Jim Connolly Marketing

Jims Marketing Blog – Now with added love!

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Here’s some good news for those of you, who are kind enough to comment here and share your opinions with my readers and myself.  As from right now, when you leave your comments, you will be able to share YOUR most recent blog post with MY readers!

How come Jim?

The CommentLuv WordPress Plugin

I have just installed the CommentLuv WordPress plugin.  The CommentLuv plugin automatically visits your site when you comment here, as soon as you enter your web address (URL).  Then, as you type your URL in, this little program retrieves a selection of your last blog posts, Tweets or digg submissions. (By the way, I have also added it to the AMAZINGLY BRILLIANT Ideas blog too!)

You can then choose one, which will then be included at the bottom of your comment.  See the example below, and check out the box just under Danny Brown’s comment:

I’m always looking for ways to make the blog genuinely more valuable for you.  This latest addition will hopefully help commenters attract some new readers – as many of the people who comment here have superb sites!  This is just a way for me to say “thanks!”

What do you think?

I would love to know what you think.  Leave a comment and show your fellow readers your most recent post, Tweet or digg in the process.

As always, it would be great to hear from you.

(UPDATE: I found this plugin attracted a huge amount of spam, so have removed it.)

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

The secret of a top 10 blog

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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.

technorati, small business, blogsWhilst 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.

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

Have something worth saying and say it well!

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I want to share a valuable piece of advice with you, which I received from my mentor; the late, great Jim Rohn. Here’s what Jim used to say;

“Have something worth saying and say it well.

Jim would use that phrase when speaking about effective communication and I believe it’s also a very simple, powerful way to remind ourselves how to focus our marketing efforts. Let me explain what I mean, looking at both parts of that message, 1 part at a time.

Have something worth saying

Are your products or services worth talking about, or are they pretty similar to other people in your industry? You see, no matter how good someone’s marketing is, it will fail to generate sales or motivate people to buy from them, if its a great message, about an ‘average’ or slightly better than average service.

  • People are bored by ‘average.’
  • They see average everywhere.
  • Average, is camouflage that stops you getting noticed.
  • Average, is bland.
  • Average, doesn’t compel people to do anything.

People need to ensure that their business, products and services are REALLY worth talking about.  Not only is this required if you want to generate word of mouth publicity, it’s also required if you want your marketing to work.

…and say it well

Many people really struggle with effective communication, yet unless we know how to communicate effectively, we can never achieve anything worthwhile in business.  This is why it’s so important that when we have something worth saying, we learn how to say it well.

No business wants to be “the best kept secret” in their industry.  However, the majority of what we see and hear from small businesses is very poorly communicated.  A business that cannot effectively communicate what it does and why people need to buy from them, is placing a VERY low ceiling on their potential.  If such businesses are intent on handling all their own marketing, at the very least, they need to make a study of effective written and verbal communication.

Bottom line: By having a business, product or service that’s worth talking about, and learning how to effectively share this compelling news, marketing becomes a great deal easier.

Marketing blog experiment

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As regular readers will have noticed, the blog looks quite a bit different today!  That’s because I’m running a marketing experiment with a new, more basic looking blog design.

One of the great things about the Internet is that you can easily see, very quickly if a design change is encouraging people to use the site / blog differently.  For example, I will be able to see if there are changes in things like; the number of pages the ‘average’ person views, how long they spend on each page, how many times a page is shared, etc.

I’m really curious if making the blog’s design more basic, will help readers to focus on the actual content; which is what the blog’s all about, after all. Let’s see!

One of the benefits of running this blog, using the Headway wordpress theme (affiliate link) is that I can quickly make changes like these myself, usually in seconds.  As effective marketing is all about testing and measuring, the ability to make changes so quickly, and then adapt based on the feedback, is massively valuable.  Equally, if it’s quickly apparent that the new design needs changing, this can also be done in minutes.  That’s great peace of mind and allows for changes to be made with total confidence.

Sharing my results with you, as always

Because the vast majority of my readers have their own website or blog, I will let you know if the new, more basic look generates an improvement or drop in the blog’s statistics / analytics.  This way, we can learn from my experiment together. I’m guessing it’s going to take a week or so, before I see any relevant data.  Rest assured that as soon as I do, I will pass the findings on to you.

What (if anything) do you think about the new, basic look?  Also, which blogs do you read most often and do you think the design of that blog influences how you read it?  Please take a moment to share your thoughts.

Why bloggers post every day – Part 2

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Do you write a blog?

Are you thinking about blogging or taking your blog more seriously?

In either case, I believe you will find this post really useful.

As regular readers will recall, I wrote a post last month about the results I have seen, since I increased the frequency of my blogging from around 1 post a week to 6 or more posts a week.  This is part 2 of that post; Why bloggers post every day.  I suggest you read part 1 before you continue, as it contains some very interesting findings, which could really help you!

However, since writing that post I’ve noticed another interesting development, which I want to share with you.

More visible, more mentioned

It’s now a month since I started blogging almost daily and in addition to the results I covered in part 1 of this post, I am now starting to see a significant increase in the number of times that this blog get mentioned.  These mentions range from people citing this blog (or me) in their blog posts and articles, through to an increase in the number of times I see the blog and myself mentioned across Twitter, Facebook, forums and newsletters etc.

