“Blogging can convert traffic into leads and leads into customers. Blogging can “warm up” your cold calls and traffic from other sources. If someone receives your cold call, they may be more receptive if they’ve read your blog and received value from it.”
Back in 2012 I discovered Seth Godin. I started with Purple Cow.
Immediately I was hooked and started reading as much as possible.
Then I found audiobooks and used to bike around my neighborhood listening to Seth at 3x speed. A couple of his books are why I started blogging back then: Linchpin and Tribes.
Linchpin talks about being the only person at a company that is indispensable – and one of the ways he says to do that is to study every aspect of the company and meet a bunch of people.
Tribes says to write. Write as often as possible and publish that writing somewhere on the internet.
Reading these books finally got me to start blogging, and I started a website called Following the Rules.
Fast forward to 4 years later and that blog has brought in job offers, 6 figures of revenue (in mobile development and marketing leads), and gave me something to talk about at parties and networking events.
Now I blog for clients, here are some of the results we were able to get just over the last few months. This is new traffic to the blog – we also installed a welcome mat and brought in new email subscribers.
Traffic to a client’s blog
Their average project size is 6 figures, and this blog has brought them at least 4 in the last 3 months, on top of our other marketing efforts.
So how do you get these same results for your business? Here’s what I learned.
Stay Consistent
“While creating and publishing consistent content may seem a bit tough at first, it’ll really help you build reader loyalty and grow your audience.”
It seems like every social media channel loves consistency.. twitter gurus say to tweet 5x a day, bloggers say blog twice a week, people that love email marketing say send emails as regularly as once a day…
And consistency is key.
I used to write a blog post a week without fail on following the rules, and when I did that, the email list grew – sometimes by 50 or a 100 a month without any promotion what so ever.
That’s because google loves consistent content.
It also gives your readers something to expect.
Think about the content you listen to or the people you follow online.. is it the one offs or is it someone who’s publishing all the time?
I love Gary Vaynerchuk (daily videos), Seth Godin (daily emails), Neville Medhora (weekly blog post), The Nerdist Podcast (weekly podcasts) and Kevin Smith (8 podcasts a week).
Along with a bunch of Youtubers.
If you’re consistent you’ll get inside your customers minds and make them come to expect you.
You become their friends.
And then they buy your crap.
Use Personal, Sometimes Embarrassing Stories
“Because business is personal, sharing a little of yourself makes you more accessible. People like doing business with other people.”
One of my most popular posts on Following the Rules is How to Learn Guitar in Two Weeks. This one brings in about 20% of my search traffic (my most popular post is about chipotle’s portion sizes).
This post opens with a story of how left out I felt at a party, when a random dude came in with a guitar and ended up getting close with a girl I liked.
That event sparked me to learn guitar, I wrote a post about it and bam.. instant success… after 6 months.
It takes time for search engines to find you, but if you’re human in your posts and you reference stuff that’s happened to you or your company – you’ll hook the readers and they’ll stay to read more posts.
The average person landing on that guitar posts reads an average of 3.4 other posts on the site before leaving. It’s the same for my client’s blogs too – hook them with the personal story + value and you’ll have a reader for a little while.
Ok last thing…
Promote Your Crap
“The real magic lies in content promotion. Without it, your content will struggle to earn a social mention, let alone a quality backlink.” –Robbie Richards
I used to write posts then just let them sit out there and see what happens.
The Dom & Tom blog was the same way.. this client had no promotion strategy, and their 300 hits a month of mostly bot traffic was all they had to show for it.
I got in there, set them up with a Twitter account and started tweeting posts out with hashtags 5x a day. Just that one change bumped them up to 800 hits a month in 30 days.
Then we added LinkedIn and facebook. Then posting things on Reddit. Finally we just started @mentioning and reaching out to bloggers on their behalf.
Their traffic is on track to surpass 2,000 hits a month – all from relevant keywords and followers – within 90 days of us starting, and it’s all thanks to promotion.
Hubspot has such a great infographic on blog post promotion that I use it to train up our entire writing team.
And that’s all you need to do.
If you don’t want or don’t have the time to do all this stuff for every post – X27 can do it for you: read more info on us here.
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