Blogs and websites: like peanut butter and jelly

I frequently suggest to clients they combine their blog and website. But often the mentality is that websites are websites and blogs are blogs.

  Most often, the core content of a website changes less frequently the content of a blog, making it much less interesting for search engines and readers looking for something new.

But when blogs are linked to social media distribution and then combined into a website they become stronger together: the blog becomes a traffic and search engine magnet pulling in attention that gets shared with the less dynamic website content. I’ve never seen an actual case that documented this working…until now:

TMG Brand Communications is a boutique public relations and marketing communications agency in New York City. TMG had an excellent web site which presented its capabilities and samples of its work. But the site was lightly trafficked. A post on Dan McCarthy's ViralHousingFix describes the strategy:

“In the last quarter of 2009, TMG developed a blog centered, integrated social media marketing strategy to elevate its brand presence. TMG established a blog on a sub-domain of the tmg-media URL. This blog, “Tami McCarthy’s BuzzCloud”, was set up “using WordPress and the Cordobo Green Park theme. The agency also created a TMG Brand Communications fan page on Facebook, pointing the page to the primary TMG domain. The Networked Blogs application distributed blog posts to the Facebook page, and a plug-in was used to distribute posts to Twitter.”

The impact was immediate. In the six months following the launch of the blog: TMG increased web traffic to its TMGpr.com agency site and to its new blog, Buzzcloud, by 198%. In addition: 

• Visits to TMGpr.com, the agency site, increased 32% in the six-month period following the blog launch;
• Search engines drove 61% more traffic to the agency site in the six-month period;
• The number of keywords that drove traffic to TMG’s agency site gained from 425 to 1,178 in the six-month period. 

This success story was all about leveraging content. At the center of this strategy was Tami McCarthy’s blog, which constantly pushed content into a social media system that included a Facebook page, and Twitter account.

By combining the blog with the existing TMG website, overall site traffic jumped 198% in six months!

Are you maintaining your website and blog separately? If you are, it’s like eating peanut butter and jelly in separate sandwiches.   

 

Link to Tami’s blog: http://buzzcloud.tmgpr.com/

Read more detail of this case study on Dan McCarthy's ViralHousingFix: http://www.viralhousingfix.com/tag/google-inc  

Comments

[Tami McCarthy]

Josh,

Thanks so much for the recognition here. Very much appreciated. I hope it inspires more people to integrate their digital assets, it sure does pay off!

-Tami