Orbit’s Own Recipe: Blog Casserole with Newsletter Sauce

By Andy Crestodina

Ever wonder how a web marketing company uses the web to market themselves? In this issue we invite you into our kitchen to share one of our most effective marketing recipes. So come on in and smell what we’re cooking…

Blog Casserole with Newsletter Sauce

An illustration of a measuring cupA delicious blend of email marketing and blogging, with a side of social media and article marketing.

Assuming you already have a website and you’re looking to increase traffic, this can be a tasty and nutritious dish at a very low cost. Your only commitment is time: two to three hours in the content kitchen, crafting delicious content for your readers to devour, and another hour putting your creation in the oven to bake (that is, posting it online).

Serving frequency: 2-8 weeks

Ingredients

An illustration of a bowl with a whisk and an egg breaking into the bowl3 Cups of Text (article of 500 words or more)
This could be any information useful or interesting to your audience. Think about what they like or need and start writing. Here are a few tips to keep in mind:

– Choose a title for the article that’s short and spicy. It should grab attention and whet the appetite.

– Try to make the writing search friendly by including some phrases people search for on your topic. Better yet, start by researching phrases to make sure you’re aligning your writing with a popular – but not too competitive – keyphrase. As an example, this article uses the phrase “web marketing” which is a target keyphrase for Orbit.

– Cut it up into bite-sized pieces with lots of formatting: headers, sub-heads, bullet lists, bolding, etc.  Avoid long dense paragraphs.  Sprinkle in a few links to pages on your site. Links help readers dig in for seconds if they’re hungry for more. They also help search engines understand what the article’s about.

– Finally, we recommend having it edited by a professional to make sure there’s nothing in it that would make people queasy.

2 Tablespoons Supplementary Content
Spice it up! Add pictures, statistics, famous quotes, charts, jokes, citations from other articles on the topic, etc. Choose things that support the main article.

You’ll also need a kitchen with these small appliances:

-Blogging platform (we recommend WordPress)
-Email service provider (Constant Contact, ReachMail, etc.)
-Content management system (we always use Mighty-Site)

Directions

An illustration of a whisk-First, put the article into your blogging platform as a post. Garnish this with a bit of your supplementary content. Adding even one graphic can really make the post more engaging. Make it live and turn the comments on.

-Add a short blurb and a link to the blog post on the home page of your site using your content management tool.

-Put the article into your email marketing tool. Add the rest of your supplementary content and mix well. Taste a spoonful, add any other ingredients it may need to be perfect, and send it to your list! Optional: if you use social media like Twitter and Facebook, don’t forget to tweet, post, and share.

-Cook at 350 degrees (wait) for three days.

-Check your results. Look at the open rate, the click through rate, and the number of visitors to your site over the next few days. If the cooking (and your list of recipients) is good, you should see open rates in the 10-15% range or more and a nice spike in site traffic. Also, keep an eye out for comments on your blog. If people comment, that’s good. Maybe you can start a conversation!

-Share Your Leftovers
It’s always smart to help less fortunate websites by sharing your new content. This is easy thanks to article marketing services like isnare.com and ezinearticles.com. Just submit the article and needy website owners will come and pick it up. They get a page of content and you get a link back to your brilliance.

Tip: Change the article a bit before submitting it to one of these websites. Search engines don’t like duplicate content, so it’s best not to have the exact same version of the article on your site and other sites. So before uploading to an aggregator service, move some words around and reverse some sentences. Use different sauces and spices.

So now you know what we make in our own kitchen. This is nowhere near the whole cookbook, but if you’re hungry for traffic, we recommend whipping this up every 2-8 weeks Bon appétit!

An illustration of a baking dish and serving spoon

There is more where this came from…

The best articles from this blog are available all in one place – our book. Now on it’s 6th edition.

Content Chemistry, The Illustrated Handbook for Content Marketing, is packed with practical tips, real-world examples, and expert insights. A must-read for anyone looking to build a content strategy that drives real business impact. Check out the reviews on Amazon.

Buy now direct $29.95