No matter how wonderful your SEO is or how much you spend on advertising, great content is essential if you want to transform your site’s traffic, into commercial success.

Why is content so important?

When people find interesting or valuable information on a site (great content), they are likely to take 4 steps.  These 4 steps are what’s needed in order to develop a commercially successful site.  Here’s what they do:

1. They look around the site for more things to read.
2. They return to the site regularly / subscribe to it’s RSS feed; so they don’t miss any new posts.
3. They recommend the site to their friends and share it via social networks.
4. Over a period of time, they will make an inquiry, information request or purchase (depending on the site’s business model.)

SEO & Content

No matter how great a site’s SEO is or how much traffic it attracts, it will not cause people to take any of the 4 steps above, unless the content of the site is powerful.  SEO will help people find you, but when they find your site, it’s the quality of your content that will cause them to keep reading, revisit regularly and recommend you to people.  Before someone will click your links, call you, email you or place an order, your content needs to inspire, compel or motivate them into action.

I described the importance of site content recently, by comparing it to what you find, when you check out a new TV channel that you see advertised.  If you tune in and quickly see that the programming is dull.  What do you do?  You go and find something interesting to watch.  You don’t simply keep watching just because you landed on that channel.  Equally, you don’t set your DVR to record it’s shows and you don’t recommend the channel to your friends either.

The bottom line: No matter how well content is advertised or optimized, it’s what people find when they arrive that determines whether it succeeds or not.

If you are getting targeted traffic from your SEO, but these are NOT converting into customers / clients / inquiries, it’s time to rethink your content strategy.  Spend some of that SEO time, or your SEO budget, on either hiring a local copywriter or learning how to write compelling copy yourself.  Of course, as the quality of a site’s content improves, more sites are likely to link to it, which helps enormously with your SEO anyway!

The balance we are always looking for, is to be as easy to find as possible, by people with a need for our services; whilst ensuring that when they arrive, they value what they find enough, to take those 4 steps.  Don’t be like the majority of small business owners, who focus most of their efforts on chasing traffic, retweets, diggs, stumbles etc – Whilst neglecting their content.

It’s all about getting the balance right, with effective SEO and great copy.  That’s how you transform your site into a business generating machine.

I have had many people ask me why I don’t provide book reviews here, so I thought I would quickly answer the question in this post.

Like many well read bloggers, I was sent a review copy of the excellent, new Tony Hawk book a few weeks ago, along with the opportunity to interview Tony, which I certainly would have done, if I had decided to write a review.  The book, How Did I get Here? the ascent of an unlikely CEO, is a great read and I have no hesitation in recommending it to you (look, no affiliate link!)

I am extremely happy to personally recommend the book and I will be sharing some ideas inspired by Tony’s book with you in future posts, but as a marketing guy, writing book reviews is a very low leverage use of my available blogging time.

Equally, it’s my experience that this is not the best way for YOU to discover the best new books either!

Here’s the simple 3 step process I use, to discover great new books:

1. I look out for recommendations, especially if they come from people that are not being paid, directly or indirectly, to recommend the book.  I have already bought 2 copies of Tony’s book for Christmas presents.  That’s a powerful, unpaid recommendation.  If I saw an endorsement like that, I would go to step 2.
2. Because these are business books, I always look for 2 or more reviews from professional book reviewers / literary critics.  I’m talking about the kind of highly skilled people, who have the ability to read, digest and communicate the REAL core of a book, without missing a thing.  These guys have read everything and usually specialise in books within a certain business niche.  Yes, some may be biased pro, or against, certain authors, but that’s the reason for checking out several professional reviews and for taking the next step.
3. Finally, I check out independent reader reviews on sites like amazon.com.  Time and time again, independent reviews are cited by people as one of the most influential motivators, when researching a purchase.

By running a book purchase via those 3 filters, I have discovered some amazing books and missed a lot of the crap, that paid reviewers often rave about.

I am a marketing professional and not a literary critic.  As such, that 3 step process is just my way to discover the gold dust on the bookshelves.  This is not the right way and it’s not the best way  – It’s just the way I filter out a lot of the cleverly marketed dross.

