Jim Connolly Marketing

Business blogging experts?

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Over the past 24 hours, I have seen 2 people advertising their services as business blogging experts.  In both cases, I decided to check THEIR blogs out.  As a marketing guy, I was curious as to what kind of blogs these expert business bloggers had. I’m really glad I did, because it motivated me to write this “buyer beware” post and hopefully, will stop people from wasting their time and money.

Business blogging experts?

One of them has a blog, which has not been updated since last year!  This blog expert wants you to pay him, to coach you on the benefits of business blogging, yet his primary business blog looks like he has just given up on it.

The other blogging expert was even worse!  Her blog is not even configured correctly.  I was on her blog for 5 minutes, and was unable to find anything, other than the most recent blog post, because the navigation was so poor.  Equally, the blog was almost unreadable, (even on my 24 inch monitor), because it’s written in a tiny font. It looks a total mess and lacked even basic social bookmarking options.  I have seen many new bloggers, with far more professional looking blogs.  Unbelievably, she is currently offering a free talk on successful business blogging, via a local networking group.  Clearly, no one bothered to check her out before allowing her to talk.

Researching a business blogging expert: The basics

Both of these self proclaimed business blogging experts, have thousands of followers on Twitter.  This is not an indicator of how good they are at what they do, yet many use the size of someone’s social network as a short-cut to their decision making process.  If you want a better indicator as to how good a blogging expert REALLY is, check out their blog!

Here are a few of the basics to look for, before you decide to take any advice from them:

  • Check that their blog looks professional.  If it isn’t, do you really want to take blogging advice from them?
  • Check that their blog has an active community.  A quick look at the number of comments their posts attract, will give you an idea as to how well they are engaging THEIR readers.  Look at the last 10 or so posts, as some posts get a lot fewer comments than others.  Bottom line: if their blog doesn’t have an active community (which is the heart of a great business blog) they are hardly going to be able to show you how to build a great community on YOUR blog!
  • Check that their content is valued by others.  When people find something on a blog or website interesting, they will often link to it.  For example, there are around 20,000 links pointing to this blog right now.  You can check how many links point to any site, using Yahoo Site Explorer.

Even if someone is offering you free advice via a local networking group or webinar, ALWAYS check them out, before you waste your time and money following what they say.  Just because their advice is free, does not mean it will not cost you a great deal, if you use what they say and it’s based on bullshit.  Sometimes, free advice can be very expensive!

How dependent is your business on Twitter, Facebook etc?

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If your Facebook or Twitter account got suspend or deleted, what impact would it have on your business?

I ask this question, because I’m seeing more and more people invest huge amounts of their valuable time building social networks on 3rd party sites, which they have very little real control over.  Conversely, I see remarkably few people invest anywhere like enough time on the development of their own social media platform – namely, a commercial, self-hosted blog (like this one.)  I’m sure you’ve seen it too; people who only manage to put new content on their own blogs a couple of times a month, yet they update Twitter or Facebook on and off all day long.  Their blogs are being neglected, yet their Facebook stream is packed with interesting posts, great ideas and useful links.

In other words, they are building their primary social networking hub on something they have little real control over – Something that can be suspended or deleted without their consent, at any time.

Twitter account suspensions

I was prompted to write this after receiving an email this morning from a reader, who has just had his Twitter account reinstated AFTER Twitter suspended it, without warning or reason, for 8 days!  Although I no longer follow him, I do read his stream occasionally and it is a very typical Twitter account, which doesn’t spam or abuse anyone.  By the time his account was restored, 2 new prospective clients had unfollowed him.  Apparently, they saw the “account suspended” sign and assumed he was a scammer!

In fact, of the 30 or so people I know of, who have had their Twitter accounts suspended, I can’t think of any that were actually doing anything wrong.  By the way, one of those I helped get their account back, via a conversation on Friendfeed, was non-other than Chris Anderson; Editor of Wired Magazine and creator of what we now know as the freemium marketing model.  Again, a completely random suspension.

Free blogs get suspended too

Just over a week ago, 70,000 people, (yes seventy thousand) had their Blogs shut down without notice, when the blogetery blogging platform they were using was closed down.  Some of these people will have invested months of their time, developing content for that platform, only to see it erased without warning.  Had that same time been invested in developing on their own self-hosted blog, it would still be there.

