Just Say ‘No’: 6 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Have a Blog
I have taught our blogging workshops long enough to recognize a certain person. You may recognize her, too. In fact, it may be you. After one of my classes, a student who had been very quiet throughout the session came up to me. She wore a deep frown.
But then she broke into a grin.
“Thank you,” she said.
” For what?” I asked.
“For giving me permission not to blog,” she said.
And she isn’t the last one to say that to me.
Too many blogs
Every social media expert on the planet has one or two or three blogs. All our friends and colleagues are doing the blogging thing.
It’s easy to see why someone might think their business will go down the toilet without one. In our workshops, we walk people through the benefits and the commitment required to be a successful blogger.
6 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Blog
1. Your customers don’t go online. This is a big one. Obvious example: Say you are a service station owner. Do your customers go online to learn about your products and services? And if they do, will their habits in buying gas change as a result of reading your posts?
2. It would take you four hours to write a post. Depending on what you charge clients for your services, the marketing benefits you get from blogging could be eaten up by spending a half a day noodling with one post.
3. You don’t have anything to say. Maybe this is true and maybe it isn’t. But related to reason #2, if you are constantly stressed out because you don’t have a topic, if you have to reach deep every time you come up with a subject, this might be too time-consuming and draining an experience for you.
4. You have something to say, but you aren’t a writer. This may be good or bad, depending on what you think “writing” looks like. But if you get tongue-tied every time you sit down to write, or you have an inner critic, say, your 5th grade teacher, who just won’t let up on you, maybe you should rethink things. (Or maybe you should hire someone to blog for you.)
5. You and your computer don’t have much together time. I hear this frequently. “I’m away from the office a lot.” Part of blogging is posting. But another key part is responding to your readers. If you don’t recognize them with a comment, they might not come back.
6. You have to be careful about what you say. Maybe you are an attorney or a psychologist. If you blog under your business identity, weigh carefully whether you risk someone construing your personal post as professional advice.
Your Old Blog Posts Aren’t Dead. They’re Just Sleeping.
Post by Judy Dunn
We’ve been tricked. All of us.
That freshly baked, piping hot, sweet-smelling, pie called Original Content grabbed us by the collar. Assaulted our nostrils. Made us salivate.
This pie was made just for me. It’s fresh and juicy. No one else has had a bite. I want the first piece.
We bloggers know this pie well. We should, because we baked it.
As we create the content pie that becomes a new blog post, someone is standing over our shoulder. Maybe it’s that Internet marketer who sends us their weekly newsletter. Or that hot-shot author whose book, “Create Original Content or Die,” is on the bestseller list. And they are whispering:
“Say something new! ”
“Write with your own voice!”
“Be original. Be Cree-A-tive.”
Why Bringing Back an Old Blog Post Can Be a Good Thing
Attention spans are murderously short on the Web. Plus, you are always collecting new readers.
So you have your memory-challenged regular readers. And you have a brand new audience that has never read your old posts. That means that with just a little tweaking (or a lot, if it makes sense), you can get more google juice.
Of course, if you just start republishing old posts randomly, without choosing carefully, you’ll just be rehashing stale, boring ideas. But done right, you’ll get a surge in traffic and, very possibly, some new subscribers.
5 Steps to Waking Up an Old Post
- Revisit your older posts often. Your goal here is to find which posts were the most popular. If you see a certain post being viewed again and again, this is prime content to bring back. Sometimes it will be a post that had a lot of reader comments and sometimes not. Pay particular attention if the referring site (where the reader came from) is Google. If people are searching for help with a certain problem and they keep finding your blog post, you have a winner and you should consider republishing it.
- Look at your title, sub-heads and formatting with a fresh eye. Reworking the title just a little bit could make your post even more popular in a Google search. An added benefit: Google will look at it with fresh eyes, too. Google Analytics even tells you what terms people were using in their search when they found your post. Adding intriguing sub-heads also helps—to break up the text and draw the eye to the important parts of your post. And check your spacing. Do paragraph breaks often to help readers skim and scan. Sometime my paragraphs are just one sentence long, especially if I want to add emphasis to a thought.
- Consider updating the content. Your most popular posts got to be that way for a reason. If you can add new content, or rewrite, you’ll capture more readers, people who wanted to know more about what you were talking about. So think about the new things you could add.
- Add new tags. A tag is merely a keyword or category used to describe the topic of your post. Tags are indexed by Google and Technorati, so someone doing a Google search is more likely to come across your posts. Revisit your tags and think about whether adding a few new ones might help more people find your post.
