What No One Ever Tells You About Blogging
Every where you turn, you’ll find people raving about blogging, with good reason. Blogs are easy to use communication tools… and businesses NEED to communicate with potential customers. So if you’re a business and you need to communicate to customers WHY they need to be doing business with you… you need a blog.
However, while blogs make PERFECT sense as a business marketing tool… there are drawbacks to blogging.
What no one ever tells you about blogging
Blogging is not marketing magic.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it is true.
I’ve had several clients who paid to have the most popular and powerful blogging software on the planet set up on their own hosting account. I installed essential plug ins to make their Wordpress blog even more attractive to the search engines.
More than once I have gotten emails from clients wondering why their blogs aren’t getting great search engine rankings on their highly desired keyword terms. When I load their blog, I’m greeted with the “Hello World” initial Wordpress blog post. There are no other posts published. There are no categories set up. Nothing but “Hello World”.
Successful Blogging Takes Planning
Planning and research are both ESSENTIAL keys to blogging success.
Planning begins with knowing who your target audience is and why they are at your blog is the most critical element in your blog’s success.
(Here’s a poorly kept secret… it’s also the key to your BUSINESS SUCCESS!!! That’s why I wrote the book Beyond the Niche: Essential Tools You Need to Create Marketing Messages that Deliver Results
Once you know who your audience is, then you need to figure out what keywords they are using to find your site. This is the “research” side of th equation.
Top A-list bloggers have shared that on average more than 50% of their traffic comes from the search engines. That means using the right keywords is a KEY element in your blogging success.
There are plenty of free tools you can use to find keywords. However, I got an email today which calls into question the accuracy of those free keyword tools. My client ran her favorite keyword through 3 separate free keyword tools and got the following:
Google: “Average”
Overture — 1211
Keyword Discovery — 600
Wordtracker — not listed
So, I ran her keywords using a new tool I recently discovered called Wordze.
Wordze gave the COMPLETE picture on what was happening with her keyword. It not only showed the standard info… it also showed her who her competitors are on that keyword as well.
PRICELESS!!!
Using the link above saves you $10 a month if you decide to subscribe.
Successful Blogging Takes Effort
The most successful blogs have posts published on a regular basis… at least once a week… more is better.
Many, many blogs begin with a flurry of posts… and then, the new blog owner loses interest and stops posting. Defining your blog’s direction is essential to achieving blogging success.
Successful Blogging Takes Time
There is no such thing as an overnight success when it comes to blogging. The blogs that do “race” to the top usually find their stay at the top to be precarious at best.
You won’t launch your blog tomorrow and then cash a six figure adsense check within 30 days. It just doesn’t work that way.
However, if you’re willing to invest the time and effort into this powerful business communication tool… then you’ll find that your blog can act as a powerful, versatile, easy to use marketing tool.
Blogs are Blogs…and success doesn’t matter what platform you’re using…. right?
Blogs are blogs… that’s what you’d think. Wordpress, Typepad, Blogger blogs or even the free Wordpress.com blogs… they’re all the same… right? That’s exactly what I used to think but over the past two years, I’ve seen evidence to the contrary.
For example, I had one client who launched a blog on a VERY popular free blogging site on my recommendation.
The plan was to use the free blog as “bait” for her sales site. The plan was to capture targeted reader’s attention and those readers who were interested would click through to the frequent references to her sales website.
She blogged faithfully five times a week for several months yet when I ran the log files on her sales site, we didn’t see a single visitor come from her free blog to the sales site. In other words, over a 6-9 month period not a single person who visited her blog and went on to visit her web site.
I probably need to add here that I wasn’t using a free “stats” counter to track this or even the free “stats” programs available for free. I was using ClickTracks to analyze her log files.
Sure, my client didn’t have any $$$$ invested in development, but she was investing a significant amount of time and effort in her blogging efforts. (She’s a WONDERFUL writer, by the way!)
During this time, I launched quite a few wordpress self hosted blogs for other clients and the testimonials from those clients were outstanding.
It just didn’t make sense.
These people weren’t blogging as faithfully as the client with the free blog nor were they as well “branded” and tightly targeted as she had been with her free blog yet they were seeing growth in their blogs. There was increased traffic with the self hosted blogs (something we couldn’t track with the free blog) but most measurably, when you typed the other blogs into Google, the blogs came up in the search. That was NOT the case when it came to the free blog.
Because of what I had seen, I advised my client to launch a self hosted Wordpress blog. (I’m a boot strapping entrepreneur’s best friend and hate to recommend spending money they don’t have to spend.)
Her Wordpress blog was hosted on it’s own hosting account with a unique domain name pointing to the Wordpress software installation. Her new blog acts as a “free standing” web site.
I then installed the necessary plug ins to “pump up” performance and she went to work blogging on the new site with the same enthusiasm she was on the free blog. She put a notice up on her free blog account that her blog was “moving” but we didn’t port the content over to the new blog.
Within 6 weeks of launching the self hosted Wordpress blog, we began seeing traffic from her new blog coming to her HTML “storefront” web site. That traffic started as a trickle and is now a reliable flow.
Thanks to this hard working client, and a few that aren’t quite so enthusiastic when it comes to their blogs…. I’ve developed a real confidence in recommending that small business owners make the investment to launch a self hosted Wordpress blog.
So these days, when I get an email asking me how to create an “alive and vibrant” blog presence, the first step I suggest is to launch a self hosted Wordpress blog. It’s been my experience that free blogs just don’t get the attention they deserve or the traction for long term growth.
Wordpress rocks for SEO
This is one for the “more proof” files. As you know, I’m a real fan of Wordpress blogs. I’ve found that for my clients, who are not tech savvy, a Wordpress blog allows them to compete successfully with “web experts” in getting their website found on the internet.
Mark Gosh on the Weblog Tools Collection did his own unscientific research project and was kind enough to share his findings. In his “experiment” he typed in a keyword and took a look at what results were returned. In each case, the results returned a WordPress blog post on every Google Search.
March challenged his blog’s readers to find keywords that didn’t return such favorable responses, and they found a few.
I’ve written about how I’ve had clients who launched a Wordpress self hosted blog in addition to maintaining an established blog on another “popular” platform who were SHOCKED at how quickly their Wordpress blogs rose to the top when they searched for their own name.
Reading the comments on Mark’s post, you’ll see their experiences are not uncommon.
