Blog marketing: Do social networks outrank search engines?
An interesting article over at Promotion World declares why search engine traffic is not vital to blogs, outlining the strategies bloggers should already be using to drive traffic and, eventually, loyal readers to their blog.
At first I jumped to a conclusion, thinking that the author (TJ Philpott) was saying that search engine ranking and traffic is not important at all.
In fact, that’s not what’s being said — more that SEO (search engine optimisation) and ranking in itself isn’t a necessity for a successful blog.
This should be music to the ears of most bloggers — in fact, any web site publisher — because anyone who has been publishing online for even a modest amount of time knows how fickle search engines can be. One day, you’re riding high on Google, the next you’ve been mysteriously dropped (you probably didn’t do anything wrong, either).
It’s probably fair to say that most passing traffic comes to blogs from search engines — and the majority of that from Google — but the article suggests that spending a bit more time focusing on social networks and social media can pay real dividends.
It does depend to a certain extent on the purpose of your blog, of course.
If you’re merely trying to get footfall in order to increase revenue from advertising, then search engine ranking equals better traffic and more profit.
If, however, you want to build reader loyalty and sense of community (and in turn, perhaps, sell via affiliate marketing, which tends to do better once a level of reader trust has been built up) then SEO may not be enough.
Inbound links from other blogs certainly help, but they can be hard to achieve.
The article suggests that using social media to encourage visitors to your site may not only increase repeat visitors, but can give you a better insight into what readers actually want as you “socialise” on these sites.
It’s interesting food for thought, but the main take-home point for me is that, like income, diversification of visitor sources is vital for the success of most blogs.
I personally don’t think one type of marketing is better than the other, but both should be used in balance to bring visitors to your blog.
What do you think? Are you switching more towards social media marketing, or is SEO still very important?
Case: Measuring Word of Mouth via Bloggers
Back in 2007, I partnered with a PR agency that handled a french inspired fast food company serving mainly breads and pasta. They were looking into doing a “blogger meet up” and experiment with the idea of measuring word of mouth. They were in the process of launching a new product, which happened to be a special blend of spiked coffee; one of those amaretto or Bailey’s infused mixes.
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Blogging More Efficiently by Doing What Works
I often meet bloggers that think that blogging is about doing certain things. They’ve read a couple blogs about blogging and find out that there are many different blogging activities they can do. So they create a checklist and methodically try to complete every activity on the checklist. These activities may include:
- Twitter marketing
- Guest posting
- Blog commenting
- Submitting to article directories
- Creating list posts
- Doing interviews
- Writing humorous posts
The problem with the checklist approach is that different activities will yield different results. Guest posting may send more traffic than blog commenting. Or list posts may attract more links than interviews.
As you manage and promote your blog, if you’re watchful, you’ll see that certain activities will be more successful than others.
Once you’ve made that realization, you should move more time and effort to those successful activities.
Sometimes the first thing you do provides very good results, so there’s not much reason to spend a lot of time on the other activities.
The 80/20 Approach
Instead of the checklist approach, I suggest the 80/20 approach.
With this approach, you spend 80% of your time on activities that have worked well for your blog. If being active on Twitter has brough a sizable increase on your RSS subscriber base, then you spend a lot of time of Twitter. If funny posts have been well received by your audience, then you set aside much of your time to create those posts.
With the rest of the time, you use it to try out new things or the activities you like that don’t provide the best results.
The 20% is there so you don’t get bored. It seems to be human nature to try new things. Plus, by trying out new things, you could find an activity that works even better than your current best activities.
Different Activities for Different Blogs
One thing to note is that certain activities work well for some blogs but not for others. Just because article marketing works for your pet blog doesn’t mean it will work as well for your travel blog.
This means you should spend time testing different activities to see which ones work for each blog.
For example, I used to do a lot of article marketing but I found that it didn’t work that well for many blogs. For many niches, article marketing is very saturated and overdone. Your articles don’t really get much traffic because there are so many competing articles.
But I submitted some test articles for a new blog in the gaming industry. These articles did well since surprisingly the gaming industry is not active on the article directories. Therefore, I spend most of my marketing time doing article marketing for the gaming blog.
To recap, through testing figure out which activities work well and then spend the bulk of your time and effort on those activities. This strategy will improve your blog as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Performancing offers an authority builder service to help you discover which activities provide the best results for your site.
Blogging Tricks Will Only Bring You Part of the Way
Recently, I was working with someone that considers themselves an expert in social media marketing, SEO, and other popular terms these days for promoting a site and getting it some traffic. The person ran their ideas past me, and there were two things I quickly noticed.
The first was that they had probably read some blogs that told them to do various things to increase their SEO, things like bolding keywords, stuffing meta tags with keywords, and changing out H2 tags for H1 tags all in the hopes of beating their competitors.
The second was that they were focused on various tricks relating to creating landing pages, buying links, and other marketing methods.
All of the information this person passed by me was older information, most of which was nearly useless today as well as short sighted, with possible results that would end in disaster.
Imagine if you will, owning a blog for years, slowly building it up, trying to get to the next level in traffic, revenue and whatnot, hiring an “SEO expert” and having that person create, via tricks, some serious traffic.
You pay the person, thinking they’ve done a great job, and three months down the road, your site starts dropping in rankings, traffic dries up, and various other things happen that puts your site lower than it was before the “SEO expert” came along.
This is a far too common occurrence in blogging. Even the bloggers managing their sites make mistakes in SEO, marketing and social media in hopes of creating a hugely successful, viral, high positioned page that they can leverage in terms of making huge amounts of money or popularity that they can leverage in other ways.
People have to stop and realize that blogging tricks will only get you part of the way to your goals, and if done incorrectly they can actually cause huge setbacks.
Too much optimization, too overt in your self-promotion, and you’ll end up wishing you could undo your hard work.
The best advice I can give someone looking to do better with their blog would be to research as much as you can before you act in any way to effect your blog in any important way.
Don’t just leap into action after reading one person’s experience, and always check the age of the information because all the search engines are working hard at providing the best natural, gaming free search results.
Facebook Pages, Short-lived Fad or Still Useful?
Ever since Facebook launched the new design earlier this year one of the most interesting features was the new power given to Facebook Pages. Every item posted to pages showed up in fans’ news feed and I have been a fervent promoter and user of these pages, there where before I hardly ever used the platform for social marketing. The possibility to constantly drop links to blog updates without filling my own Facebook profile was a god send. I have managed to launch a blog almost entirely based on its Facebook page as sole and only promotion platform, but the future might be different and the social network could become useless as a promotion engine.
