This One, Tiny Little Tip, Will Change The Way You Think About Blogging To Build Your Online Business

Welcome back my friend! I’ve got a good one for you today!

You’ve likely been hearing all the buzz flying around lately about content marketing and blogging, and about how closely entwined it is with inbound marketing, social media marketing, and all the other new-fangled marketing jargon.

But let me ask you this my friend. How is any of this ‘new’ stuff any different than the old stuff?

How is this ‘new’ marketing and blogging stuff any different than the marketing and blogging stuff that’s been working just fine for the past thousand years or so (give or take)?

Short answer—it’s not.

Marketing has never been about the tools and technologies; marketing is about the people, always was, always will be. I created my own website to simplify the process of making money online and this one fact is the fundamental principle underpinning everything I teach.

People love throwin’ around fancy new labels for everything because it creates a nice new niche to be exploited, and makes them feel more important than those that have come before them.

Don’t get me wrong here though folks; I’ve got no problems with all that; it’s just as good for me and you as it is for them.

Here’s the issue though for small business owners that don’t have time to sit around reading blog posts and twitter feeds all day: the terminology tends to be a tad bit (unintentionally) deceptive. It kind of leads you to believe that you’ve either gotta’ go out and learn a whole bunch of new marketing skills, or else get left behind.

Bottom line though is this; that’s all pretty much untrue!

Marketing is marketing is marketing is marketing. Don’t over-think things here.

Give people a reason to trust you; prove that you’re trustworthy (through your actions). Teach, inform, and educate people on the things that they’re interested in learning about. And if you can muster it somehow, try to make the whole experience at least a tad bit interesting for them, so that you’re not coming off like some old dullard drone.

Not too difficult right?—And certainly not new.

After people ask me what I do for a living; the first question I always get from small business folks is this; “Hey, do you think this blogging stuff might work for my business?”

[ah-duh—yeah…maybe!?!]

“Well, actually, I’m not really sure—Would your business benefit from having more people know that it exists …and from having them know how your business might be able to solve some of their problems for them?”

I suppose I could have just as easily said, “Well, actually, I’m not really sure—Would your business benefit from MARKETING???” [As I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen one that couldn’t!]

That’s the point here folks; when it comes right down to it, none of this is anything all that much radically different than any other marketing you’ve ever done—it’s all just marketing. ‘Inbound’ is a tactic. ‘Social Media’ is a tactic. In fact, even ‘Internet’ is just a tactic too.

It’s all just marketing; meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Blogging can help internet marketers sell products. Blogging can help network marketers recruit more reps. Blogging can help online and offline businesses grow. Essentially, if you aren’t blogging, well, one thing is for sure:

You are losing money.

How Your Business Can Benefit from Blogging

Short answer—the same way it would benefit from using any other marketing tactic—Make people aware of the fact that you exist, help them see how your product and/or service can give them pleasure and/or take away their pain, and always be honorable and trustworthy in everything you do.

Don’t know where to start?—try this …

1. Set Up a Super Simple, Clean, Fast Blog

Don’t worry about getting fancy at this point. Just get started blogging or keep improving your blogging efforts. If you are new to blogging, set up a simple (self-hosted) wordpress blog, no frills, lots of white-space, big font size, no clutter.

Next up; make yourself a list of the top 10 or 20 most common questions your customers are always asking you about your product or service.

Make each question the title of a separate new blog post. In each post, answer the question, honestly, clearly, and directly; and try not to sound too much like a stiff while you’re doing it—throw back a few shots of scotch if it helps your blogging, it’ll loosen up your tongue a touch (social lubricant)

Allow your ‘voice’ to say what it really thinks (write like you don’t care whether it’s written perfectly or not).

You’re not writing this for your Freshman-year English professor or your wife’s aunt Trudy; you’re writing it for somebody that couldn’t care less about you or your writing and blogging skills—he just wants some well-deserved, straight-forward answers before he decides whether or not to whip out his well earned money. Can you blame him by the way; isn’t that exactly what you do? Give the guy a break, give him a reason to trust someone for a change (a real reason).

