Jim's Marketing Blog

Marketing tips and ideas to help you grow your business

Google+ Not me too!

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A lot of people have asked me if I will be writing a review post this weekend, about the new Google+ service.  I managed to get an invite on day 3 of the pre launch and have been very impressed with it.  However, this early on, all anyone can say for certain is that it looks interesting.  You can join me on Google+ here.

But no, I am not going to review Google+

Here’s why!

There are already hundreds of posts written about Google+ saying almost the same thing.  For me to simply add to that noise would be of no value.  I spent 30 minutes this morning, reading 10 posts about Google+.  If you had read any one of those posts, you would have had no need to read the other 9. They all offered a very similar breakdown of all the key features and then the blogger either said it would fly, or flop.  That’s all anyone can say now.  None of the posts I read offered anything original; just comparisons to Facebook etc, lists of features and what’s great and what they think is missing from the product.

Me too posts

I try and avoid writing what are called me too posts.  Me too posts tend to be very similar (hence the name) and I believe that my posts should offer you something original or at least an original view point.  Anything I wrote today would have been me too. That kind of review post is great for news blogs (and Google+ IS big news).  I see little point, however, in me too saying that Google+ rocks or sucks and telling you what the features are, yet with no user data or ‘stats, that’s about as deep as anyone can go, today.  Plus, that post has already been written hundreds of times in the past 24 hours.

Of course, any posts written today will also be inaccurate and outdated extremely quickly, as the Google+ team are rolling out changes very fast right now.  I have already seen one big change in the past 12 hours alone, (which those reviewers all missed.)

Over the coming weeks, as more people are invited to join (it’s mainly geeks and early adopters now), we will start seeing some worthwhile data.  We will also get an idea as to how fast (or slow) Google+ is growing.

I will be talking about Google+ in the near future, but not until opinions can be formed on facts and hard data (rather than guesses and first looks).

If you are using Google+ I’d love you to connect with me here.

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

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!

My dofollow experiment – The results

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Way back in November 2008, I decided to start an experiment. Against the advice of a few SEO professionals, I decided to see what would happen, if I offered ‘dofollow’ links from the comments section of this blog.

I have been able to take this gamble, because this blog is 100% free of advertisers, affiliates and sponsors.  In other words, I have none of the traffic pressures many of my fellow bloggers have.

After 6 months, here’s my experience.

What’s a dofollow link?

Briefly, for those who do not already know, when you leave a comment on a dofollow blog, the links you put in your comment are followed by Google, from the blog, to wherever your link points.  However, the vast majority of blogs and websites offer ‘nofollow‘ links, which means that Google is told not to follow the links you leave in your comments.  By offering dofollow links, it’s believed that you give a tiny SEO boost to those who comment on a blog.

The dofollow results

3 weeks ago, I removed the dofollow attribute from the blog, so that I could see what difference, if any, it made.  I thought it would take weeks to notice any real, measurable difference, but the change started after just a few days.

Here’s what happened.

Spam comments from REAL people

Sadly, this blog slowly became a magnet for people seeking to get dofollow links for their sites and their client’s sites.  This form of spammy commenting, has already all but stopped.  This is because those who make a living from targeting dofollow blogs, usually have software installed on their machines, which shows immediately if a blog is dofollow or not; (like Quirk’s popular SearchStatus plugin for firefox).

Let me make this clear – I am NOT talking about automated spam, which every blogger gets.  I am referring to spammy comments left by real people, exclusively designed to get dofollow links to their site (or their client’s sites.)

Search engine results

After just 3 weeks with the dofollow attribute turned off, search traffic to this blog from Google has increased by over 25% (and it’s still increasing.)  My Google Pagerank has also increased from 3 to 5.  I have discussed this considerable increase in search engine traffic with several SEO professionals. It seems the general belief is that I was being penalised by Google, NOT because I offered dofollow links; but because too many of those links pointed to what SEO professionals refer to as ‘bad neighbourhoods.’

In other words, people were linking to dubious sites from here and I was being penalised by search engines for allowing it.

I believe that this problem can be rectified, by manually checking the URL’s of every link left by every person who comments. However, this blog has around 4000 comments – one post alone has almost 700 comments (and growing!)  The large number of comments on this blog, made it just too time consuming for me to manually check the URL destination of each comment. Yes, there is software out there which is supposed to be able to do this for you, but I found it to be way too inaccurate – often claiming great blogs were spammy and visa versa.

Conclusion

Just offering dofollow links shouldn’t have any negative impact on a blog – providing you have the time to be able to manually check out the URL of every person who comments on your blog AND you are able to correctly identify what is a good or bad neighbourhood.

