Hello again, and welcome back to marketing with purpose. My name is Monica Pitts, and I am your answerer, the answerer of the questions for this blogging Q and A episode, I have had a lot of people ask me recently two questions, actually. One, do I need a website? Yes. And I'm not just saying that because I build them, you still need a website, folks. And I also have a lot of people asking me, do they need to blog? And that is what I am breaking down for you in this episode today. Now I am a blogger myself, and I have been since 2009 and at this moment I have over 1080 articles published on my blog. Yeah. So this is not a new thing to me. I have been blogging for a really long time, since it even began to be cool, right? So in this episode, I am going to cover the most common questions that I hear about blogging, like, do you really have to have a blog, and how often should you do it? How do you set it up? How do you attract visitors? I'm going to give you some ideas for monetization and some mistakes to avoid, and even how to measure success. So let's get to business. You're on a mission, and you just need more people to know about it. And whether you're brand new to marketing or a seasoned pro, we are all looking for answers to make marketing decisions with purpose. I'm Monica Pitts, a techie, crafty business owner, mom and aerial dancer who solves communication challenges through technology. This podcast is all about digging in and going digital. I'll share my marketing know how and business experience from almost 20 years of misadventures. I'll be your backup dancer so you can stop doubting and get moving towards marketing with purpose. This episode is sponsored by may create design. Yeah, that's right, we sponsor ourselves and brought to you with love by our Marketing on a Shoestring mini course. Now our free beginners mini course is all about marketing on a budget. And contrary to popular opinion, you don't have to spend a million dollars or do something that you hate to market your business. Get ready to challenge traditional marketing assumptions, because this 101, mini course is designed to give you a rock solid foundation so you can make the right decisions for you with total confidence. You can check it out at you may create.com that's Y, o, u, M, a, y, E, C, R, E, A T, e.com, and the link, of course, will be in the show notes. Okay, now back to business. There are so many ways that you can market your business online these days. There's video, there's 400 different types of social medias, and that leaves people questioning, like, is blogging even still relevant? Now for me, yes, blogging is super relevant. 51% of the page views on my site, 62% of the users on my site, and 79% of the returning users on my site are all because of my blog posts. So they are a cornerstone in my marketing strategy, and I'm not alone, okay, I'm really not alone. Nine out of 10 marketers use blogging to achieve their content goals, according to sem rush, and that's because it works like you can see it on my website. But also, like blogging, it drives traffic to your site, and traffic drives leads, right? So companies that blog have an average of 67% more leads each month than companies without blogs, and that's because you're building out the content of your site. You are increasing the number of search terms that your site optimizes for, and you're reaching more people with every single blog that you add. Now I know what you're thinking, though you're like, but Monica, I thought you said that search is changing, so will blogging still work? I mean, yes, I know we totally covered that in a recent episode on the podcast, search is totally changing, and we interviewed SEO expert Nina Gibson about it. But here's the deal, she really believes, and so do 75% of marketers that AI enabled search engines will positively impact their blogs. So I feel like blogging is far from dead, and at this point, it isn't just about churning out boring AI generated paragraphs of text, either, because when you do it right, blogging is establishing your expertise. It's driving traffic, and it's powering your marketing. When you use that crappy AI generated content, people don't stick around and read it, and Google sees that. Google is not stupid. They've been using AI for a really long time. They know what good content that actually shows experience looks. Like and what crappy content that was generated by chatgpt looks like. I'm not saying don't use chatgpt. I'm saying use it for what it's meant for. It's not meant to write your blog posts for you. Okay? It's meant to speed up the process of writing your blog posts. Okay, so with all that on the table, let's get to this. Q A sesh, first off is blogging dead? No, we already just established this.
