Is Blogging Worth It For SMEs?

Welcome back! Good to see you. If you haven't seen it, here's the archive of my best writing. Thanks for visiting!

Is blogging “worth it” for SME owners/marketing managers whose primary goal is generate sales leads and sales online?

By this I mean: how does blogging stack up against other online marketing methods available to business owners in terms of Return On Investment, Return On Time and Return On Effort?

There’s no one-size-fits all answer to this question, but let me share a few insights after working with many SME clients from multiple industries on their web marketing strategy, which has often included a blogging component.

Blogging for “offline” businesses

In this post, I’m mainly considering how a typical “offline” business selling products or services can use blogging to enhance the performance of their website.

There are two broad scenarios I’ll consider:

1. Scenario 1: “Necessity-based” businesses - when your prospects and clients don’t have a particular interest in what you do beyond the result or outcome you can produce for them. This would apply to many strong  “Yellow Pages” categories such as pest control, landscaping, rubbish removal etc.
2. Scenario 2: “Interest-based” businesses – when your prospects and clients can identify more strongly with the “subject matter” behind the products and services you provide, especially in “information-rich” industries  (e.g. model aeroplanes, financial services, Ultimate Fighting Championship subscriptions, coaching clubs etc).

In other words, some businesses and industries tend to easily spawn a wealth of information that your prospects and clients will eagerly lap up.  In others, prospects will have little personal interest in drilling deeper into what you offer (e.g. latest techniques in rubbish removal).

There may also be cases where different customer segments may fall into the first category (e.g. a home computer shopper searching for the lowest price desktop PC) and others the second category (e.g. an avid computer geek following the launch of the latest must-have graphics card).

What this means for your blogging strategy

Where your customers don’t care deeply for your subject matter and are simply looking for a result (Scenario 1 above), the main benefit blogging can offer your business is that of increased search engine visibility.

Briefly:

1. Search engines like “fresh” content.  Blogs offer a convenient way to add fresh content without interfering with key conversion pages.
2. Regular blog updates allow you to add posts which target long-tail search terms.  It is difficult to rank the same website for multiple competitive terms, especially when you have  a limited number of pages on your website.  Blogging effectively allows you to add more search-engine optimised pages, which target less competitive key phrases.  Good rankings for many specific long-tail or multi-word key phrases can add up quickly.
3. With this strategy, it’s important to quickly convert the search into a conversion.  Because users are not necessarily interested in your content, clear calls to action and/or seasonal offers are vital to ensure you do something with the traffic you generate.

Then there’s Scenario 2 - in which the user is potentially highly interested in what you have to say.

Here you have the option to use your blog to gain a position of Thought Leadership in your market.   You’re not as focused on the quick conversion as you are in building a reputation with prospects, clients and even colleagues and competitors in your market.

There may be the same SEO benefits as with Scenario 1, but the principal benefit of this strategy are the long term conversion and loyalty benefits.

Bottom line: this strategy takes longer to gain traction and requires a higher standard of content writing to demonstrate the Thought Leadership which fuels outsized results.

What will be the investment of time, money and effort?

With Scenario 1, the investment of time, money and effort can be fairly modest.

Design and setup of a blog may cost anywhere from $0 if you DIY to a few thousand dollars (sure, you can spend more if you go for a super-premium design which is overkill in 99.9% of cases).

Then there’s content production.  As the aim is not to demonstrate Thought Leadership with cutting edge content, it is easier in this scenario to outsource the content production function to a writer with very little effect on results.

Having one blog post a week written and published might cost you a couple of hundred dollars a month – a fairly modest investment.  (This is also one of the deliverables we often roll into our Gold Client Internet Marketing Program for SMEs).

Blog content usually gets picked up by search engines fairly quickly and it doesn’t take long to build up a base of posts to feed the search engines.  Within 3 to 6 months of regular posting, you can expect to get a comparatively large proportion of your organic search traffic via your blog.

However, you should recognise that this can be a bit of a “brute force” strategy – a large proportion of the traffic you generate via your blog will NOT convert – so it’s also important to ensure your offers and conversion strategy is sufficient to squeeze some conversions out of the traffic you do get.

Now let’s look at Scenario 2.  Setup costs will be similar to Scenario 1, but the content generation task tends to be much more labour and time intensive for the Thought Leader (who is often the business owner).

For example, if you’re an expert in cutting-edge loan structuring approaches for property investors, it’s hard to employ a low-cost writer to produce content that does your strategies justice and engages your audience.