- Think about adding a new image or two. If you are like me, you didn’t give much thought to images when you first started blogging. But images can be very powerful, hitting the part of the brain that triggers memory and emotions. The result: You attract more readers—and keep them engaged in your post. For more advice on what the right image can do for your post, read 5 Ways the Right Photo Can Get You More Blog Readers. For some good sources of photos, see my recent post, How to Find Spectacular Free and Low-Cost Images for Your Blog Post.
What about you? Do you republish old blog posts? Do you think it’s a good strategy?
Get Rid of the Google Landing Page Blues: 5 Tips for Increasing Online Sales with a ‘Portal Site’
Whether you are a massage therapist, dog trainer, executive sales coach, event planner, or someone else, if you are selling information products online, or are thinking about doing it, you might already know how hard it is to get your visitor’s undivided attention.
Your website visitor, who must be convinced to buy a product they might have never heard of, is a little different from the customer who goes to Amazon.com to buy a copy of Seth Godin’s latest bestseller-something she already knows she wants. What you must do, then, is persuade her to buy your product.
On a large, multi-page website, your reader has many choices: click here, go there, do this. If you have several products (e-books, DVD sets, audio recordings, etc.), your visitor can easily become overwhelmed.
To attract visitors and convince them to buy, consider creating landing pages. Also called micro-sites, landing pages are really just sales letters posted on the Web that allow you to target the very people who are most interested in what you are selling, the people most likely to buy.
Great idea. Except for the fact that Google recognizes landing pages as sales letters and does not rate sites with sales copy very highly. So you don’t get nearly as much organic search traffic. Many online marketers get around this by creating a portal site, one central place with valuable free content for the search engines and links to their individual landing pages.
5 Tips for Increasing Online Sales with a ‘Portal Site’
- Create a simple URL/address for your portal site. It helps, especially as you begin to sell more products, to have a simple, central site. When someone asks what products you offer, it’s easy because you just have to remember one site address and direct them to that.
- Create links from your portal site to each of the landing pages for your individual products. You will want to send people to separate landing pages for each product, each with its unique domain name. Choose names that are easy to remember.
- Create sections of your site where visitors can download free content. This is key because it will increase your organic search rankings and drive traffic to your site. Because Google loves content, especially fresh content, include articles, special reports, and other information that is timely and helpful and will bring you lots of visitors. Valuable content will also establish you as an expert and build the reader trust that leads to sales.
- Include a sign-up for your free, opt-in e-newsletter and links to your blog and other social media profiles. It’s a great way to build your list organically, find quality prospects, and get your content out to more people.
- From your portal site, send visitors to separate landing pages with their own unique domain names. Make each page simple, with no menu bar, no confusing options. You want your reader to focus on the reasons she needs to buy your product right now. So just include your sales letter and link to a form where your visitors can buy your product.
A well-thought out portal site linking to landing pages with amazing copy that sells your unique products will go a long way in pumping up your online sales.
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Website Redesign: 5 Copywriting Questions to Ask Yourself
These days, especially if you have a WordPress website, you can easily make updates as your business grows and evolves. When your target client and message change, it’s a good idea to make sure the content of your website reflects that.
Sure, you want the details right. But you also want your site to reflect the heart of your business. Because that is what your clients and customers will respond to. When you engage their senses and emotions, they will stick around-to the end of your message.
5 Copywriting Questions to Ask Yourself in a Website Redesign
To get your content right, with a nice balance of facts and emotional appeal, ask yourself these 5 questions:
- Is the content focused on my needs or those of my clients? Are you talking too much about yourself: your experience, your degrees, your portfolio? Because your visitors don’t care about that. All they want is a solution to their problems.
- Do the words I use show that I know my audience? What works for accountants with MBA’s or company CEO’s would be disastrous if you are selling to teenagers looking for the best deal on a skateboard.
- Do I know my business’s brand and personality? Try narrowing your company’s brand down to three adjectives: Is it loyal, fun-loving, serious, friendly, trustworthy, playful, reliable, irreverent, or something else? Keep these descriptive words in the back of your mind as you write your website’s copy.
- Does my passion about my business show? Picture your copy as eyes. Is your visitor seeing them light up when you talk about your product or service? Don’t be afraid to get excited. Show in your copy that you deeply believe in what you do. It will shine through in your message.
- Does my unique “voice” come through in the website copy? Every website visit is a conversation. Visitors click to ask questions. The answers you give them show them who you are. It’s simple: Know your company’s brand and personality and put that voice in your copy.