Your blog will show that you're an expert, which is going to build your brand. It will increase your website traffic, and it helps you rank for words that you wouldn't rank for otherwise. And let's be real, like not everybody wants to consume their information the same way. Not everybody wants to listen and watch information. Some people, me included, we still want step by step instructions. We want to read information because that's the easiest way for us to consume it and use it the way we want to use it. Okay? It's also a great way to repurpose your other content, like newsletters, videos or podcasts. That's what like my blog is actually just me repurposing my podcast. Now, it didn't start out that way, but that's what it is now. So there you go, and the people who are on my blog, they're on a blog post, and you are in a podcast, and that's how you want to in like, that's how you want to intake your information. That's awesome. The people who find me out online, they want to read it. That's awesome. I'm just saying, okay, huh? So no, blogging is not dead. Question number two, do you have to do it? No, you don't have to do anything in your marketing. What you should be considering, though, is a way to update your website regularly. So maybe you don't publish a blog, but you update your portfolio or share new testimonials. You put up events or answer frequently asked questions, or share specials, anything that you feel like might support what your audience needs to see to make a buying decision. That's what you should be putting up on your website regularly. Any of those types of activities are going to build out the amount of pages on your website and the number of words that you rank for so you can put them up, they're just not going to rank the same way that a blog might rank. Sometimes portfolios do really, really well, but other things, they don't, they don't get picked up in search engines the same way that a blog post would. So if you like writing and you're trying to position yourself as an industry expert, then it would make sense for you to blog, but if you're not a writer, then you still need some type of regular content. So if you're a talker, then maybe an audio podcast would be great. Or if you're comfortable on video, maybe a video podcast would be right for you. Either way, you need to be producing regular content in your marketing. So what can you expect from blogging like, let's say you decide to do it, what can you expect from it? Well, it's a marathon. It's not a sprint. If you want immediate results, you should be running ads. You can expect, if you publish regularly, each post will generate some traffic to your site. Some blog posts will generate more traffic than others, and over time, you're going to see a steady flow of traffic leading back to your site from organic search. So that's what you can expect from it, marathon, not a not a sprint. Some are going to do better than others, but it is a long, slow burn, and it will exponentially grow over time. So what platform should you use for your blog. Well, Wordpress, duh. Okay, so I'm I'm only kind of joking about that I build WordPress sites. So of course, I love WordPress, and there are some definite advantages of having your blog on WordPress, one of which is that your blog and your website, they all stay together. But ultimately, whatever you have that you can enable in your website will certainly work the system that you use, though, needs to be in your website, like physically under the same domain as everything else is on your site, and it should be built in a modular way that allows you to organize the content with like Tags and Categories, or it's going to be a mess for people to find things and future you will not like you. Okay? You want this blog in your site because you want to keep all that SEO Mojo that you're building by sending people to your website and keeping them on there for long periods of time, reading what you have to say. You want to keep all that Mojo together under the same roof, under the same domain, okay? If your blog is at a separate domain, then it builds Mojo on its own. And you are not building that same Mojo for your main domain, for your site, yep, domain Mojo. It's a totally technical term. Look it up. It's totally known. Okay, it's not Mojo. It's called authority. But whatever I like to call it Mojo, I think that makes it more fun. Okay, so on to the next question. How often should you blog? Now that is a doozy of a question, my friends, but that depends on your goals. Now, remember, it's a marathon, not a sprint. So if your goal is to communicate with your constituents or to fuel your marketing, then I think two to four times a month is a great goal. Yes, if your goal is to drive traffic to your site and increase search traffic, then HubSpot suggests six to eight articles per month. Now also, you have to consider your topic like if your content is timely, then you'll probably need to publish more often or create a schedule to update what you have to make sure that it's consistently relevant, because otherwise Google will start favoring other articles over yours, because it knows that Facebook doesn't work the same way now, as Facebook did five years ago, it knows it's different, and so it's going to show