Your blog won’t make you any money-the CXL Growth Marketing minidegree REVIEW(part 7)

Warehouse office in uptown Miami, two older boomers who love to watch sports, talk about their college days, play golf and wear pink polos discussing their business.

CEO: Hmm, I tried to find the dumbbells we sell on Google, and I didn’t find anything.

Marketing Manager: Wait, I will give it a try as well. You are right, when I type in dumbbells in Uptown Miami, we are on the 10th Google page.

CEO: What should we do then? Perhaps we should put up a billboard on the street so people would visit our website more and that would help us come out higher?

MM: that is a great idea. But I think in the long term it will become expensive.

C: Hey, no pain no gain

MM: WAIT. I KNOW. I heard it on something called a webinar. We should start a blog.

C: Oh Yes, Tim talked as well how they blog now on their site, and he even himself sometimes puts a few lines down. You know I’ve always wanted to be a writer. I think I am very similar to Hemingway.

MM: Yes, and half the work is already done for us, let just copy other blogs, sort of like best of and let’s combine everything together to our blog post. I have an empty slot in my calendar think I can do our first post from tomorrow 9 am-10 am

C: Oh, that’s great, so by day after tomorrow we are hopefully on page 3–4?

MM: Let’s hope so!

If you have worked with small businesses as I have, then you’ve probably overheard conversation similar to that.

And You’ve wanted to shoot yourself in the head.

I’ve always known You just can’t immediately rank well in Google, one post isn’t going to do a lot for you, You need linking and so on, but I haven’t known much.

However, last week, I did a course in the CXL Growth Marketing Minidegree program about Content Strategy for SEO, which blew my mind.

And I would like to share some of the biggest nuggets with you.

A blog isn’t for driving sales.

The biggest lesson I took from the course was that blog isn’t for driving sales. It is for providing value, developing brand awareness and for raising the rank of your domain.

Most people search answers, not products to buy.
80% of keywords people search online are informational, 10% navigational (they want to get to a particular page they already know), 10% transactional.

So that’s what your blog should help people do, it should help them find answers to their questions.

Which altogether helps you:
A) build your brand relationship
B) raise your domain authority which means it also helps your other pages to be more easily findable.

When you do that well, and your product pages are created with commercial intent keywords in mind, those will rank higher, and then $$$ starts flying in.

Keep it original

But how do you provide value and raise your domain authority with content? Or simply make your name more known?

Well — with great content.
In blogging, the good stuff is amazing, average stuff is useless.

But how do you create great content?

With original research.
You can answer questions people have and conduct researches.
Internet is filled with questions people have.

You can come up with hypothesis yourself and conduct research as well. Or find answers to unanswered questions.

These days SEO isn’t just about keywords.

Google is not a baby anymore, it is a schoolboy, so it understands the overall topic of your writing, and when you research and create a “paper” from it, Google can associate it with the topic you are writing about.

So make great content, don’t worry so much about keyword hacking and the audience will follow.

(It is called semantic SEO.)

You can also answer simple questions more effectively than anyone else.

And the brilliant move is to repurpose your customer chat logs and all of the similar stuff to the blog articles.

Usually, people who are interested in the same topic have the same questions as well.

The more relevant quality content you publish, the more people spend time on your page, and the higher your domain authority goes.

First the fame, then the $$$

But how do you get those people on your page? Especially at first, when you don’t rank high yet.

With smart distribution.

For SEO linking is essential.

When you publish content, at first no one will know about it, and when you don’t have links to your site, then Google robots still think you are a worthless page.

So there are many ways to upgrade your distribution game.
First of all guest blogging, writing articles for different pages/blogs/news outlets, etc.

Creating a valuable piece and then sending it to them with a few links to your site.

Not only is it good for links, but it also helps you to get in front of a new audience and get your face out of your own bubble.

So at least for every 2 posts on your page, you should guest post once on someone else's page.

An in an ideal case before pitching your articles, pick the sites you are going to build relationships with.

A link from a site with domain rating in the 80s is worth 8X more than a link from a site with domain rating in the 70s.

So when choosing sites to contact, take that piece of knowledge into your equation as well. And play the long game.

Another great thing you can do for your internal blog is to get quotes from industry thought leaders. Ask them a question or two about the topic.

Or create a whole article as a roundtable where different industry experts share their thoughts.

It is supposedly a great way to network as well — who wouldn’t love to express their opinions.

When you finish the piece, then the people featured in it often share it with their network as well.

So brand awareness — checked. Links for domain authority — checked.

Thank You Andy Crestodina for this fantastic course and for all the numerous insights you gave to us.

Who knew blogging for your website SEO could be so much fun!

And remember, advertising is fast but inconsistent, content is slow but steady.