In this blog post, we take a look at the pros and cons of HubSpot's blogging tool — providing a detailed analysis of its tools for anyone considering using the HubSpot CMS platform.
Blogging is an often overlooked but essential part of any successful content marketing strategy. Not only can it attract customers, but it can also aid in sales and drive traffic to your site. When it comes to using blog posts as a marketing tool, you need to make sure you are writing content that reaches your target audience.
Here are our tips to ensure your writing is successful:
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Ensuring your content focuses on your buyer personas
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Conducting keyword research
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Writing about topics that are of value to your audience
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Being consistent
However, your blog post is only as good as the blogging platform you use. If you’re going to get started with (or even scale) blogging — you need the right content management system (CMS).
While there are many blogging platforms on the market, at Huble Digital our weapon of choice is HubSpot. As an Elite HubSpot Partner, we get a lot of questions when it comes to blogging.
Two of the most common questions are:
1) What are the benefits of hosting a blog on HubSpot/using HubSpot’s blogging tool?
2) Given the benefits, should I migrate my blog to HubSpot?
As it stands, HubSpot is currently the highest-rated CMS. According to G2 Crowd (a leading independent review house), HubSpot has a rating of 4.5/5 based on 1,222 votes at the time of writing this blog.
You might be wondering — why is it rated so highly?
To provide you with some answers, in this blog we will explore some of the pros and cons of using HubSpot's blogging tool. This will allow you the opportunity to decide if HubSpot is the best tool for you to use and if you should start your migration.
Related: Want to know more about HubSpot and its world-class rankings? Learn why HubSpot is the Apple Inc. of CRMs.
The (many) pros of the HubSpot blogging tool
HubSpot’s blogging tool allows you to write, optimise, publish and analyse blog content in one place. Below we’ll cover the will elements of the HubSpot blogging tool that we favour.
✅ Infrastructure and security
The HubSpot CMS uses a global, enterprise-grade content delivery network (CDN), ensuring fast, secure access. This means that, rather than assembling the page's data and layout for each request, HubSpot will render the page ahead of time and push it to the CDN, significantly improving your site's speed and security. Also, unlike other systems, HubSpot supports multi-blog hosting — all of which can be managed in one place.
✅ Blog importing and migration made easy
The HubSpot CMS comes with a WordPress ‘blog importer’ tool. This tool enables you to migrate your WordPress blog to HubSpot with ease. In simple terms, it works by uploading the XML version of the WordPress blog to HubSpot. For more information, read how to import your content into HubSpot.
✅ Simple and intuitive interface
Another thing we love about the HubSpot blogging tool is the fact that it’s incredibly easy to use. There are two different modes to create and edit blog posts: draft mode and in-line edit mode.
✅ Insert and edit images
While most blogging tools have a feature to include images, none are as easy as HubSpot. The tool allows you to easily upload an image within seconds, that can be cloned and edited. This means your writers can do simple image editing and placement without disturbing the design team. Can’t find a suitable image? HubSpot also comes integrated with stock images.
✅ Free blogging templates
To help make blog writing less daunting, HubSpot has helped out by providing free, ready-to-use blog post templates.
✅ SEO benefits
Your blogging tool should not only help you to create great content, it should (and perhaps more importantly) also help you to optimise blog content for search engines. The HubSpot blogging tool does just that!
The tool’s optimisation tab provides SEO recommendations to improve your search rankings. From title length, to keywords and internal links — HubSpot will let you know if anything needs to be tweaked to maximise your blog post’s SEO juice.
✅ Content search
There’s no longer a need for a third-party search tool. Using HubSpot’s search engine will let your visitors easily find the content they’re looking for.
✅ Blogging dashboard and reporting
The HubSpot blogging dashboard will give you a snapshot of the most important performance data from your HubSpot-hosted blog posts. This includes traffic sources, time on page, submissions, average bounce and exit rate, new contacts and customers. Along with this dashboard, there are different closed-loop reports for marketers, from traffic sources to attribution.
✅ Blog subscription ability
HubSpot automatically generates a blog subscriber form for each blog that you create. You can also configure blog email notifications to go out instantly, weekly or monthly.
✅ Preview tool
HubSpot provides a preview tool that allows you to preview it in real-time as if it was just posted. Beyond this, you can send previews to clients and readers or use it to see if you like the look of the final blog post. This allows for easier sign off from customers as they can see the blog post.
✅ Blog ideas generator
Are you ever stuck on what topic to write about next? HubSpot has launched a handy blog ideas generator tool for you to use when you hit writer's block.
✅ Blog comments
Another great thing about the HubSpot tool is the blog comments. The blog comments dashboard gives marketers greater control over comments, allowing them to be reviewed and moderated before they’re published.
✅ Multi-language content creation
Easily manage multiple language domains and optimise each one for SEO. This can also allow users to toggle between languages.
✅ Managing your posts with tags
The HubSpot blogging tool allows you to tag posts based on whatever criteria you want. This can make managing content incredibly easy.
For example, you could group content by subject and author — or even both. You can also see how many times you’ve used a specific tag and what published posts have been tagged. HubSpot gives you the option to combine multiple blog tags.
However, while the HubSpot blogging tool can enhance your content marketing strategy, it’s not without a few pitfalls. That said, our HubSpot specialist team expects to see these pitfalls rectified in the near future and believes that the positives outweigh the few negatives in this circumstance.
The few cons of the HubSpot blogging tool
❌ Content staging limitations
Content Staging is an in-app separate content environment that allows you to update or create staged pages before publishing them to your production site. While HubSpot’s content staging tool allows you to redesign and relaunch your website in a sandbox development environment, it’s limited to website pages and landing pages. This means you can’t use the staging tool to redesign your blog – you need to replace the blog templates in your settings.
❌ HubSpot tags are universal
The tags in HubSpot are universal, meaning they will apply to every blog. This is great if you have one blog in one language, but if you have two or three or even four blogs (all covering different topics), the tags won’t translate well into different languages (unless they are proper nouns).
What’s next for HubSpot?
HubSpot is continuously improving. Not only will this improve their own journey, but also yours. As you can see, using the HubSpot blogging tool to post your blogs offers a range of benefits and can really enhance your content marketing strategy.
Hopefully, this analysis of the HubSpot blogging tool has provided you with some food for thought. If you're interested in making better use of the HubSpot CMS blogging tool — why not book a session with a Huble Digital consultant?
Or if you’re not currently using HubSpot, see how we can start your CMS onboarding process.