newer articles instead of your older ones. Now, if your content is evergreen, then you can probably publish less, because it doesn't ever go out of date, and it's going to keep driving traffic over time. The next thing that you need to consider before you decide on your frequency is the age of your blog. So blogs with over 100 posts, they can just publish one or two times a month, so they can keep building traffic, because they already have that base built up. But blogs with less than 20 to 30 posts, they should probably be posting like two times a week. HubSpot, of course, suggests that six to eight articles per month mark, and when we got started, we actually published 14 articles a month, and it totally worked, but it was very time consuming, and now we just do one or two articles a month, and we have for a while, because we have hundreds, actually over 1080
published articles out there, driving traffic a little bit each, and some a lot more. So take that into account when you're determining how often you should blog, what are your goals? What's your topic, and how old is your blog? So if you're going to spend all this time blogging, how are you going to get people out there to read it? Well, tell them what you did and why they need it, right? So you're going to tell them in all of your marketing, and you're going to let your blogging fuel your marketing. You're going to tell them on social media. You can tell them on the invoices that you send to them. You can tell them on the videos that you show in your waiting area. You can tell them on the door of your bathrooms while they're using the toilet. You can, you can tell, I mean, email them about it, right? There are to get creative, right? Tell them about what you're blogging about, send them out there. They they won't know unless you tell them. And then also, if you do your keyword research, people are going to find your blog posts naturally. You do want to tell people about it, right, because you've invested a lot of energy in it, but those that keyword research will allow people to find you when they need you on their own, so that will attract readers to your blog as well. Okay, so before you get started, I want to tell you about a few common mistakes to avoid when blogging, so that way you don't make them right. Because I want you to start off on the right foot. So I find that blogs do not work as well when they're not underneath the main domain of your website. Yes, I talked about it earlier when I said how to set up your blog, but you need your blog to be underneath the same domain as your website. Don't blog about random crap that has nothing to do with your business, because then people are going to find your business for random crap words that have nothing to do with your business. I just did consulting for a realtor in my area, and their website gets found for fireworks in Columbia, Missouri because they published an article about fireworks in Columbia Missouri, I once published an article about sidewalk chalk. It was very well visited, but I don't sell sidewalk chalk, and nor do I do it for people. So eventually I took it down because I was so tired of it bloating my metrics. Okay, now you can also turn those things on their head and pull people into your website by adding a call to action to learn more about your services. But we want your business to be found for things that make sense, so blog about things that people would search for that are related to your business. Now, people also make the mistake of not formatting their content, they just slap stuff up there. It's like this huge bulleted list. Nobody's gonna read that. Nobody's gonna read that. And remember, Google wants to see that people are sticking around on your site and on your page. Okay, so if they're not sticking around because your content is not formatted nicely, you're not doing yourself any service. So take the extra step, add some headings and make it look nice. People also just blogs, and then they don't tell anybody about it, and they just expect everybody to find it. But we already talked about how to attract readers to your blog, so don't do that, tell people about it. And then also, I already complained about people writing boring AI generated crap and expecting it to pan out in the long run, which it won't, because people aren't going to like it, and Google's going to know that Google always puts the user first, okay? And we like that. That's why we Google stuff, right? And as a blogger, you need to keep that in the forefront so you can invest your energy the right way. Okay? So here's another doozy of a question. I get asked all the time, how can I optimize my blog posts for search engines like so we've been talking about how we want to drive traffic to our website using this blog but how do you format your blog posts to get them found? Well, you would start by looking for ideas in a keyword research tool. So I look for ideas all around me. I get newsletters, I listen to people's questions, and then I think, how would somebody search for the answer to that? And then I go into a keyword research tool, and I start figuring out how they phrase it. So your goal is to find those phrases with between like 100 and 1000 visits per month, because you're probably not going to get