This Web Wednesday is a guest post written by Dave Young. Dave is the co-founder of Shortcut Blogging. He is a partner in the Wizard of Ads marketing and consulting group, founded by Roy H. Williams. Young is the author of Why We Blog, a why-to book on blogging published in 2004.
We’ve been telling local business owners to get blogging since about 2004. Why should you blog? In my 2004 book “Why We Blog” I listed the following reasons that anyone who desires to be noticed online should be blogging.
- You have a story to tell
- You have advice to share
- Your customers have stories to tell about you
- Google wants to know that you’re still in business
A sincere blog with content relevant to the majority of its readers offers proof to the world that you are real; that your company is more than just an entry in the phone book; that you have passion about the services you provide; that you are an expert in your field.
And, more today than in any other time on the internet, your sincere and relevant blog offers proof to Google that you deserve to be found because of your passion. As recently as last year, you could still win good placement in search engine results by creating a bunch of phony-baloney, keyword-rich, blog posts and farming them out onto hundreds of article sites which linked back to your site on those same keywords. You remember those frustrating searches, don’t you? You were looking for some kind of solution to a problem and all you could find was page after page of poorly-written text that merely parroted back the words you typed into the search engine.
Well, Google got smarter. They penalized thousands of those sites earlier this year and turned the world on its head. Again.
Google knows that you want reliable, relevant, expertly-written information. They know that you are counting on them to provide it. So, they keep finding better ways of weeding out the crap and delivering the goods.
The problem is that it’s always been easier and cheaper (depending on who’s doing the writing) to pay a Search Engine Optimization firm to go out and create and spread the crap content.
When we started spreading the gospel of sincerity and relevance back in 2004, the single biggest problem we faced with our business-owner clients was that they didn’t have time to write, didn’t have the foggiest notion what to write about and many didn’t have the writing skills to pull it off even if they had the time and the ideas. That’s why the most consistently favorite module of our blog/web workshop at Wizard Academy has always been the 1-hour session where we take students through an exercise in generating topic ideas. We would lecture and teach and facilitate 3 days worth of design, html, technical tips and do all we could do to help you build a web site and the biggest crowd-pleaser was always that 1-hour brainstorm. Many told us that they would have gladly paid the entire 3-day tuition just for that single hour of clarity.
They would leave the class full of great intentions for consistency, most would fall to the wayside in less than 6 months of blogging. As it turns out, the time factor is probably the biggest culprit.
Just over a year ago, we put our heads together to figure out how to let a business owner write weekly blog posts with a bare minimum of time spent writing each month. We did it. By putting people through the valuable brainstorm exercise and then scheduling online interviews about those topics, we found that we could create weekly blog posts for any expert with a time-expenditure of about 1-hour per month from the expert. We use a staff of talented editors to convert the spoken word into written blog posts.
This technique accomplishes the nearly impossible task of getting the writing out, but it does it in a way that satisfies Google as well. Because the posts are written in the expert’s name, and published on the expert’s own site, Google can figure out that they are sincere and relevant. Because the content is focused on what the expert knows and how that knowledge can help those who need it, it becomes “sharable” content that readers are likely to spread through their social media circles.
Simply put, there’s never been a better time to start blogging!
This Web Wednesday is a guest post written by Dave Young. Dave is the co-founder of Shortcut Blogging. He is a partner in the Wizard of Ads marketing and consulting group, founded by Roy H. Williams. Young is the author of Why We Blog, a why-to book on blogging published in 2004.
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