[close]1/22

BLOGGING FOR PLACEMENTS: HOW YOUR STAFFING FIRM CAN DRIVE SALESAND FILL M ORE JOB ORDERS WITH A BLOG

Stand OUT | Stay TOP of mind | Sell MORE

[close]2/22

No. They don’t NEED a website. Or staffi ng software.Or sales people for that matter.

But if you want to run a profi table, rapidly growing staffi ng fi rm, a blog is a must-have sales and recruiting tool.

DO STAFFING FIRMSNEED TO BLOG?

[close]3/22

1. Blogging increases traffi c to your website.

More visitors = more placements.

2. Blogging improves your ranking on Google. And Bing. And Yahoo!Better rankings = more web traffi c.

3. Blogging makes social media marketing easy.

More social sharing = more web traffi c.

4. Blogging makes you look like an expert.

Expert status = more sales opportunities (and higher margins).

5. Blogging gives your sales team more to discuss on their calls.Better conversations = higher margins.

6. Blogging drives people to take action.

That means more job orders. And more job applications.

7. Blogging is 100% effective.It has worked with every company. We've seen increased traffi c by, on average, more than 200%!

WHY IS BLOGGING SO IMPORTANT?

an expert.

[close]4/22

BLOGGING & SEOHow do you get to Carnegie Hall?Practice. Practice. Practice!

And how do you get to the top of Google results?Blog. Blog. Blog!

[close]5/22

BLOGGING & SEOSo why is blogging so important for SEO?It’s about Penguins, Pandas and Hummingbirds!

In the old days (2008 and before), SEO was mainly about keywords.Pick the right keywords. Optimize your web pages around those words.Stuff the words into the page content. And wait to get ranked by Google.

Then Google changed the rules.

In an effort to help searchers fi nd more relevant results, Google had two major algorithm changes, know as their Penguin and Panda updates.

Without getting into technical details, these changes rewarded websites that produced new, relevant content...and penalized sites that were static (not changing), stuffed full of keywords, fi lled with low-quality articles (i.e., duplicate content), and those that leveraged backlinks from “content farms” and other sites that had been created specifi cally to try to beat Google at SEO.

[close]6/22

WHAT WORKS INSEO TODAY?• Be relevant.

Offer content that is really of interest to your audience. If your content provides answers to the questions people are asking (and searching for), your website will show up more often in search results.

• Create fresh content.Google rewards sites that constantly produce new, original content. The more content you produce, the more search engine traffi c you will get.

Just one blog post a week will increase search traffi c to your website dramatically!

• Include rich media.Google loves video (they own YouTube, the world’s #2 search engine). Your content should include text, video and images.

• Be socially relevant.Google rewards content (and websites) that are being shared and discussed on social media (which is why Google+ and other social sites are becoming increasingly important).

• Focus on topics of interest...not keywords.Forget about being #1 on Google for a specifi c term. Instead, focus on increasing the total volume of traffi c to your website by becoming relevant for an ever-increasing number of keywords, terms and phrases.

Our clients have seen the number of keywords referring traffi c to their websites jump from a few hundred to many thousands after just a few months of blogging.

• Understand how your clients and candidates search.

Okay, we lied. You don’t want to entirely ignore keywords. You need your content to be written around the words people use when they search. For example, more people search for “employment agency” than “staffi ng fi rm.” So make sure your content is written using the terms your clients and candidates use.

[close]7/22

DID YOU KNOW?People process images 60,000 times faster than text.And a blog post with a picture will get liked, shared and commented on 98% more often.

That’s why YOU MUST include visuals in your content development strategy!

[close]8/22

THE ANATOMY OF A BLOG POSTa how-to guide for optimizing your content

URL. Each post gets its own URL on your website. You can control these URLs, so try to include commonly used search terms with each post.

Blog Title.The title of your blog isn’t just the headline, it’s also the fi rst thing a search engine will see (after the URL). Your titles should be optimized for search engines by including commonly searched keywords and addressing specifi c problems and interests your target audience has. For example, if you’re blogging about an accounting job in San Diego, don’t just use a title like “Accounting Job,” be more descriptive using a title like “Accounting job with top manufacturing fi rm in San Diego, CA.”

[close]9/22

THE ANATOMY OF A BLOG POSTa how-to guide for optimizing your content

Category. Think of categories as the table of contents for your blog. You want to create categories that make it easy for humans (and search engines) to fi nd content (blog posts) that fi t a certain theme. These categories direct people to relevant content, which helps in how your blog pages get optimized.

