Marketing blogs, they’re everywhere! If you do a review of the top 100 blogs in the small business section in Technorati approx 85% of them relate to marketing and social media. The top blogs are all marketing blogs (Mashable, Seth Godin, Chris Brogan and the rest). They are all full of very useful and offer relevant advice.
However, for those of us who are not marketeers by trade or have other views or opinions on other aspects of small business – it can be difficult to get noticed. Sometimes you’d have to ask yourself why you would even bother writing about other things as it can dilute any traction you gain by talking about the business of marketing in one or two posts.
This blogs greatest view numbers have been on posts that relate to social media marketing. If we don’t have a post that relates primarily to this space, the number of hits from the U.S. drops noticeably.
We think we have other useful information to share – but it gets lost in the land of;
“Top 10 tips for using LinkedIn… Facebook….Twitter…blogging…” when shared across business blog forums.
To us, this presents an interesting challenge. Our blog is for small to medium businesses (for the most part). Therefore writing about our social marketing experiences is relevant. But we would like to write about other things relevant to the SME sector as well.
However, if we are only successful in terms for search engine finds and click throughs due to posts on social media and other marketing related posts, then the blog is unlikely to generate the type of traffic that we are looking for i.e. traffic that will lead to a reasonably high percentage of clicks into our product pages.
We are not a marketing house, we are a product house creating solutions to help business with project delivery. We need to be enticing people into the site who are looking for solutions over and above figuring out their own social marketing strategy – though of course it’s great to communicate with them.
We need people who are looking at becoming more effective, looking for project management solutions, cost control, budgetary controls, management reporting etc.
Which is why we are looking at the whole thing all over again in preparation for when we commercially launch MyProjectTracker. Our blog needs to be more rounded. It needs to be more relevant for the audience we are trying to attain. It needs to attract the type of readers who are going to click through to our product pages. It needs to pay for itself after we launch.
It will be interesting to see whether we can garner SME business interest in areas apart from marketing (which we will still write about from time to time based on our experiences!). An example, we wrote a post on Effective Management. It’s on page one of Google search in Ireland. We have not had one click through to the post from it! There are 200K search requests for Effective Management every month globally. We think this highlights the challenge.
We can’t wait to take it on. Social media marketing is most definitely a way to get our message out there – but we need to find out what people want to know about!
What are your views?
Photo : Garlandcannon
Hi Jim. Point well made on the “Twitter” front – hadn't considered that aspect -d'oh ! The challenge I think on the niche subject is finding the right one and being comfortable with it – this is indeed where the focus is going to be.
Thanks for stopping by and adding to the conversation – appreciated.
Hi Barney,
Thanks for a very interesting post. One of the reasons you see so many marketing blogs listed in the top 100 in technorati small business, is that they are written by people, who understand how to market their sites. Mine's often listed in the top 10.
One of the reasons you see so much more traffic when you post about social media / marketing – is that you promote these posts on Twitter. Twitter users are notoriously fond of RTing posts on social media.
In my experience, it's best to focus on your niche subject, and your target audience.
Hope those ideas help / are of interest my friend.
[...] for small business owners not to start doing it. Todd Youngblood’s “SPE” BlogMarketing isn’t the only small business topic to blog about out there. But with marketing blogs and particularly social media marketing blogs racking up the lion’s [...]
[...] Marketing isn’t the only small business topic to blog about out there. But with marketing blogs and particularly social media marketing blogs attracting the lion’s share of blog readers and traffic, what’s a blogger on other small to medium sized business topics to do? My Project Tracker [...]
[...] Marketing isn’t the only small business topic to blog about out there. But with marketing blogs and particularly social media marketing blogs attracting the lion’s share of blog readers and traffic, what’s a blogger on other small to medium sized business topics to do? My Project Tracker [...]
[...] Marketing isn’t the only small business topic to blog about out there. But with marketing blogs and particularly social media marketing blogs attracting the lion’s share of blog readers and traffic, what’s a blogger on other small to medium sized business topics to do? My Project Tracker [...]
Thank you for this post–I am also confronting this same challenge. I believe resolution resides in the notion of persistence and focus.
My approach is a bifurcated effort: I leverage SMM as a conduit to gain more brand advocates, while perpetuating content that features the other services offerings we provide to the same channels, with the addition of highly niche online communities.
[...] Marketing isn’t the only small business topic to blog about out there. But with marketing blogs and particularly social media marketing blogs attracting the lion’s share of blog readers and traffic, what’s a blogger on other small to medium sized business topics to do? My Project Tracker [...]
I hope I don't sound cynical but marketing is of interest to entrepreneurs because it correlates with revenue. If, as we are told, every post needs to make and deliver on a promise, the promise of increased revenue is an attractive one. Readers will click through if they believe the solution will make them money. After all, that is what they are in business for.
Hi Heidi – thanks for the comment and stopping by. Sounds like you are taking a solid approach.
Hi Dana. You don't sound cynical in the least and the point you make is perfectly valid i.e. marketing is the no 1 way of driving revenues. I suppose the trick is to ensure that posts on other aspects of business can also hold there value by discussing ways of being more efficient, reducing costs etc. Point well made though, thanks for sharing and adding to the discussion.