Why I Am Doubling Down on Blogging - and Why You Should, Too

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You've probably heard me talk about blogging on many occasions. As we head into 2022. I continue to double down on blogging. It's important to know why I'm going to talk all about that on this episode of The your digital marketing coach podcast. Digital social media content, influencer marketing, blogging, podcasting, blogging, tick tocking, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, SEO, SEM, PPC, email marketing, who there's a lot to cover, whether you're a marketing professional entrepreneur, or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got, Neil, on your side, because Neal Schaffer is your digital digital marketing marketing coach, helping you grow your business with digital first marketing one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach. And this is Neal Schaffer. Hey, everybody, Neal Schaffer, here, your digital marketing coach. Welcome to the podcast of the same name. This is an episode that has been in my mind for a while. And I'm really happy today to talk about it. Because it's a concept that I talk a lot about, not only on other podcasts I've been interviewed on, but also with my clients. I began this process of doubling down on my blogging when I published the age of influence to see I published a book on influencer marketing. without really having any blog content about influencer marketing, how was I going to promote the book? Without myself talking a lot about the book? How are people going to discover it? And it really ties into this digital first concept and digital first approach to marketing and the name of this free ebook, which I haven't forgotten about it, it's coming soon. But it really comes down to well, what can I do to get the word out about my book, it's the exact same thing, it's what can you do to get the word out about your business about your business's products and services? In a digital first, society, there's only a few ways. And that's why my book, and you've heard me talk about it on this podcast, I dumb it down to search, email, and social. So email, well, I have a list on my website, I can create more lead magnets, I can generate a free preview, get people to opt in that way I can do maybe you know, joint webinars where I can build my list. So list building strategies, and then leveraging technology that allows you to utilize marketing automation, to improve your chances of converting people on your list is obviously one very, very easy to understand. Very intuitive concept that I'm sure you understand, obviously, email only works when people already know about you. Right? I know that there are companies who will just send out cold emails and what have you. Not a big fan of that, although I know they can't be effective. But needless to say, email is the one that normally you would send out to people that already are in your sphere of influence, already have some brand affinity. And that's why you have their email address. And that's why they have opted into receiving marketing communication from you. So then we have search and social all over the place on social media. I do a lot on social media, there's definitely more I can be doing in terms of video. But when we get to search is where I realized that was lacking. So three big search engines that are based on three different types of content. We can look at first podcast, have a podcast, I can check that box, whether you call Apple or Spotify. We could argue YouTube, but I'm going to get to that in a second. That's one area. It's like, okay, I'm doing it. So I'm doing social check. I'm doing the email check podcast I'm doing and I'm going even further. By listening to one of my previous episodes on why I was interviewed on 100 different podcast episodes. You'll know why that sort of fed into that. Then we have YouTube and then we have Google search engines. So the YouTube is sort of the final piece of my strategy that I'm hoping 2021 I'm hoping to end the year on a splash, but it was really the search aspect. That got me on to doubling down on blogging. Now how am I going to get the word out that I am an expert in influencer marketing that people find out about my expertise, the only way to do that is to create content, about influencer marketing and you teach people what I know about it, just like any company can be doing the same thing. Now it's really interesting. After doing keyword research on influencer marketing is that influencer marketing search results were dominated by a few different types of companies. One were influencer marketing tools, companies. But it was very, very clear that what they were trying to do was to sell you on their influencer marketing tool. So the content itself maybe wasn't as deep. Maybe it was more self promotional, it wasn't really offering up the resource that Google wants to offer people that are doing, you know, searches in their search engine. So then there were other companies, like, you know, I don't want to name names, but there are huge marketing, software marketing technology companies that want to blog about anything and everything. And so some of them had top results, but they're not an authority on that subject. They haven't written a book about influencer marketing. In fact, their software doesn't even have influencer marketing functionality. And I would argue that there's a lot of social media marketing tools that were doing the same thing. And then you had these general sites that tried to jump on everything trendy, I'm thinking of, well, I don't want to name names again, but but there are these sites that aren't necessarily directly related to marketing, or social media, that we're coming up with content about influencer marketing. And this is the reality that I realized when I went through this exercise is that today, and I tell this to my