Tags. If categories are the table of contents, tags are the index. Tags allow you to organize content based on relevant keywords and phrases. While you don’t want to overdo tags (typically include 5 to 8 per post), they will help drive search traffi c to your posts by organizing your content around keyword phrases that people might be searching.

[close]10/22

1.2 BILLION people are on Facebook.Google+ has 300 MILLION active users.259 MILLION people have LinkedIn profi les.Twitter users send over 400 MILLION tweets EVERY DAY.

It’s no secret that social media is big.

And if you want to drive more employers and job seekers to your website, there’s no better place to do it than on social sites.

BLOGGING & SOCIAL MEDIA

[close]11/22

Because social media is about dialogue. Blogging gives you something to talk about.

Look at your Facebook news feed. What do you see?People sharing personal updates. Stories they like. Pictures that capture their attention.

How about LinkedIn?It’s non-stop content sharing. Articles. Blog posts. eBooks. Videos.

Google+? Twitter?More of the same. Lots more!

If you’re in staffi ng sales, or you’re a recruiter, and you want to be socially relevant, you need to be active in social discussions...where your clients and candidates hang out.

And when you share relevant blog posts, you’re not just active in the discussion, you’re driving people back to your company website.

WHY BLOGGING IS SO IMPORTANT FOR SOCIAL MEDIA

[close]12/22

Our clients who regularly share blog posts on social media

see as much as 30% of their web traffi c coming from social sites.

[close]13/22

Step 1: Create great content.It all starts with knowing your clients and candidates. What are their concerns? Interests? Challenges? Don’t just focus on staffi ng issues (sorry folks, but most people outside the staffi ng industry only spend a tiny percentage of their time thinking about staffi ng issues). Your content should focus on the things that are most relevant to your audience.

SO HOW DO YOU LEVERAGE A BLOG IN SOCIAL MEDIA?

Step 2: Add the content to your blog.A good blog post is 300 to 500 words in length. If you have more to say, break your content into multiple posts. Or create an eBook, slideshare, video or other rich media presentation that you can embed into a post on your blog.

[close]14/22

Step 3: Automate distribution.

One of the AWESOME things about a blog is that it allows you to create RSS feeds. In plain English, this means that you can create a stream of content from your blog that will automatically go to other places.

RSS feeds can be used within your website, for example to feed company news to the home page of your site. Or to feed your candidate-focused content to the job-seekers page on your site.

RSS feeds can also be used to automatically send your content to social sites.

• Feed your posts to Twitter.This can be done to a corporate Twitter account as well as the Twitter accounts of each of your staff members.

• Feed candidate-focused content (or all content) to Facebook.Keep your company page up to date by automating content sharing. But please note that if your blog is fi lled with jobs, you would not want to send all the jobs to Facebook. Overdoing job sharing on Facebook is a quick way to turn off candidates.

• Feed your content to individual status updates on LinkedIn.Unfortunately, you cannot feed content to your company profi le or to LinkedIn groups. But you can feed it to the status updates of individuals in your fi rm.

SO HOW DO YOU LEVERAGE A BLOG IN SOCIAL MEDIA?

[close]15/22

DID YOU KNOW?Sharing content on LinkedIn Groups can give you exposure to tens of thousands of prospects...

• Join the groups where your clients and candidates hang out.• Share relevant blog posts with those groups.• Your posts show up in the status updates and emails sent to all group members!

It’s a no-cost way to expose your company and your ideas to the right people.

[close]16/22

SO HOW DO YOU LEVERAGE A BLOG IN SOCIAL MEDIA?Step 4: Share blog posts manually.Some sites do not allow you to automate content sharing (Google+, LinkedIn Groups). And other sites give more weight to content you share manually (Facebook). So as part of your social sharing strategy, you need to plan a process for manually sharing your blog posts on social media.

Ideally, your blog should be set up with social sharing icons on each post. Using these icons, your sales team and recruiters can share blog posts on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ with just one click. You might also use a widget like ShareThis to make it easy to share your content on dozens of social sites.

Step 5: Discuss! Share. Like. And +1.While each social site works differently, the general rule of thumb is that the more interaction that occurs with your content, the more people will see your content.