As a result, it would be wrong for me to offer book reviews, knowing that I myself wouldn’t be swayed by the kind of reviews that I would be writing!

Yes, I could be a hypocrite and pump the blog full of reviews (and money-spinning affiliate links), but that’s not part of the business plan here.  This blog’s business model is to offer you free access to marketing and business development ideas and thus position myself as a marketing resource, when you need professional marketing help.

By the way, if you have an affiliate business plan, then there is a solid business model behind joining the review circuit; so long as you have the targeted traffic required.  Affiliate income can be very significant.  Just because this does not fit into my business model, does not mean it isn’t a great idea for others.  I know of people making thousands a month, working the affiliate income model (yes really!) It’s about deciding what you want to achieve and allowing that to guide your decisions.

Let’s work together and grow your business. To find out more click here!

I’m often asked why this blog does not have guest bloggers; usually by people who want to write here.  I would like to share the answer with you, because I think it may be useful to those of you who are wondering whether to have a multi-authored blog or not.

The first thing to say, is that there is no universal right way or wrong way to run your blog.  Single authored blogs and multi-authored blogs can both work extremely well.  It all depends on what you want to achieve.  Let’s start off with why this blog is a single authored blog.

Guest bloggers: Why I don’t use them here

This site is what’s known as a positioning blog or authority blog.  It’s purpose is to help me build a relationship with you, where I give you lots of free marketing and business development ideas.  Then, when you decide you would like professional help with your marketing, you already have a relationship with me, where I am positioned as someone that you can trust for effective marketing results.  Through the blog, you get to see the quality of my work on a regular basis and also connect with me with comments and emails.

Whilst some positioning blogs DO use guest bloggers, I find that this often makes the quality of the content erratic.  Equally, because there is no relationship between the guest blogger and the readership, readers can be left wondering if the guest blogger is qualified to give them advice.

If I go to Seth Godin’s blog, I know exactly what to expect and I trust the information 100%.  That’s the model I use here and it works extremely well for me.

Guest bloggers and multi-authored blogs

Most of the world’s best read blogs are multi-authored.  These blogs are owned by people with a very different business model to my own.  They are not interested in selling the services of the blog’s owner as a specialist.  Instead, they have a business model based heavily on the sale of advertising.  For these guys, it’s all about page views and click-throughs’.  Pete Cashmore’s mashable is a great example of this, as is Michael Arrington’s techcrunch; which was sold to AOL last week for tens of millions of dollars!

Many smaller blogs use a similar multi-author approach, but for slightly different reasons.  Whilst sites like mashable and techcrunch need lots of authors, because they report on the news and are updated many times each day, smaller sites will bring in guest bloggers as a way of building their reader numbers and adding variety to their blog’s content.  This can be extremely effective and many respected sites use this approach.  One very successful example is problogger, which has built a massive, targeted readership using a variety of guest bloggers.

Unlike the big multi-authored blogs, these smaller ones tend to be owned by people who DO sell their services via the blog, but who also offer affiliate products and/or advertising.  In order to make their affiliate programs work, they need to get their blog in front of lots of new readers, on a regular basis.  This is because only a subset of their readers will buy their affiliate products, and once this percentage has been reached, the blog owner needs new readers.  As affiliate fees tend to be relatively small, sites that rely heavily on affiliate income need a regular supply of new visitors.

Good guest bloggers can bring this kind of targeted traffic with them.

Guest bloggers almost always have their own blogs and their own social networks, followers and fans.  Typically, when a blogger writes a guest post, they will tell their network, many of whom will go and read it.  If the guest blogger is well connected, the traffic they bring with them can be huge.  This provides an immediate traffic boost for the person, who owns the blog they are guesting on.

So, the guest blogger gains access to the blog owner’s readership, whilst the blog owner gains access to a subset of the guest blogger’s readers and contacts.  This strategy is extremely common and is an alternative to being an associated blogger, for those who prefer to be independent.

As you can see, it’s all about matching your approach to what you feel comfortable with and what you want to achieve.  You can use either route very successfully and as I said at the start, there is no right or wrong method.

What works best for you?

Which style of blogging do you use and what do you see as the benefits?  Please share your feedback with your fellow readers and myself.

Let’s work together and grow your business. To find out more click here!