This was a really interesting interview with Mike Blumenthal done by milestoneinternet.
I wanted to highlight the most important take-away for my clients and blog readers from this interview:
“The issue in marketing always should be about return. Some businesses have a limited amount of time and a limited capacity and there’s always this temptation to do the hottest, newest social network whether it’s Google+, Facebook or Twitter. Here are five things you should make sure happens before you think about new social tool or channel:
- You’ve have properly optimized your website onsite and offsite;
- Properly optimized your Google places listing and have done local optimization;
- Are actively collecting emails and communicating with your customer base via a direct communication;
- Managing the review process; and
- Putting in place a good blog; good blog. If you have those five things, then I think you’re ready to pursue Facebook and Twitter and really benefit from them because you’ll be building equity around things you own rather than giving Facebook all of your content.
Benu: I promised you that that was the last question, but last question. Why blog?
Mike: Blogging generates 50% links and about 70% more traffic [than sites without blogs]. It’s an opportunity to position yourself as an expert. My career literally changed because of my blog. “
It’s Always about ROI
I tell this to my clients ALL the time. There are lots of ways to skin a cat, but the most important thing to look at when choosing what type of internet marketing you are going to do is to look at where you will get the best ROI for YOUR business. And not all businesses are the same, some businesses might be better to advertise and market on Facebook, while other businesses it would be better to market with local SEO campaigns and focus on Google Places optimization.
Invest in Blogging
The one nail I’d like to hit over the head again is “blogging” and why it’s uber important for every business to heavily invest in becoming a content publisher. From my experience blogging has almost always delivered a strong ROI (regardless of niche), therefore just about every business will and can benefit from blogging.
Blogging also promotes the only thing you can trust 100%, your brand and your website. Even though we want to have a presence on all these social media sites, at the end of the day you do not own those properties and ultimately do not have any control over what happens there. The goal is to always build your brand and your website and then use the social media sites to funnel people back to your website and brand, so you can build your own audience, newsletter lists, etc.
Bigger Sites Get More Traffic
All a small business owner needs to understand is more pages on your website equals more traffic. Bigger sites equals more traffic and better rankings (usually). By creating new pages of useful content (in any medium: articles, videos, photos, podcasts, powerpoint, etc) you are able to develop an audience. If you are not sure what to blog about check out this post here.
Virtual real estate is much like traditional real estate, every time you publish a new page on your website it’s kinda like building a new room to your house you can rent out. That page will bring you relevant traffic for years to come, so as you build more and more pages you will get more and more relevant traffic. Every business should have a content creation strategy, I personally recommend 1 abstract news post a day and 4 “how to articles” or “FAQ’s posts” a month + 1 link bait piece a month. Be smart about your blogging topics and try to mine the long-tail when blogging. This will give the average site 25 new pages a month. In a year’s time, that is 300 new pages to your website. If your website is 15-30 pages (like most small business websites) don’t you think you’ll get more relevant traffic from 300 pages versus 15…? Of course, you will!
Do The Math on the Power Of Blogging
Then just multiply the above content creation strategy by a few years. After 3 years, you’ll have 900+ pages on your website.
Wow!
If you’re a small business owner, most of your competitors will have 15-25 paged sites. You’d dwarf them with this strategy.
Think of the internal linking power you have alone. This how wikipedia and amazon.com rank so well for so many terms. They’ve leverage the size of their links + internal linking to rank.
All you need to understand is:
Bigger sites = more traffic. More traffic = equals more leads. More leads = more sales. More sales = more profits!