the really, really general phrases that people are searching for all the time, like mortgage loans, you're not, you're not showing up for that. You're just not. Web Designer, nope. Web Designer in Columbia, Missouri, much, much higher likelihood I'm getting that right. So the more specific it is, the more likely I am. So if you hear people talking about those phrases, or you think that they'll resonate with your target audience, then you craft a blog post around them. So for example, I was planning my content out, and I hadn't done an episode on blogging in a while, so I searched for blogging, and in the keyword planner, which is, I use Google Keyword Planner, two terms came up that sparked my interest, which was, How often should you blog and is blogging dead? Yes, friends, yes. So that is what I'm trying to go after with this article on my website. How often you should blog? Has about 210 hits a month in my area. And then is blogging dead that about 320 people search for it a month in this area. So hey, that's those are good search terms I can try to rank for them. So then once you find those keywords that you want to go after, you're going to use them in your copy, in your headings, in the title and in the description of your post. And you're going to write your post in a way that's easy to read. You're going to use smaller words and short sentences. You're going to break text up into groups of smaller content and add headings so it's really easy to skim, and I would suggest investing in a plugin. My favorite one is Yoast SEO, and we actually have the premium version of it. And no, I am not getting paid to say that. It literally gamifies optimizing my content. It makes it really easy for me. So Yoast SEO is a great one. Find one that works for you. It really will help you optimize your content. Okay, next question, how do I know if it's working? How do I measure the success of my blog? You're going to look at five things, organic website visitors. Those are the website visitors that get to your website from a search engine by searching for keywords. Number two, emails on your list. Number three, the number of sales meetings that you're booking. Number four, close business. And number five, money in the bank. Yeah, I know not all of those are all related to your blog directly, but you should be seeing those numbers rising, right? They should all be going up if you're blogging regularly and it's working. So then, once you get started, how are you going to stay motivated and consistent with your blogging efforts? Because people are like, I don't know. I really just, I don't know if I'm ever going to get it done. Well, I would just start with a goal per month and then craft a content calendar. It's a lot easier if when you have the ideas, you write them down right then and there, and you just keep them in a document someplace so you can pull them out when you have time to work on it. Have time to work on it, but you're going to have to block time off in your schedule to do the task. If you don't, then you won't get it done. And then commit to doing it for a specific time period, especially if it's new. So I'd suggest doing it for maybe a year, at a minimum six months, but really you should be doing something for like, a year, so you can look at the data. Remember, it is a marathon, not a sprint. So it's going to take time to measure your results, and you can't expect to master something the first time that you see it, right? And then you're going to review your results, review a monthly and celebrate your successes and see progress and tweak stuff that isn't working for you. Okay, so monetizing your blog, I love this. People are like, Well, I'm gonna do a blog. I'm gonna make some money, all right. Well, friends, before you decide that you're gonna try to monetize your blog, I need you to answer a few questions to decide if it's even the right idea for you. Like, what are you after?
Are you after business for your business, or are you after pennies from Google ads? Right? Because if an email address of a potential customer is more valuable than what you might make from adding Google ads to your pages, then maybe it's not the right thing for you, like, if your goal is to promote your brand and win the trusted visitors, are you going to do that with ads flashing all over the place and annoying the crap out of them? You know what I'm talking about. You have been to the recipe blogs. It is painful. So if what you want to do is build trust with your visitors and showcase your expertise, then don't go recipe blogger on them. Okay? Okay, show yourself as an expert, give people actual advice and examples that AI can't and then offer a valuable resource in return for an email address and follow up with the people who downloaded the resource. You will make money then doing the thing that you do your service. Yeah, I know. I know you can see how it all comes together. Now, the example that I just gave you for monetizing your blog was running ads on your blog, but there are actually other strategies that you can use to monetize your blog beyond advertising. People will pay you to publish guest posts after you have a certain amount of traffic, I have people ask me if they can make guest posts on my website all the time, so many