People aren’t used to honesty these days believe it or not—don’t be short-sighted, build yourself a reputation for integrity—it’ll blow people’s minds (and use lots of—mdashes—in your writing too, just for fun 🙂

Moving on …

One last order of business before you publish. Within each one of your blog posts you need to quote & link out to about 5 or 6 different external sources. The best place to find people to quote and reference is from your competitor’s own blogs, or from the blogging efforts of other people that are in your niche, but that aren’t direct competitors. Don’t link to their product pages, sales pages, or even their front pages. ALWAYS quote from and then linkback to, one of their actual blog posts. This is blogging your way to a great reputation!

Also Note: be sure to reference each person/post-author by name. Take the time to make sure it says exactly who the author of the post is. If a specific, real name isn’t displayed as being the author, then move on and find a different post to use.

You NEED to reference a specific person because later these people will hopefully help you with promotion and its much easier to get a real person to help you than a faceless website address.

Doing this outbound linking/quoting/citing/referencing thing is essential (and mandatory) and also helpful for 10 or 12 different reasons (that you’ll figure out eventually if you don’t already know) one of which I’m about to elaborate upon below.

2. Build Yourself a Tight Little Promotion Pump

Again, same thing here, same as above; no need to get fancy. Start with all the people you just linked out to from within each of your blog posts. 20 questions = 20 posts X 5 outbound links each = 100 people you now need to start baiting into doing your blog post promotions for you.

PLEASE note that I specifically said, ‘bait’ into promoting for you. I didn’t say, ‘ask’, I didn’t say, ‘beg’, and I didn’t say ‘push’ or ‘pester’. That’s bad blogging etiquette and looks desperate which you don’t want.

Baiting means that they ‘decided’ to do it of their own free-will (i.e, they, ‘discovered’ you (not the other way around) via their great & selfless perceptive prowess)—i.e, let them be the hero, not the pawn.

I’m not suggesting that you write all 20 posts at once and then bait all 100 people at once; just that the final tally after you’ve written and published all 20 articles will be around 100 people at your disposal.

In reality, what you will do is write one article (ie, answer one common customer question) link to 5 or 6 people from it, publish the post, and then start getting (genuinely) friendly with those 5 or 6 people.

The quickest, easiest, most efficient way to do that is by using twitter.

After you publish your first post, locate the twitter profiles of the people you linked out to from within your post, add those 5-6 people to your ‘follow’ list in twitter, and then send out your first tweet regarding your newest post (@mentioning those people).

More about @mentions: Mentioning 5 or 6 people in the same tweet isn’t exactly optimal and may seem a bit awkward, but in most cases it’s better than the alternative, which is sending out 5 or 6 consecutive tweets with only one @mention in each (thus, promoting your own blog post 6 times in a row, which isn’t good).

If it makes you feel better, maybe do it twice with 3 @mentions in each—that wouldn’t be so bad I guess.

Example Tweet …

New Post: [insert the shortlink to your new post here] featuring @person1 @person2 @person3 @person4 @person5 via @yourowntwitterhandle

Why?

The first thing people check, and the thing they check most often, on twitter, is their ‘mention’ feed. The mention feed shows only the tweets that (as you might imagine) @mention them.

They see that you mentioned them in your tweet (ie, THEY NOTICE YOU, for the first time ever possibly). They see that you used the word ‘featuring’ in your tweet, which suggests that the blog post you just tweeted about must have something to do with them (which is exactly right, you quoted them in your blog post, cited them by name, and even linked to one of their own blog posts).

What do you think their opinion of you might be at this point?

Well, let’s see; what would yours be of them???

Short answer—They think you’re awesome!

Worst case, they will at least go look at your new post, and might even read it. Or they might just scroll down to the part where they are quoted and see what was said and which of their posts you linked out to.

Either way, you’ve made a great first impression because…

1. You quoted them in your post.

2. You gave them a link to one of their posts.

And 3. You did it all without asking for anything in return, and you weren’t pushy about promoting those facts too aggressively (ie, you didn’t email them about mentioning them in your post, you never actually ‘asked’ them to promote it for you, nor even to read it for that matter, and you didn’t pester them with a ton of questions about whether they liked it or not, etcetera.

What about a best case scenario?

Well let’s see … they will probably ‘follow’ you back on twitter (which is good, because then they will see all of your future ‘new post tweets’).