My friend and blogging expert Yaro Starak talks about building a successful blog in 2 hours a day.  The problem for business owners is that most don’t have that amount of time to devote to a strategy that may take 6 to 12 months to gain sufficient traction to generate a payoff.

Many business owners under-estimate the ongoing work required to keep a Thought Leadership blog going. It’s common to see business owners write a few good articles before getting distracted by other things and it doesn’t take long for a blog to get “stale” and lose traction.

There are ways for business owners to leverage their time with a Thought Leadership blog (e.g. dictating post ideas to a good writer and proofreading the draft before posting), but there is still a substantial investment of time involved to ensure both post quality and frequency.

How long will it take to see results?

As mentioned above, in Scenario 1 you may see search engine benefits in 3 to 6 months sufficient to justify the ongoing investment.

In Scenario 2, the payoff tends to be slower (although it can be large if you manage to achieve a position of true Thought Leadership).

I’ve been writing this blog for 6 years now and although the payoff is sufficient to keep writing, by no means has blogging been one of my highest-return marketing activities.  However, I do see blogging as one component of the pre-eminence building process.

How does blogging stack up against alternative promotional approaches?

I am no doubt revealing my bias toward targeteded traffic+ conversion here, but I see blogging primarily as a supplementary promotional strategy for “offline” businesses rather than a primary one.

My advice is always to get your conversion funnel right first so that you know you can convert a visitor into a client.  You should test and tweak your funnel to ensure maximum throughput and maximum velocity from first-time visitor to loyal client.

Only once your conversion funnel is in place would I recommend looking at blogging as the “cream” on top of your strong foundations.

The final verdict

Blogging can be a very useful traffic generation and pre-eminence building strategy for SMEs – but you need to go in with your eyes open and be clear on your objectives, what the resourcing requirements will be and whether or not you’re prepared to pay the price.

It may also be prudent to think about what support is available to leverage your time and efforts to ensure you get the highest net return.

11 Comments »

Yaro Starak Launches “Blog Profits Blueprint”

Here’s an imporant announcement if you’ve ever wanted to make your blog more effective or profitable, OR you don’t yet have a blog and you’re interested in learning more about how blogs add value and make money.

My friend and colleague Yaro Starak has just released his Blog Profits Blueprint.

The Blueprint is a content-rich 55-page report that Yaro has put together to teach the core concepts and ideas that go into building a successful and profitable blog. It’s the culmination of what he has been through over the past two and a half years of blogging and reaching the point where he makes a full time income from blogging part time.

I read through the entire report yesterday – here are some of the highlights from my perspective as someone who is primarily interested in using a blog to enhance the reach and effectiveness of my exisiting business.

• What is a blog and why are they so popular? – pages 9 to 12
• How blogs make money – page 12
• Yaro’s “Pillar” strategy for creating blog posts that generate buzz, backlinks and pre-eminence – pages 18 – 23
• How to generate high-quality traffic for your blog faster and easier than you’re doing now.
• How to convert your blog traffic into value – either straight revenue from advertising and other sources, or pre-eminence for your business.

Bottom line: the Blog Profits Blueprint contains tonnes of usable information that you should at least be aware of, even if you’re not interested in direct revenue generation from blogging.

Yaro is also just about to launch a mentoring course called Blog Mastermind whereby a limited number of mentorees will be coached by Yaro in order to build their blogs up into serious cash-generating concerns. If you may be interested in this program (but even if you’re not), then the next step is to download the Blog Profits Blueprint.

Add Your Comments »

DoFollow Plugin Activated On Marketing Results Blog

One well-meaning but ultimately futile feature of the WordPress blog platform is the mandatory addition of the rel=”nofollow” attribute to links within all comments.

From the Wikipedia entry “nofollow”:

nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of spamdexing, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place. Google announced in early 2005 that hyperlinks with rel=”nofollow” attribute would not influence the link target’s PageRank. In addition, the Yahoo and MSN search engines also respect this tag.

rel=”nofollow” actually tells a search engine “Don’t score this link” rather than “Don’t follow this link.” This differs from the meaning of nofollow as used within a robots meta tag, which does tell a search engine: “Do not follow any of the hyperlinks in the body of this document.”

Why nofollow is silly

Much has been said about why nofollow is silly, including this seminal post. I agree. For starters, comment spam is absolutely rife [11,009 spam comments gobbled up by Akismet since installing it around 2 months ago].  nofollow doesn’t work.

Nofollow Deactivated On This Blog

I have just installed the DoFollow Plugin which deactivates the default nofollow setting within comments in WordPress.

What this means is, if you comment in even a half sensible way on this blog, your comment will contribute toward the search engine rankings of your site!

Will

9 Comments »