So once your content has been shared to Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+, encourage your team members to Like the content, share it with their networks, and add comments to turn the blog post into a dialogue about the topic of the blog.

[close]17/22

...not playing on social media!Social media can seem like a big time waster.But where else can you directly interact with prospects?

Social media is easier than cold calling. And a lot more effective. It lets you go around the gatekeepers, bypass voice mail, and avoid getting lost in an inbox stuffed with email.

Social media gives you the ability to directly connect and nurture relationships with staffi ng decision makers.

At Haley Marketing, we suggest that staffi ng executives REQUIRE that their sales people spend 15 to 30 minutes a day on social media doing the following things:

1. Building their personal networks.2. Sharing blog content with relevant groups.3. One-to-one content sharing using direct messaging.4. Commenting on content shared by others.5. Asking and answering questions.

BUT I WANT MY SALES PEOPLE SELLING...

[close]18/22

If you build it, they will come.Only in the movie “Field of Dreams.”

If you build it. Regularly update it. Share it. Discuss it.

Then they will come.

But getting people to come to your blog is not enough.

OPTIMIZING YOUR BLOG FOR MAXIMUM RESPONSE

they will come.

But getting people to come to your blog is not enough.

[close]19/22

GETTING PEOPLE TO TAKE ACTION1. Design your blog for MAXIMUM response.

Make your blog page sell. Many staffi ng blogs are nothing more than a list of posts sorted in reverse chronological order. But that won’t get you more placements.

To drive response from your blog, your blog page should include:

• Categories. Make it easy for people to fi nd relevant information...including information about your services, your case studies and testimonials.

• Calls to action.Use the header, footer and sidebar on your blog page to actively encourage people to contact you about your services:

- Include a button to Request an Employee.

- Provide a list of Hot Jobs with a link to Search All Jobs.

- Include an Apply Now button.

- Invite candidates to opt-in for job alerts.

- Promote top candidates (this could even be a category on your blog!).

• More calls to action. Most of the visitors to your site will not be looking to use your services right away. But you still want to capture their contact information. Here are a few ideas for using your blog page for lead capture:

- Include an eNewsletter opt-in.

- Invite people to sign up for an upcoming webinar or job fair.

- Include a link to landing pages to download an eBook or white paper.

BUY NOW

CLICK HERE READ MORE

[close]20/22

GETTING PEOPLE TO TAKE ACTION2. Each post can “sell” too.

Don’t take this the wrong way. Your blog should not be fi lled with relentless pitches for your services. But you should do things to drive response in each post.

Here are a few ideas:

• Ask questions. If you want people to post comments on your blog or respond on social media, include thought-provoking or provocative questions in your post.

• Create internal links. Blog posts can, and should, link to other content on your website. This can include linking to related posts, information about your services, current jobs, or even profi les of top candidates. When creating links, try to use keyword phrases as the “anchor” for the link. For example, if you wanted to link to your job openings, you might create an internal link like “Check out the hottest manufacturing jobs in St. Louis.”

• Include company info in each post. Many times your blog content is not going to be read on your blog. Your content may be read on a social site, or with an RSS reader, or on another website. Be sure each post identifi es who you are and how to contact you. We often include text in the posts stating “This article fi rst appeared on the Ask Haley blog by Haley Marketing | www.haleymarketing.com.”

• Create promotional graphics. Do you have white papers to offer? Videos to share? Upcoming webinars to promote? Have standard graphics designed that you can embed into your posts and then link to appropriate landing pages on your website. You might even create standard graphics for “Search Jobs” and “Request an Employee.”

[close]21/22

THE LAST 64 WORDS...As you can see, staffi ng and recruiting fi rms can realizetremendous value from blogging.

• More traffi c from search engines...• Expanded reach through social media... • Better access to staffi ng decision makers...• More inbound sales leads...• Improved recruiting...• More strategic sales conversations...• And even direct marketing of jobs and talent.

If you want more placements, BUY NOW...with less work,

GET BLOGGING.

[close]22/22

Need help putting your blog into action?That’s what we do!

At Haley Marketing, we are 100% focused on the staffing industry. We can help you set up your blog, write content, create compelling visuals, and integrate your blog with social media ... and your sales efforts.

For more information on our blogging and social media marketing services,please contact us today.

Solutions to the staffing industry’s challenges.

Prices YOU can afford.FOR MORE INFORMATION, CALL US TODAY.

1-888-696-2900www.haleymarketing.com