve read the post, they’ll have reasons to reach out for a quote and can do so easily.

At Midas, we use cutting-edge software to find out exactly which SEO terms are the most likely to drive traffic to your website. Statistically, do people search for “analytics companies” more than “analytics firms”? How many instances of “analysis” should we include for every instance of “analytics”? These questions are but the tip of the iceberg and just one example of how a competent marketing agency can help secure a rewarding return on the resources that get invested into a blog.

The most valuable service that a blogging consultant can offer is optimization. The internet is crowded; it’s easier than ever for a blog post–no matter how fabulously written–to sit in a remote corner of the web and glow like a lightbulb in an empty room, perpetually unseen by God and man.

At Midas, we love providing comprehensive blogging services, including composition–but some businesses just need help getting some exposure for the posts they’ve already published. In these cases, they hire us, first of all, to identify the best keywords to focus on for maximum clicks. This alone can increase traffic tenfold, and we can do it for individual posts, whole blogs, and even whole websites.

We can also make recommendations about how to repurpose content for email campaigns and newsletters, tweets and Facebook updates, and much (much, much) more depending on your following, subscriber base, and website activity.

Nobody trusts advertisements anymore, and they shouldn’t. Ads are inherently biased and notoriously short on real information. Oftentimes, advertising is a nuisance for businesses as well–ads have to be changed every so often and each new incarnation costs.

This is why content marketing is so useful both for small businesses and their potential customers. From the perspective of readers, they get to see proof of a company’s expertise before ever hearing a sales pitch, which engenders sound trust. Meanwhile, the company gets to become a thought leader on a topic using content they buy once and can reap returns from forever.

Whereas a company can create a cute picture that shows their website in an hour, a blog is a long-term campaign with an implied level of intellectual quality. Quite simply, most business owners are too busy running their companies to write high-quality content frequently enough and get it seen by the masses.

That’s why Midas Marketing offers comprehensive, done-for-you blogging. We do everything from topic and keyword research to the actual composition of posts to SEO optimizing to formatting and design. We’ll even make recommendations for how to adapt blog content for other media–newsletters, social media, and the myriad other available marketing channels. And we always send content to our clients for approval before publishing.