This causes a REAL dilemma though.  That’s because the temptation is to delete any comment from someone, with a link that you are not 100% sure about.  This inevitably means you run the risk of deleting comments from great, genuine people.

Dofollow clues

There’s an old saying in marketing, which tells us; “success leaves clues.” So, this weekend, I checked out the 50 most successful blogs that I read and NONE of them offer dofollow comment links. By the way, these include; scobleizer.com, techcrunch, mashable, ducttapemarketing.com and veronica belmont’s blog.

Over the past 6 months, my dofollow experiment has been really interesting.  My conclusion is that dofollow is a GREAT idea, if you have the time to check out the URL of every comment and the ability to call it right each time.

If you only get a few comments a day and can afford the time to check them out – Go for it!  However, if you get a lot of comments to your blog and you want to avoid a lot of extra work, I think you have a call to make. 

Ironically, the dofollow benefits you give your commenters will make very little difference to their SEO anyway.

This post covers my unique, personal experience with dofollow links.  I would like to hear your experiences with dofollow links or nofollow links.  What kind of impact did they have on your blog; positive or negative?

What if someone sees this?

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I read an interesting post on Seth Godin’s blog yesterday.  It tells the story of someone, who had three people short-listed for a job as a housekeeper.  The employer decided to Google their names and found they were totally unsuitable; all because of the information she found about them online.

Only last week, a web designer told me he had lost a highly profitable piece of work, after his prospective client checked him out online.  He hadn’t written anything offensive and there were no negative comments anywhere about either him or his services.  The client withdrew the project, simply because they were uncomfortable hiring someone who was regularly posting to Twitter after midnight!

Apparently, they said his late night Twittering suggested to them that he would not be awake enough during the working day, to handle their project professionally.  The next day I read an article on the BBC website, about a lady who was fired, for saying that her new job was boring, on FaceBook.

Whatever you happen to think about these decisions, there’s a valuable lesson here.

We live in an age where most of what we do online is visible AND searchable.  We also know that employers and prospective clients are now checking people and companies out online, before making hiring or buying decisions. Before you post searchable information online, ensure that is consistent with the image you want to project; either of yourself your business or both.

Quick blog marketing tip

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Here’s a quick blog marketing tip, to help you reach more targeted readers with your blog.

Focus on people – not ‘traffic’

Take a look at the search terms that people most frequently use, when they arrive on your blog from the search engines.  Then, write a blog post about that subject and you will often attract even more people.  More than this, you will not simply be ‘attracting traffic’ – you will be attracting targeted readers with an interest in your blog’s subject.

So long as the search terms that people are finding you with are 100% relevant to the subject of your blog, even if you see just a small increase in targeted readers, it’s worth it.

I have successfully used this tactic on my tech news blog and seen some amazing results!

I would like to hear from YOU if you have already used this idea and what YOUR experience was!

Google and me!

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As any of my regular readers will know, me and Google have a very strange relationship!  I decided to write this blog exclusively for people and develop it’s readership via ‘social media marketing.’  As a marketing professional, I wince when I see blogs, which are clearly written primarily to score SEO points; with the actual readers needs placed second.

So, I decided to develop this blog around a ‘100% human-focused approach’ – rather than writing for SEO and then relying on Google to provide me with a readership.

This saw me break a few SEO rules. For example, I provide do-follow links to people who comment here, even though I was strongly advised NOT to, because it would harm my Google ranking (It didn’t by the way!) I also decided to only write posts when I have something I want to share – rather than posting every day just to keep Google happy with the “regularly updated content” we are often told it needs.

Google rewards quality content

When I announced how I was going to build jimsmarketingblog.com‘s community, a few SEO professionals said that because I was focusing on providing good quality content, Google would actually still provide ‘targeted traffic’ to the blog. They said that Google was getting a lot better at identifying high value content.

After looking at the stats for the past month, I can confirm that these SEO professionals were 100% correct!  Even though I write in my natural style and often don’t blog for a few days at a time, Google now sends legions of people to this blog every day, with very relevant search enquiries.  Moreover, it has given the blog a revised PageRank of 4 (up from 3), after just 4 months of blogging and with me offering do-follow links.

Writing for Google and SEO

The lesson here is that despite what some might tell you, it seems that there is no real need to “write for Google” in order to attract new visitors via their search engine.

My experiences have shown that if a blog is SEO friendly and well written, lots of people will link to it. Once you get the links and you keep your focus on high quality content, it seems Google will figure the rest out!

It also shows the effectiveness of good SEO and the importance of the work provided by SEO experts, like those who have guided me in recent months.  I especially want to thank Gregor Spowart from MMD.