I hear it all the time from Small Business owners, “Do I have to blog?”
2 years ago, no; you could have gotten by with Adwords and a website as your complete online marketing strategy. Small business owners started there, and then began adding in LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter links on their sites, then they may have stepped up to sending an email newsletter once a month. Slowly, everything changed and because it was “slowly” changing, it was easy to add tasks to your internet marketing.
Then Google Stepped In
This year (2012), Google’s Penguin and Panda updates have changed everything. In one sense, Google has leveled the playing field, and in another sense, Google made it impossible to easily and cheaply rank for average long tail keywords.
Now, you must be either all in, or all out. There is no sense dabbling and testing the waters on the Internet anymore, you won’t see any benefit from it. Now, Google is essentially requiring that you have a social media presence. The only way to get social media to work is to get your followers engaged in your content. That means you will have to be able to share it as effectively as possible – hence a blog.
What Are You Trying to Accomplish?
Have you ever driven by a car dealership at 9:30pm and seen several couples parked on the side of the road walking through the lot looking in the windows of the cars?
The Internet made it possible to do that with every business. Any time of the day 24/7, you can research products and services, and virtually kick the tires of almost all of them.
As Internet Marketers realized the power of this, we learned how to make the webpages of businesses engage the customers/visitors more with calls to action – join email newsletters, download a .pdf booklet or guide.
Then social media hit the scene which naturally tied into blogging. Why?
Because the goal of every business is to get the word out about their products and services and develop a base of devoted fans.
When done right, that’s what Social media and blogging are extremely good at. Now, we have additional calls to action we can use such as sign up for the RSS feed; Sign up for specific, specialized content; Like us on Facebook; +1 us on Google; Follow us on Twitter; etc.
Using blogging and social media, we have many new ways to engage our growing audience. But …
Where Are You Going to Get All This Content?
From YOU!
The absolute truth is: If you don’t blog and develop a social media presence and continuously work on your email marketing list (and customer list), your only real hope to get people to your site is Adwords and PPC. But with AdWords, you have to be relevant in order to not pay through the nose for clicks. In layman’s terms, that means if you were on the first page for the keyword you were advertising on, you would have a reasonably low cost for each click.
But the only way to get on the first page is to have a site, a blog, and an actively growing social media presence!
You can see the issue. Now days, you have to have a highly ranking website in order to pay low click through rates, and you have to have an active blog and social media presence in order to rank well on Google.
Thus, because AdWords ads require your site to be relevant (ranking) on the keyword you are purchasing click-throughs on, you have to Blog.
The alternative is to stick to offline marketing tactics only, and drive traffic to your website through those offline means. The problem with this is: depending upon the market you are in, you may be vulnerable to competitors who focus on building audiences online with quality content. Even if your market isn’t one where your competition is this savvy, they won’t remain complacent and out of touch forever!
Realize What’s Happening Now and the Ramifications for the Future.
It’s becoming harder and harder to get attention on the Internet. Now, the Internet is not a “free” marketing medium anymore. Even if you do it all yourself, your time is valuable and you will need to spend lots of it learning and doing, building a list and creating content for them.
The speed with which everything is changing has increased and will continue to increase. That’s why you desperately need to START NOW!
You can’t afford to wait any longer, you must Start blogging and building your audience now. You do that with quality content. Which will be the topic of a post for another time.
What do you think? Have you noticed the speed with which everything is changing? Have you also seen businesses drop off the search engines recently? What are your thoughts? We’d love to hear them!