Even WordPress.com, which I consider the best free blogging platform by far, can suspend or remove your blog if, for example, one of their moderators believes you have Search Engine Optimized it, so that it’s too Google friendly and does not read well enough for people.  In a list of blogs that are not allowed on WordPress.com, they list their now famous SEO clause:

Blogs that are written for search engines instead of humans. These blogs are dedicated to trying to fool Google and other search engines into ranking them or the sites they link to highly. WordPress.com is not meant for this type of activity.

The challenge here, is that many people would consider that “type of activity” to be nothing more than SEO!  It’s a very grey area.  What you or I consider a legitimately optimised blog post, one particular moderator at WordPress may consider to be too SEO friendly.  If so, and someone reports it, you are at best suspended or at worst, the blog is deleted.  I have to say here, that typically, the moderators at WordPress are very good these days and only want to block scammy blogs.

Your marketing on your platform

However, why give someone who knows nothing about you or your business, the power to suspend or delete your business blog, when you can build a self-hosted WordPress blog, like this one, which you control and direct 100%?  In my opinion, this alone is a great reason for business bloggers to consider owning their own platform.

My point is that whilst social networking sites are a brilliant idea and a great opportunity for you to reach new people, you should also consider investing in a central Internet space or hub, which YOU control and can develop with total freedom.  No 3rd party should have the power over you or your business, to be able to pull the plug on your primary online platform.

But I put at least 95% of my social media time into producing content for this blog and connecting with the reader community here.

Because of this, if any of my social media / social networking accounts were suspended, I would still have a thriving community of readers, commenters and people who regularly email me via this blog.  I would still be able to reach new prospective clients every hour of each day.

Seth Godin Vs Bob the Blogger!

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As a marketing coach, I am always studying the power of influence and influential people.  For example, we all know the power a celebrity can have, when they give their personal endorsement to a politician or their paid endorsement to a product.  This is because a large chunk of the general populous, uses what a well known or well-respected person says, as a short-cut to their decision making process.

A while ago, one of my favourite writers, Seth Godin, made a couple of statements that were widely accepted as fact – Despite them simply being his opinions.  Fans of Seth heard what he said and then looked for things that would support it.  It’s actually a very good piece and as always, delivered with passion and power.

Here’s what Seth said:

“Blogging is free, it doesn’t matter if anyone reads it.  What matters is the humility that comes from writing it.  What matters is the meta cognition of thinking about what you are going to say.  How do you explain yourself to the few employees you have or your cat or whoever is going to look at it?  How do you force yourself to describe in 3 paragraphs, why you did something?  How do you respond out loud?  If you are good at it, some people will read it.  If you stick at it, you will get good at it. But this has become much bigger than are you boingboing, are you the huffington post.  This has become such a micro publishing platform, that basically you are doing it for yourself, to force yourself to become part of the conversation, even if it’s (Seth gestures with his index finger and thumb, to denote a tiny amount) just that big and that posture change, changes a huge amount.”

Here’s the clip of Seth saying this on YouTube – It’s powerful stuff.

If Bob the blogger (I just made that name up) told you that it didn’t matter if anyone reads your business blog, most of you would disagree.

You might remind Bob that a blog with 5000 unique visitors a day will out perform an identical blog, with just you and your cat reading it.  This is why every blog development program and every leading blog development site, focus so much on developing a targeted readership and increasing your blog’s visibility.

If Bob the blogger told you that as a busy small business owner, you should be writing a blog for humility, you just may question that too.  Here’s why:

  • Bob is not Seth, so we question what Bob says.  With Bob, we are a student.  We study what Bob says and ecology check it, to see if it actually makes sense.  Then, and only then, we accept it.
  • Seth is not Bob, so the temptation is to accept what Seth says, without question.  At this point, we cease being a student and miss much of the learning that people like Seth offer.

The challenge here, is that when we fail to study, we fail to learn.

Blindly accepting something, turns the student into a sheep.  Even when the person is as intelligent and honest as Seth Godin, we owe it to ourselves to study what they say.

This is NOT a post about whether or not Seth is right or wrong with what he said in this one instance.

It’s about whether more people would have questioned what Seth said, if he was “just” a normal guy, like my fictitious friend, Bob the blogger.

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

Blogging is dead (again!)

