Last night’s “Why Blogging is Essential” event in Nashua, NH was another winner!
The turnout was great, with more than half the audience being SEMNE members of one type or another. There was also a good amount of people who were first time SEMNE-ites. We started the night with an hour of chatting and getting to know each other. It was interesting to hear what everyone was up to these days. One thing was clear, the search marketing industry is hot as everyone seemed to have plenty of work to do in their day jobs!
After a few quick SEMNE announcements, business consultant, Ted Demopoulos took to the podium and provided everyone with an enthusiastic presentation on exactly why blogging is an essential ingredient to your online marketing mix.
Here’s a few takeaways from his presentation:
- All marketers should at leat understand blogging so that it can become a part of their toolkit as necessary.
- Don’t worry about all the hype surrounding blogging, it’s simple enough to try out for yourself to get a good feel for it.
- Blogging is a great way to get people to know you, especially if you create a voice for yourself.
- Blogs can establish you as an expert, especially if you’re blogging about something that you are passionate about.
- Search engines love blogs because of all the content.
- Blogs can gain you links because bloggers love to link to other bloggers.
- The Press will often even link to bloggers.
- Links to your blog from a blogger who wrote about you will generally not have the “nofollow” attribute on the link and thus should pass link juice.
- People do business with those they know, and people feel like they know you if you have a great blog that they read all the time.
What Doesn’t Work When Blogging:
- Traditional marketing strategies, like constantly trying to sell something.
- Writing only about your own stuff and not other people’s stuff.
- Sales letter type content.
What Does Work When Blogging:
- If people happen upon your blog over and over again and always find it full of good stuff they’ll remember you.
- It’s okay to weave in your own products/services at times.
- Anything goes when it comes to your sidebar–including ads, but be smart–advertise your own stuff here, not AdSense and your competitors!
How to Create a Successful Blog:
- Practice blogging on a throwaway blog to start.
- Plan your blog…what’s the goal of it? Promoting your business? Selling your books?
- Be consistent by sticking to one particular topic and posting at least once a week (3-4 times a week even better!).
- Use a conversational tone.
- Be honest, have patience and be passionate.
When Trying to Sell the Concept of a Blog to CEOs or Others:
- Speak their language and understand that they’re basically concerned with money and risk management.
- Realize that discussions about your stuff are probably already going on elsewhere online, you can and should join the conversation.
- You can start a blog with baby-steps by turning comments off, if you’re concerned about what others might say.
- Encourage your passionate employees to blog.
- Alternately, you could do a Podcast instead as it’s easier for some CEOs to get (think “radio.”)
That’s the gist of it. There was also some great Q&A during the last half hour.
We’ll post some pics from the event soon!
Leave a Reply