Google and Facebook Want to Host Your Business and Life but Your Blog is your GoTo Resource

One of the things I respected about the companies I’ve worked for is their protection of that company’s brand and source of income. You should protect your businesses future.  My managers never wavered in avoiding risk, vulnerability to problems, or unwise partnerships, thus building the proverbial wall of China to opportunity development.

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Graphic Courtesy of businessinsider.com

What I didn’t agree on, was this fixed mindset that everything is considered first a threat instead of an opportunity. This conservatism unfortunately leads to dependence on passive, paid advertising schemes and neglect of the richest connection with customers – the blog.

 

Advertising makes the brand mediocre and ads are expensive. Getting addicted to PPC is an unwise business decision for a sustainable strategy.

The company blog and strategically building exceptional, original, engaging content weren’t considered a priority, and as you’ll read here, they need to be.  The blog has so many benefits which you’ll see listed below, and the key is that it helps to focus your online marketing and help it convert leads.

 

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Image courtesy of asapcanadastaffing.com

Ultimately, what drives a successful business is opportunity, not threat. And if a company should not take ownership of its marketing efforts, it not only faces threats of dependency on others, it weakens its ability to capitalize on opportunity.

After you read this epic post fully on why your blog should be the focal point of your online marketing, you’ll understand why it should be the core of your marketing strategy.

You might also want to read my posts on making impact with content, improving engagement, reverse engineering content, and building traffic volume. There’s so much to learn in digital marketing, it’s ridiculous. But you’ll be glad to stay ahead of the curve instead of behind it.

 

Let’s Turn a Weakness into a Strength

So what if we stood that traditional conservative business wisdom on its head to create a formidable business strategy that tames threats and cautiously builds and protects company equity? What if the best conservative practice is to boldly build powerful, rich, intent building, brand promoting, customer converting, content equity online so that you can control, manage, nurture, and accelerate its performance? What if you take control of what is “contextually relevant” to customers instead of constantly meeting other company’s agendas and squeezing into their mold? I’d say that’s a smart business decision and one with legs.

 

Better yet, why don’t we forecast or visualize an ideal web content strategy and then build back to where you are currently?  Reverse engineering is one of the least conservative approaches imaginable, and I think you’ll find it intriguing.

I don’t like overly conservative management, yet ironically I match up well with conservative companies that never take chances, because I keep them aware of what’s coming and help them find new trends and hop on them.  I’m a forecast guy with both eyes on the future. There are a lot of conservative business people who make decisions based on a short term view. And today, that short term road is brief and leading to Google and Facebook. Some would say that’s a dead end road.

Pay to play is the easy, effortless, and social approved way to go.  But to let these companies take control of your marketing, customer acquisition, and regulate how you market is unwise and it’s not as effective as taking full control yourself. And as you’ve probably know, Facebook is a personal social network and it’s difficult to move people’s mindset to a commercial one in an instant.

My point: All marketing activities should point to the company blog where trust building, credible, fresh, and engaging perspectives can make a deep impact on visitors and customers. In the digital era, your brand and content is your business equity and the blog supports it best (if its done well).

 

Goal: Know More about the Threat

The key issues are control, equity, autonomy, execution, content freedom, content strategy, and persuasion. If the blog isn’t the focal point, you risk everything in the long run.  As companies are discovering, if you can’t afford to pay to play on Adwords and Facebook Ads, you may be out of business.

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Those staggering ad revenues tell us that Google and Facebook pages are the home of everyone’s online marketing strategy. From any company’s perspective, those are frightening facts. Not only are companies spending their marketing budget on advertising, they are losing control of their own marketing.

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Pic courtesy of Search Engine Land

These companies are great companies. They are fair, but will they stay fair? They’re corporations owned by private investors interested only in profit maximization. Even they would tell you on a personal level that being super dependent on another company is  unwise. Read what Danny Sullivan said were the top 25 things he hated about Google.

