This past week I’ve blogged that content is an important part of your online and social media marketing plan and that you need to be consistent, work through the low points to get to the tipping point, the moment when your marketing starts to pay off. What is needed to carry you on through those low points and to stay on task is passion.
Consistency and Content
When I talk to my clients I tell them that the key to their online marketing campaign, the key to consistently producing content that can be found online and that will be valuable to potential customers, is to blog. Companies that blog have 55% more website visitors than companies that don’t blog. Websites that blog have 434% more indexed pages on their web site then websites that don’t blog. An indexed page gives your website more search engine (SEO) authority and increases the amount of content available to visitors. Websites with blogs have 97% more inbound links, another source of SEO authority, than sites that don’t blog. Blogging almost doubles your Twitter reach and blogging gives small companies an enormous advantage online, a place where they can compete on par with larger companies. (Source of the statistics is from HubSpot’s “The State of Inbound Marketing 2010” and “The State of Inbound Marketing 2011.”)
Most companies post a blog once a week or once a month but research shows that site visits and conversion rates go up with more frequent posts. (Ibid above) When I tell clients that to be effective and to reach their goals they must blog at least three times a week I get two very different reactions. One reaction is: That would be impossible, I couldn’t possibly keep up a schedule like that. The other reaction is: Hey, no problem, there are a lot of things I can talk about. Obviously I want to work with the latter and that is why passion is important.
Burt and Deborah
Ask yourself why you are in business. Is this just a job, just a way to make a buck? Or are you passionate about what you do? For many of us passion is represented by Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr’s passionate surf soaked embrace in From Here to Eternity. But the passion you need is the kind of passion that a committed couple have over the long term or the kind of passion that keeps a parent up all night with a sick child. You need the kind of passion for your business where you can’t relax for the weekend until you have your three blogs for the week written and posted. It’s not a lot, we are talking about 500 words per blog, one type written page three times a week. If you can’t write that much about something you are passionate about then perhaps you need to rethink your business plan.
I know that not everyone is a writer, not even if you are passionate. You may need help writing but you should be able to think of things to write about and give that information to someone who can help you write. If you are interested in how Image Media Partners can help direct your passion to a better online marketing plan contact us and let us know how we can help.
Photo credit: By Trailer screenshot (From Here to Eternity trailer) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
