According to Business2Community, B2B companies that blog only 1-2x/month generate 70% more leads than those who don’t blog. If you had to identify one trend for 2014 blogs, it’s easy to say that lists were HOT. However, in the spirit of publishing quality over quantity, let’s look at some quality business blogging tips for 2015. If you prefer quantity, stick with the lists, they aren’t going away anytime soon.

Blogging Tips 2015:

1 Incorporate videos

Incorporate videos into your company’s blog, article section or about us page. A study from Cisco estimates that 79% of all internet traffic in 2018 will be video traffic. Even if their estimate is high, the answer is simple: Upload kick@*! videos to your own blog or information section, write text about the video, and gain new traffic and conversions. Yes, YouTube will give your video more hits/clicks/views, but what about traffic on your website? It’s time to move some of your video eggs from the YouTube basket onto your own internet space.

Need some tips to incorporate videos into your blog? Here you go:

• Video marketing statistics from Digital Sherpa.
• Vital has a short but helpful guide on optimizing videos for SEO.
• Check out Vertical Measures, who posted this back in 2012 (obviously ahead of their time!). Notice how they provide a transcription below the video, the words ensure that Google can accurately categorize and index their page.
• Interested in Vlogging? Here’s a link to a fabulous beginner’s guide from Amy Schmittauer, aka Founder and Face of a popular video blog, “Triple S”.

2 Incorporate personas

This process involves multiple steps and some planning, but the results will capture leads from your target audience, as opposed to capturing traffic from an irrelevant audience. Incorporating personas into blog content can be in-depth, data driven, or an overview approach can be taken to test it out.

If you’re interested in the highly detailed, no room for error approach, check out this post from iPullRank.

If you’re looking for a guide to creating personas, it will depend on the resources at your disposal. This is a good place to start, Tom Webster explains what not to do when creating personas. Then move onto Hubspot’s 100 questions to create a buyer persona. Ready to add more science and data to the mix? Check out another post by Michael King with iPull Rank.

3 Uncover the longtail

Veteran SEO professionals probably know this; but how often do they stick to it, and implement a content strategy around it? Clients and business owners want to focus on the top performing traffic keywords, and often create all blog content around these targets. If you’re an “old school” marketer, and you already know about longtail, how often do you research it, and go after it as a strategy? Not often enough, in most cases. Let’s revisit, and apply a blogging strategy to it.

Longtail keywords encompass keywords with less search volume than the top targets and are more specific or longer in length. Example: Top keyword target based on search volume: blogging. Longtail options: blogging for beginners, blogging definition, blogging sites…and on down the line.

How do you turn this into a blogging strategy? Here’s a step by step guide. Or a list. Whatever, here you go:

• Plug your top 10 keywords into Ubersuggest for longtail options. Pick out all of the phrases that apply to your website, your client base, and your business.
• Take these longtail keywords, and plug them into a keyword research tool. Find out the volume on each word, and focus on the top tiered performers. Skip the very top performers; everyone is going after those.
• Create blog titles for each longtail keyword identified from the last two steps. This list may give you enough ideas for the next six months!
• Want to take it one step further? Copy and paste your list into MergeWords, and add modifiers such as “how to”, “most popular”, “best of”, etc.

If you’ve found the tips above helpful, you will like the iPullRank version as well.

Blogging Tips 2015: Video, Personas, and Longtail. Content marketing is no longer about rankings or SERP results; it’s about providing the right resources for your audience. None of these tips are as easy as creating a list, but we are confident these tips will generate traffic and leads.