The Threat is Always There

facebookadrevenueNot long ago, Google was entertaining plans to use the cached copies of websites, sort of hosting everyone’s website online (or their key pages on Google) for people to visit and peruse. Under that scenario, Google could claim almost total domination of the Internet (like the Borg in Star Trek), except for activity on the social media platforms. On the other hand, Facebook would also like to host your business website and personal communications on their platform. But hosting the world wide web is a gargantuan task, and a legal landmine, and both companies can’t quite tackle it. But is this the future? Facebook revenues are expected to grow several Billion per year so the future seems inevitable.

Anyone who has done pay per click advertising knows how difficult it is to convey complex value propositions in a small text ad. Differentiation and brand value take a beating. So the point I’m making is a choice to become dependent on these $billion advertising monopolies carries risk for your company in many ways which I outline below.

Google and Facebook

Through their content search algorithms, Google and Social Media platforms decide whether your content is contextually relevant, high quality, and useful to web users, but these algorithms are difficult to understand, even for an SEO expert.

Here’s the BIG dangers in dependency on Google and Facebook:

  • Dependency encourages you to neglect continuous, long term content equity and brand equity on your website (which you own outright)
  • Google’s search algorithm can deem your content as irrelevant, off topic, or even as a spam attempt
  • Google has few customer support people so you must figure out complicated issues via support pages
  • Their algorithms typecast your business into topic categories which limits your freedom to reach who you believe is a relevant customer prospect
  • Facebook limits your friends and how many you can communicate with
  • Facebook’s page design allows for little creativity in UX effectiveness for your customers
  • Facebook shows ads on your key pages
  • Google Adwords and Facebook ads take too much of your marketing budget
  • Google and Facebook content guidelines can crimp your effectiveness
  • Text advertising commoditizes your brand and brings visitors to your site with the wrong mindset
  • traffic you send to Facebook or Google may not return to your website
  • Facebook app makes your content look lame and uninteresting

What are the Advantages to Focusing on your Blog?

  1. Fresh and accumulated content for stronger presence in Google rankings — Google favors fresh, valuable content for their users
  2. Helps to draw visitors and convert them into loyal engaged customers
  3. Lets you focus in on the exact keyword phrases you need to leverage Google referrals
  4. Gives you highly shareable content to promote from within Facebook
  5. Provides the best landing pages for email, content marketing, advertising campaigns since most consumers are distrustful, burnt out and negative toward blatant commercial calls to action
  6. Greater content choice for your Facebook, Twitter, and Linked in connections
  7. More content for your visitors to enjoy and experience your brand and find a comfortable path for them
  8. Engages your own marketing staff and contributors
  9. Content that upgrades visitor intent from uninterested, superficial interest to keen awareness
  10. Lets visitors discover your brand in a natural and strategically effective way
  11. Builds more impact and engaging relations with customers
  12. Lets you set and control your site’s UX and customer journey free from distraction and competitor presence
  13. provides a direct destination for your visitors where they can experience visual content and information quickly
  14. Lets you build trust, credibility and authority in your own way
  15. Content is sharable and helps build valuable links to your website
  16. Let’s you build personalities and share stories to engage your audience
  17. Let’s visitors respond and provide feedback
  18. Let’s you analyze visitors interest in specific topics
  19. Allows you to tailor your brand and UVP to specific audiences

The key point: You must build and control your website blog as the focal point of your digital marketing strategy, to create, nurture, and protect the equity you’re building or paying for right now. The core of your web marketing strategy is the engagement and persuasive powers of your blog.

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Graphic courtesy of Hubspot.com

Your blog has the kind of content that today’s consumer wants to experience, learn from, and to engage with you. It’s not your product/service pages, aboutus page or homepage. Your blogs have continually fresh, transparent, and information rich experiences conveyed via branded stories, videos, data, and customer service online that makes your company different and special.

And your blogs get very productive as they age.

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Chart courtesy of Hubspot.com

Here’s Rand Fishkin offering up ideas on how to make your blog posts 10X better.

In terms of traffic building, impact, engagement and avoiding dependency on budget draining advertising networks, the benefits of high quality blogging are unsurpassed. Build your powerful, revenue generating website with full focus on your blog and you will be rewarded.