I’ve had a few emails this week, after technorati.com ranked this blog inside the world’s top 10 small business blogs for the first time.
Whilst this ranking will go up and down all the time, to have actually reached that spot is quite an achievement, for a marketing blog that’s little over a year old.
People wrote to me wanting to know how I did it, so here’s my secret!
I write exclusively for people – NOT Google!
Ask any top marketing writer (or copy writer) and they will tell you that it’s a challenge to produce material, which inspires people to take action, to; buy from you, visit you, call you, share your work, click links or email you etc. That’s because people are complex.
As a marketer, people need to find your message both interesting and motivating and that’s no easy task – Especially if you are simultaneously trying to write that same message so that Google’s search engine software likes it!
So, here’s my secret sauce for a top 10 blog
This blog is read by people, enjoyed by people and designed to help people. If I get enough genuinely useful content onto this blog, people will share my work and people will link to this blog, allowing me to reach more people. By repeating that process, people have increased the profile of this blog and it’s readership.
Notice a common thread there?
Yep – it’s all about writing for people!
I love SEO – But I write exclusively for YOU
I don’t try and get certain keywords or phrases into my posts, to score highly with search engines. If I did, it would change the way I write and dilute the effectiveness of what I share with you. As a result, 100% of what you read here is written exclusively for people.
I love SEO. It’s one of the reasons I use the Headway Wordpress theme on this blog (affiliate), which is extremely SEO friendly. I also use tags for my posts to help with my SEO too. However, I do not deliberately write anything to keep Google happy.
Ironically, by writing exclusively for people, I have attracted around 16,000 links to this blog, which has gifted me a pretty good search engine ranking for many key marketing terms. For instance, people going to Google searching for marketing blogs will have been able to find this blog on page 1 for the search term; “marketing blogs” for the past 6 months.
In my experience, many bloggers spend way too much time ‘optimizing’ their material for search engines and looking for that one killer trick that will magically send their website / blog to the top of the pile.
While they are waiting for that quick fix, you and I can focus on delivering the best content we can, to people.
Thank YOU!
I would like to personally thank EVERYONE who reads this blog, links to it and shares it with their friends. As you can see, without your support, this blog is nothing.
Here’s a question for you:
