Archives for May 2010

Technology is constantly evolving and there are always new platforms that arise and newer ways to effectively market your business with online marketing.  Right now, some of the more popular networks used for online marketing are sites like Facebook, & Twitter.  Both of these platforms continue to evolve into more powerful networks and opening more & more opportunities for business.  Our Facebook page is our third largest source of income for our online marketing company 210 Consulting- Social Media Advisors

With all these wonderful new platforms, the one thing that many overlook is the ability for your blogsite to become a hub for your business.  Whenever I am doing online consulting with a client,  I make sure to always enforce the importance of a good blogsite that they own as the foundation to their marketing plan.  As I have shared in previous posts, it is imperative to your business to have your own website where your content & brand is strongly displayed and that you can direct all your traffic back to.  Having just a page on a company website, or on a platform other than your own, you always stay at the mercy of someone else.

Just under two years ago I set up an analytics tracker on one of my blogs to keep track of how many visitors I receive.  I find myself at times becoming somewhat a statistics geek. I love seeing the numbers and watching growth and declines.  It helps me to gauge my online marketing efforts.  Since adding the analytics to that blog,  have been amazed by the stats.  There have been over 101,000 page views that have taken place during that time period.  In addition, the blog has seen over 67,000 unique visitors.  That is an average of 4,236 page views per month and almost 2,800 unique visitors per month.

These numbers are HUGE. While there are multiple reasons why these numbers are as high as they are, here are the top reasons I believe it has been successful.  These are my top five ways to get traffic to your blog:

1.  Search Engine Optimization- When I was selling real estate & trying to gain the most exposure to my site, the best way to accomplish this was to write for the search engines.  I did research on keywords that were going to be easily attainable for high rankings and traffic and then set out to write & land on the first page for those longtail keywords.  Usually I could take the top spots within only a few blog posts on a term and keep it the top spots fairly easily. Search engines account for over 76% of the traffic that come into my blogsite.  On the other hand, Twitter & Facebook only account for just over 1.5% of the traffic.

2.  Establishing Yourself as an Authority- With the increasing amount of exposure the Internet provides for businesses & their online marketing, there are more & more competitors that try to gain business via the Internet.  The one thing that will bring them back to your site & sharing it with their friends is if you give them more credible information on the subject they are interested in.  While many fear that if they share too much information, they are giving it away.  Businesses fear that the consumer will not contact them if they share too much. The reality of the situation is that being an authority builds a layer of trust with the client that makes them decide to work with you over your competition.

3.  Sharing Your Experience- Sharing that knowledge gives you an increased level of credibility that will drive that consumer to work with you.  Also, even though you have shared how to accomplish something in detail, consumers will still call on you for your professional experience.  Remember, we are the professionals that work in the industry daily.  That experience is invaluable to most consumers & will bring them in to work with you for that reason alone.

4.  Consistency & Regular Updates- If consumers know that they can find your content on a regular basis, they will come back to read regularly because they are always met with new content.  Writers like Chris Brogan have been able to gain over 50,000 subscribers because he writes daily new unique content.  If you can write at least 3 times a week or more, solid high quality content, you will gain a readership that will return regularly to your page.

5.  Relate to Consumers- One of the biggest mistakes I see people make in writing blog posts is that they do not try to connect with the consumer.  They write using the terms of their industry or the way they would talk when trying to sell something.  Readers of your blog do not like being sold to! Instead of trying to sell, try to connect, it will be much more profitable to your blog.  If people feel it is nothing more than one GIANT ad, they will run for another source never to return to your blog.

If you apply these 5 simple steps into your blog, you will see an increase of traffic and subscribers like you could never imagine.  Trust me when I say, it works!  Once I applied these into my blog I saw my numbers grow exponentially to the place they are now!

If you have any questions about how I achieved this & want some personal online consulting to get your business receiving these types of numbers, feel free to contact me.  I’d love the opportunity to assist.