that I actually have them filtered out of my email because I don't want to read them anymore, because the answer is no, you can sell merchandise related to your blog. You can create affiliate links to sell products that you mentioned and get a cut. You can solicit sponsorships for articles. Like, maybe I should reach out to Yoast SEO and be like, Hey, I think your stuff is awesome, and I'm talking about it on this podcast. Will you sponsor my podcast and blog post? And maybe the answer is yes, that would be pretty cool, right? If you know somebody over there, will you ask them for me, they don't even need any more promotion. They're so good at what they do anyway. You can review stuff for free. You can swap blog posts with other bloggers for exposure. You can offer your own downloadable resources in exchange for email addresses, and you can promote events or on demand services. These are all things that will help you monetize the blog. But here's the deal, if you don't have a blog yet, then worrying about how to monetize it is really putting the cart before the horse, in my opinion, because first you need people coming to the blog, and then you will have a viable asset to monetize. So maybe you should just ask yourself, Who do you want to attract that you can sell things to in the future and answer their questions on your blog? I mean, think about dude, perfect. They didn't start by thinking, oh, I want to monetize this. That may have been part of their dream, but their real. Why was sharing trick shots on YouTube, right? So now they sell merch. They get paid by YouTube, and they have sponsorships paying for all their episodes, not to mention, they probably get a metric ton of free stuff, right? So you can do the same thing with your blog, but first you have to start it. So is blogging dead? No. In fact, I feel like it's more vital than ever for businesses and individuals who are looking to establish authority, drive traffic and connect with their audience. Because you know what shows up on Google blogs. You know what doesn't show up on Google. Social media, posts, a lot of podcasts, they don't show up on Google. Videos, those show up on Google. So just think about that. You know, as you're making this decision, know that investing in blogging is investing in showing up more on Google. And who doesn't want that? But whether you already have a blog and you were just thinking about quitting, or you're just starting, the key is to be consistent. You need to provide value, do your keyword research and keep adjusting and monitoring your strategy to make sure it's working. So what are you waiting for? Get out there and write something. Yeah. Let your voice be heard. There's people everywhere who need you. They need what you know. They need to hear what you have to say. You just need to be brave enough to put it out there. Now, if there's a question that you have about blogging that I didn't answer in this podcast or blog post, then hit me up. You can email me anytime, and I can always use you an answer right away. Okay, so you can email me at
[email protected] that's m, o n, i, c, a, at, m, a, y, E, C, R, E, A, T, e.com, and of course, I can help you set up your blog too, because, you know that's what we do on the regular over here. Now next week. Now join me back same place next week, because we have a guest interview with author and purpose expert Ian schmandi, and he'll walk us through how to define the one thing that makes your organization uniquely remarkable in seven words or less. So you can use it to design how your business will be managed and communicated. And for those of you who love the idea of Simon Sinek and his why, I know I do, Ian has the same publisher as Simon Sinek, yes, he does. And his publisher says that the difference between Ian and Simon is that Ian offers a framework around his why. So I don't want to get too far ahead of myself, but in the following episode, I'm actually going to explain how to create a list of blog ideas based on your why. So it's all coming together so you can stay fueled and informed on your journey to market with purpose. And before I let you. Go. I want to give one more shout out to our may create resource, sponsor Marketing on a Shoestring. It is the free beginners mini course to marketing on a budget. It lays the foundation of creating the right messaging to connect with your potential customer and prime them to buy. It unlocks the four part framework for making confident, budget, conscious marketing decision, so you can stop second guessing and get a clear path forward, and it outlines the highest converting tactics that I know of for new marketers, so you don't have to waste time on strategies that will never reach your goals. Hop on over to you. May create.com for instant access. That's y, o, u, M, a, y, E, C, R, E, A, T, e.com, so thank you so much for joining me today. Make sure to subscribe wherever you're listening so you don't miss out on our next episode. And don't be afraid to use that link in the show notes to go over and enjoy the fully formatted blog post with all the pictures broken down, covering every single thing that we talked about today, because your next step is to put this information to action, and until Next time, go forth and market with purpose.
