Want to get your content marketing questions answered by the experts speaking at the Social Media Examiner Content Success Summit in February? If so, this is the place. Welcome to our new Guest Expert Series.

To Participate

Participating is easy! Simply post your questions for this week’s Q&A host Heidi Cohen in this thread.

About Our Guest Expert

Heidi Cohen is president of Riverside Marketing Strategies where she works with online media companies and online retailers to increase profitability with innovative marketing programs. During the course of 20 years, Heidi has obtained deep experience in direct and digital marketing across a broad array of products. Heidi shares her actionable marketing expertise every day on her blog as well as guest writing for Content Marketing Institute, Social Media Examiner and ClickZ.

Hey Heidi!

Do you think any search engines will rise to challenge Google in the near future?  Also, do you think it’s true that Facebook is in the works with their own search engine?

Thanks!

Hi Heidi!

I am working on launching my blog and need to put together a blog post distribution plan and an overall launch plan. Do you have any suggestions for these? I’d like to do something creative for the launch, but I’m not sure what.

Thanks!

Heidi Thompson

Heidi –

Congrats on jumping into the blogging pool. 

I recommend a soft launch for your blog as a way of easing into blogging.  It’s more important to blog consistently across a set of topics on a regular basis than to go all out blogging every day and not be able to keep up the publication schedule. Once you’ve got the rhythm down, then you can think about a bigger splash.
To this end, I recommend using an editorial calendar and brainstorming regular posts for a two period. Think like an offline magazine with regular columns. Before you open your blog, I suggest having 5-10 posts published so that your blog doesn’t look deserted and another 5 evergreen posts ready to go To ensure you can keep your publishing consistent once your blog is open.

Understand that it takes about 2-3 posts per week to get most of the lead generation value of posting every day and about 50 posts before you get traction based on research by Hubspot. 

Participate in the Sunday night #BlogChats on Twitter to get more support. (8pm CT)

Happy marketing,Heidi Cohen