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.

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

It seems hard to believe that it’s now just over a year, since I launched this blog. In that time, the blog has developed a great community of readers, who regularly contribute comments, feedback and suggestions. This reader input, has helped shape the direction of the blog and been of immeasurable value to me.

Interestingly, over the past few weeks, the blog has started to gain recognition from organisations outside our reader community.

Two new developments in particular have really taken my breath away. Firstly, Advertising Age ranked this blog high enough to be included in their prestigious AdAge Power 150 list. As a reader of Advertising Age for more than 20 years, this recognition means a great deal to me.

Then earlier this week, it was brought to my attention that technorati has also listed Jim’s Marketing blog, in their list of the top 100 small business blogs!

Content AND reader engagement

Although I have tried to provide as much genuinely valuable material here as possible, the reason the blog has started getting noticed outside of the blogs community, is because of the blogs community! No matter how hard I try to make the blog of value, without YOU being so proactive in the way you have recommended and shared this blog with your friends, NOTHING would have happened.

The encouragement and feedback you have given me over this first year has been of massively more value to me than you can possibly imagine.

I am not going to name names, because the list would be just too long.

For example, it would include the name of every one of you, who has commented. The current comment count is just under 4,000. It would include those of you, who share this blog with your friends on Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter etc. It would include those of you, who have linked to this blog. It would include everyone who has subscribed to the blog’s RSS feed and those, who have tweeted with me or called me for a chat; after finding my phone number (01427 891274) on the contact page.