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I’ve seen a few comments and blog posts recently, from people claiming (yet again) that blogging is dead. This subject seems to come around every few months; usually after a blogger realises that his or her blog is failing to work for them, the way they intended.  So, rather than adopt a different, more effective strategy, they decide the problem rests with blogging as a platform and that it’s not their fault.

Blogging is very much alive and in excellent health!  Visitor numbers to Jims Marketing Blog blog are up by around 85% over the past 6 months and enquiries for my services as a marketing coach via this blog, are up by closer to 300%.  All of my clients are seeing growth with their blogs, both in terms of visitors and business / business enquiries.  In fact, as a business development or marketing tool, I would say that blogging has never been as powerful as it is today, with the future looking even brighter!

Blogging and marketing

Here’s the thing though: Successful blogging requires a lot more than simply setting up a blog and writing posts!  Like every form of marketing, you will need to plan ahead and work to an effective strategy, if you want to enjoy commercial blogging success.  For example, I spent 6 weeks researching and planing, before I started this blog.  By the time it launched, almost 2 years ago, I already knew what my plans for the first year were.

Within a few months, Jim’s Marketing Blog was generating daily enquiries for my business and was ranked on page one of Google, for the search term “marketing blog“, where it still is today.  None of this happened by accident, or simply because I wrote interesting posts.  As we all know, some of the most gifted writers remain undiscovered.  Others manage to attract readers, but struggle to transfer their readers, into paying clients or customers.

Their experience doesn’t mean that blogging is dead; simply that they need a more effective marketing strategy for their blog.

The next time you hear that blogging is dead, see if you can get a pulse from; Mashable, Techcrunch, Seth Godin, Robert Scoble or myself!


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

A quick look at Scribnia.com

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A few months ago, I decided to check out a new service called scribnia; which allows people to rate, review and discover bloggers and online writers.  The service was recommended to me by my friend David Spinks, who is scribnia’s community manager.  This is not a full review of the service, but rather a brief snapshot of my experience with it.

Scribnia.com

I’m always on the look out for great writers with something new to say, but find that the same old names pop up again and again on social bookmarking sites and Google.  This makes it harder than it should be, to discover new writers and sites in your niche that are worth reading.  After all, some of the best new writers have pretty poor SEO and some of the most optimised sites are generic when it comes to content.

This is why I decided to take a look at scribnia.com.  Scribnia allows you to pick a category and then check out reviews for writers in that niche – potentially a very useful short-cut.  You can see who is writing the reviews and decide how biased or otherwise they may be, again, very useful.  Also, once you have reviewed 5 writers, scribnia will start suggesting new writers to you; based on the ratings and reviews you have written.  This is my page on scribnia.

If you enjoy the reward element of services like foursquare.com, you will find the badges that reviewers can earn on scribnia interesting.  Badges can be earned for things like the number of reviews you write, the number of people who give a thumbs-up to your reviews etc.  An interesting feature here, is that you can earn a pro-critic badge, after you have written 100 reviews.  If scribnia gains enough traction, I can see this pro-critic idea as being really useful for people, who write reviews for a living or who give reviews as a part of their work.

Scribnia, chickens and eggs

Obviously, a service like scribnia relies on numbers in order to fly.  After all, people will only write reviews if they believe others will see those reviews.  This creates a chicken and egg situation, which is why I decided to write this brief post about the service when David told me about it.  Currently, there are just over 35,000 writers added to the site and there are almost 6,500 users.  The number of users will need to increase, for the service to achieve it’s potential.  However, having used the service and really enjoyed it, I believe the potential is huge.

Jim’s Marketing Blog: Now with added vitamins!

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You may recall me recently mentioning that I was moving this blog to a new hosting provider?  Traffic into this blog has increased massively over the past 6 months and the time was right to upgrade.  Our new host offers me far greater resources, which will allow this blog to continue growing without being moved again.  However, just as importantly, they also offer me vastly improved customer service and technical support.

Well, I’m delighted to say that the move happened yesterday as planned and early signs are extremely encouraging.  A number of people have already asked me which hosting provider I have moved to.  I will let you know via a review; once I have had the chance to test if their services really are as good as they claim them to be.

As with all my online technical issues, I used the services of Mass Media Design to handle the blog’s migration.  I have been a client of theirs for a couple of years now and cannot recommend them highly enough.  Interesting side-note – their co-owner, Gregor Spowart, was the first person I ever followed on Twitter, back in 2008!

You can expect to see my review of the new hosting provider, in around 4 weeks time.

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