Maybe they will also ‘retweet’ your post link to all of their twitter followers.

They will probably at least publicly thank you (on twitter) for the mention and the link (which all of their followers will then see and notice you and your post).

They may comment on your post directly. They may start a conversation on twitter about the topic of your post. They might even share your post on their other social media channels (where all their other followers will see it). This is blogging heaven!

You’ve potentially made a new blog-promotion-buddy for life (multiply that by 100 and you can start to see where all this is going, and then later by 1,000, and so on, and so on).

You’re building your blogging network here! Awesome; keep at it.

Later they may even quote, cite, and linkback to your post from one of their own posts, or from a guest post they write on another related site.

If they really take a liking to you, they might even ask you to guest post for them (great way to get a bunch of new eyeballs to your site and a chance to showcase your blogging skills)

And don’t forget; you @mentioned at least 5 or 6 people, so make sure you multiply all that ‘potential’ by 5X or 6X (and that’s your first post).

Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves though; it’s actually more likely that nothing at all will happen the first few times you do this. It might take some time to get yourself established within the blogging community.

No worries though, you’ve got time, this is long-haul type stuff you’re doing here, you’re building yourself a blogging base; just keep at it, move on to your next post and start the same process all over again, and again, and again.

Eventually you’re gonna ‘stick’, if for nothing else, just because of familiarity; they see you mentioning people on twitter all the time, they see you linking out to other people from your blog posts all the time. Basically they just ‘get used to’ seeing you around, and start to recognize you as a generous ‘team player’ (the ultimate social compliment in my opinion).

Also note: Obviously there are all sorts of other channels you could use to keep promoting this same post, and maybe eventually you will start using a bunch of other channels, but right now all I’m trying to do is get you started and headed down the right path.

Your first 20 posts or so will build you up a nice little base of operations, and a decent sized network of blogging – buddies and twitter followers. Not a huge base or following, but certainly a good quick blogging starter package.

One final message here before we finish up this ‘promotion pump’ section (and this is the rub)—Your content can’t be total rubbish. If it is, none of those things mentioned above will EVER happen.

A 2nd final message: All those new friends you just made (that helped you out by retweeting your posts and such on twitter) aren’t going to stay friends with you very long if you don’t return the favors early and often.

You’re all part of a community/network together now, so make sure you pay attention and consistently retweet their posts too, comment on their blogs, and all that good stuff.

You don’t have to do it for every single post any person in your new blogging network publishes, but you do have to put in a damn good effort on a very consistent basis. Trust me, you’re gonna need them again, so don’t be one of those people that only comes around when they need something.

3. They Say Content is King … I Say it’s Consistency

Now all you have to do is repeat. Follow the exact same process for each of your first 20 questions (posts). When those 20 are done, start on the next set of 20 common customer questions and keep blogging. Marcus Sheridan can show you how to get 100 of them in about 10 minutes.

And if you ever run out of customer questions to answer just go back to the beginning and start writing new posts with ‘updated’ answers for those questions you already answered.

By this point it’s likely a few months later already, and Mr. GrayWolf would suggest that it’s probably a good idea to revisit all those old questions again anyway (there’s no such thing as too much content in content marketing) and you certainly won’t be the first blog marketer to have semi-redundant content on their site.

Notice I didn’t say to ‘re-write’ the old post by the way (that’s bad in my opinion). If I were you I wouldn’t even read your previous blogging efforts, because I wouldn’t want it influencing what you’re about to write in the new version. Just write the new post as if it’s the first time. Make sure you also play around with the title a bit to make sure it’s unique from the first one, but still represents the basic meaning of the typical customer question.

That’s it; now just repeat, repeat, repeat. Abracadabra, alakazam; you’re a content marketer and blogging genius (same as the old boss). You might also want to check out my other post relating to blogging called How To Promote Your Blog in 2014 – The Definitive Guide.

Blogging Take Away …

It’s all just marketing folks; same as it ever was. Don’t be intimidated by the tools-de jour. It’s the people that matter, and the way that you ‘connect’ with them hasn’t really changed all that much in the past 1,000 years or so—show them how you can help them in a clear, honest way, and always look to help others.