Why is this happening and what can we learn from it?

As I said in part 1 of this post, there was a significant growth in reader numbers here, as the frequency of my posts increased.  A larger reader-base obviously gets your blog and your name on more peoples radar.  The more people aware of you and what you do, the greater the chances are that you will get mentioned.

Of course, this then alerts new people to your blog and your work, increasing the size of your readership and thus the process feeds itself.

Here’s something special

By getting good quality information in front of people regularly, I believe you also become a more integrated part of your readers daily experience.  Many readers will position you very differently too.

You, (the blogger) become a regular part of their working day.  Your blog becomes a growing repository of answers and ideas, a knowledge-base that your readers can rely on. If you can understand what’s happening there, it’s so powerful that it’s almost magical.

Share your experiences

Do you tend to subscribe to blogs that are updated more regularly or less regularly?

How often do you think a business to business blog should be updated?

If you are a blogger yourself and you have either increased or decreased the frequency with which you post, what kind of feedback have you seen?

Please join in the conversation and share your feedback!

Why Google means so little to me (and you mean so much!)

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One of the first rules of business is not to rely too heavily on any 1 client or customer, for the majority of your income.  If you do, and that customer goes broke or takes their business elsewhere, you’re in BIG trouble!  Even if that customer just decides to pay you late, it can kill your cash flow or put you out of business.

Everyone knows that it’s far better and a lot less risky, to have a wider spread of business.

Or do they?

For some reason, when it comes to the Internet, it seems many site owners and bloggers focus the majority of their efforts on just one form of traffic development; search engines.  Then, the vast majority of that is focused on just 1 search engine – Google.  As a result, some people are now very dependent on Google traffic.  Many invest a staggering amount of time and effort doing everything they can, to keep Google happy.

Even the most read sites on the Internet can become extremely dependent on Google.  In a recent blog post, Darren Rowse from problogger explained that he almost went out of business, when Google decided overnight, to cut his traffic (and thus his sales/leads) by 30%!

I believe it’s insane to allow any 3rd party to have that much control over:

  • Your sales
  • Your leads
  • Your enquiries
  • Your income
  • and maybe even your business’ future

Whilst I recommend that every business invests in professional Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), I ALSO strongly suggest that you consider investing in alternatives too.  Why? Because the results can be amazing AND it removes your exclusive reliance on search engines.

For example, although this blog is currently ranked one of the top 100 marketing blogs in the world by Adage, just a small percentage of my traffic comes via search engines.  The vast majority comes from people, via social media (more on that in a moment.)

SEO, social media and your Internet marketing mix

When I started this blog, I decided that Google was NOT going to play any deliberate part in the blog’s development.  I do NOT recommend others follow this path, it’s not the right move for the vast majority of people.

Why did I do it? Because as someone from a traditional marketing background, I wanted to use a form of marketing for the blog, which was not so reliant on Google.  I elected to use a strategy, which used a number of social media related activities. The idea was (and still is) to provide my blog with a much wider spread of human-powered, marketing options.

I use some basic SEO here, like tagging posts so that it’s easier for search engines to correctly identify what my posts are about.  This takes seconds to do.  However, I do not deliberately use Google friendly key phrases or key words – I don’t even have a sitemap!  I also do zero off-site SEO.  If Google stopped sending people here tomorrow, it would have very little impact on the development of this blog. Chris Brogan claims to have gone 1 step further than me, and says he does no SEO on his blog whatsoever! That’s incorrect, as his theme is optimized and he has requested people to link to him – I think he means he doesn’t keyword stuff. Ignoring SEO completely is at best, a little blinkered.

Here are just some of the ways that people, via social media, have helped me generate targeted traffic to this blog:

  • People share my blog posts on Twitter. I use Twitter most days and have connected with a some great people. Some of them are kind enough to share posts on Twitter, if they find them interesting.
  • People use sites like Facebook, Delicious, Stumbleupon and Digg etc to share blog posts. For example, this 1 post gets hundreds of views every week from Stumbleupon users.
  • Fellow bloggers link to posts here, which alerts their readers to this blog.  Some bloggers link to the entire blog.
  • People have mentioned the blog in podcasts.
  • I link to this blog in my marketing newsletter; which helps new newsletter readers discover the blog.

Because SEO is very much the secondary focus of the blog’s development, I focus on optimising my posts, so that they are as attractive as possible for people.  I have to admit that as a writer, I find it far, far more natural to write for people, than to alter my writing style, so that there are key phrases and words scattered strategically – to attract Google’s attention too.

It’s wise to combine great copy writing with powerful SEO.  Particularly when writing copy for a website, as opposed to a blog, the combined SEO social media approach is extremely valuable.

Love SEO – but give social media a hug too!

Do not misread this post and think for one moment that I am suggesting you ignore SEO.  That would be wrong.  I am not saying that at all.  However, I AM saying that all site owners and bloggers should spend some time exploring additional ways to generate targeted traffic. Keep up with your SEO, but seriously consider adding a little people-power to your Internet marketing mix!