Your Customers are Waiting to Hear from You on Your Blog

While others are winding their digital marketing efforts down as 2016 ends, they should actually be looking ahead to 2017 and 2018 and planning a strategy for unlimited growth. Next year’s success happens now. How can you be the best? By creating a powerful blog and budgeting for the resources it needs.

Poor performance and unfair comparisons to traditional media are 2 reasons blogs haven’t been respected. There’s plenty of travel companies, real estate companies, insurance companies, IT companies, manufacturers blogging but they’ve done it wrong. Blogging when done from a successful model, with skill and imagination, and with a great strategy enjoy success. As you’ll see in the blogs shown below, it takes time to get rolling, but when they do, wow, the results are amazing.

Blogs don’t sound romantic but they are seriously undervalued. It’s time we corrected this injustice.

Why Does Everyone Look for the Blog?

Whenever web users arrives on a website, they will look for the blog. Blogs are still the most respected source of information about brands, products, trends, and information. Research shows consumers trust blogs more than mainstream media. Trust and credibility are important and while consumers trust the power of big brand money, they also know that truth and good value are likely to be demonstrated on a small business blog.

Jeff Bullas, an Australian blogger who specializes in social media marketing gives his top 9 reasons why a blog is so important for your professional and personal life:

  1. Blogs refine your thoughts
  2. Blogs reward the creator
  3. Blogs amplify your humanity
  4. Blogs connect us to our tribes
  5. Blogs give introverts a voice
  6. Blogs reward the “new age” publishers
  7. Blogs embrace the experimenters
  8. Blogs accelerate discovery
  9. Blogs open up a world without borders

These same benefits apply to companies as well. And if you map company revenue success online using your stats, you’ll see a corresponding growth in revenue and customer loyalty.  This happened with Marcus Sheridan and the Sales Lion which you’ll read about shortly.

We haven’t yet explored the full potential of blogs to create customers and grow a company’s sales and it’s you who decides how powerful yours will be. If you aren’t fully convinced of the power of blogging, then you won’t commit the resources, time, and respect it needs to be your top producing digital marketing asset. It deserves a chance. And when you hear that professional bloggers are earning hundreds of thousands of dollars on their blogs, you have to think there’s something here.

Here’s digital marketer Neil Patel with his 5 stages of blog growth and how he says you can generate $100,000 a month from a blog. He’s been very successful with his own blog which you can see is taking off at an accelerated rate. Yours could do this too. What is the key to big traffic and revenue from a blog? Content StrategyBlog Strategy + SEO = Big Results.

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Neilpatel.com traffic stats courtesy of SemRush. Stats for smaller websites may not be accurate.

And how about Larry Kim with his Wordstream Blog?

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Wordstream.com traffic stats courtesy of SemRush

And how about Ariana Huffington’s blog which is only 6 years old. Is she could amass this level of traffic, why couldn’t you?

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Huffington Post traffic stats courtesy of SemRush

It all suggests that the blog has immense power and the potential market is almost infinite. It can get the reach and it can be persuasive. If you create an excellent blog strategy, do the hard work of researching and presenting valuable insight, the kind of experience visitors want, and continually working on it, it can be more productive than any other digital marketing campaign you could do.

And there’s more successful people using blogs. How about Australian Jeff Bullas who has become influential in the social media marketing channel.

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JeffBullas.com traffic stats courtesy of SemRush

Marcus Sheridan was a swimming pool company owner and his business was failing until he started blogging and helping customers with their problems. He was so successful at this he became an online marketing consultant who teaches content marketing.

With the blog’s success, Sheridan naturally transitioned to coaching and consulting by 2011, as well as becoming a HubSpot partner that same year.

Can you separate blogging from social media and content marketing? And how about SEO? They all go together well as Marcus discovered. You can think of the blog as a key landing page for content marketing material because product pages aren’t persuasive enough.

The truth is that Marcus didn’t leverage the power of SEO enough. He could have been more successful and accelerated his site’s growth to capture more customers and get his brand spread further.

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Screenshot courtesy of TheSalesLion.com

As Marcus says in this seminar, the reasons a blogging and inbound marketing strategy doesn’t work is because:

  1. lack of leadership and buy in from management – no respect for the value proposition
  2. lack of buy-in from employees and ownership of project
  3. lack of content
  4. lack of strategy and strategist
  5. too many silos
  6. lack of good tools

Now that we know it is so powerful and we know what’s causing the trouble, we’re ready to make it happen.

If you’ve avoided blogging because you didn’t understand it, review my post on the power of blogging strategy and how to reverse engineer content. You can build this traffic and persuasion beast and continue perfecting it just like all of the above did. They were where you are right now and summoned up the courage to build a powerful blog that would transform their business.

I can help you achieve phenomenal performance using reverse content engineeringmaking an impact, improving engagement, and optimizing your unique value proposition. I have a process to simplify and tame the complexity by focusing on the big picture and pursuing it with determination. Don’t let the details get you down.

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