clients, I'm gonna tell this to you search engine results. For many search queries are dominated by number one, old content. Number two, irrelevant content. And number three, just bad content. Because what happens is all these companies that want to rank for these keywords, they have big content teams, and content teams, they do research, they look at what else is out there in the internet. And they create content from that. And I've seen my own content, be repurposed by other bloggers, that's okay, I get it. Right. But they're not writing from the heart. They're not writing from experience. They're not writing from unique perspective, they're going through the motions to get content out there as if it was a factory operation. And guess what it shows they may have high search engine rankings today. But when I look at that content, I say this is blog content, it was not written by an expert. Maybe it was they outsourced it, because maybe the English isn't 100%, perfect. Whatever it is, there is a ton of bad content out there in the search engines. Would you agree? Can I have an amen? And if you do searches for your own keywords related to your company, your product or service, and you find bad content as well, you need to do what I do. Now, I've already talked about creating this library of content. And I'll in the show notes, I'll mention the podcast episode that I talked about that on. But you need to get out there. You need to share your perspective, you need to help people you need to help them make or help other businesses make the right decision, and they are not being served by the current search results. This is a conclusion I've come to this as a conclusion that almost every single client that I've gone through this exercise with agrees with me, there's a lot of bad content. And guess what if it's not bad, if it's not irrelevant, what happens is it's old. Like why is this information from 2014? Still up there in the top 10 results? Why does this you know, top social media platforms still mentioned Google Plus or StumbleUpon? These platforms don't exist anymore. Blogging is about building equity. It's about creating assets. So what I realized was okay, I'm going to start blogging about influencer marketing. But I need to always be keeping this up to date. I don't want to become that content that might appear high in search engine rankings, for various reasons. But over time, it's not going to stay because guess what the world is always changing. So the net net of all this is that I began blogging once a week about influencer marketing. And then when I realized that, okay, I'm building up my library, and I'm seeing that the strategy is working, because I'm genuinely creating useful content for people without trying to sell them a tool, right. That's what I realized. I can apply this concept to other things that I consult with businesses about other things related to digital marketing. It's why I've created my own library of content around things like email marketing, around things like search engine optimization that I didn't blog about before. So slowly, I found myself blogging twice a week. And then I realized, you know what, I want to make sure that for these strategic pieces of content, some of them need revising more than others. But I'm going to start to republish more content. In fact, I'm going to create a process now that I understand how critically important blogging is to my business. From the website traffic From the brand awareness and from the conversions, whether they're soft conversions into my email list, or harder conversions into my mastermind or consulting practice, that I am going to start treating all this content not as a one and done, but as assets that have long term shelf life, and I'm going to start a process of revising them. So if you were to look at my editorial calendar, pretty much on Monday and Tuesday, it's new content. I've already done my library of content for influencer marketing already beyond that. And that's why you see very few new posts about influencer marketing, because I've already blogged out but what you see now, that's Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, I am republishing older content, I'm not just putting a new date on and I am genuinely revising it, making sure it's up to date, adding more content to it normally adding at least 10% More Content to it. And with that, every time I republish old content, I know it, it's only only going to get higher and higher in the search engine rankings. It's newer, it's going to compete with the older and I'm adding more content to it, I'm building a better asset over time with it. And this has only helped my rankings once again, go higher and higher. And with that higher traffic, and it's obviously all relevant traffic. Thursdays is normally when I have guest bloggers, I still embrace guest bloggers. But I've changed my strategy about guest bloggers, I have my own strategy of topics that I want to build my library of content for. Some of them are very personal, like influencer marketing, some of them, no one is the expert at everything. So I'm more than happy to have other experts come in so long as it aligns with the topics that I want. As part of my library of content, I'm more than happy to have others come in and contribute their thoughts in helping me build my own library of content, whether the content is mine, or the content of someone else's, it's still living on my website. And that's how I have built have doubled down tripled down you could say quadruple down from a once a weak blogger. And that was in frequent best to since Coronavirus, pretty much blogging four times a week for the last year and with an editorial calendar now have blog posts ready to be published for the next two to three months, four times a week. They're already locked and loaded and ready to go. That is how aggressive I am on blogging. And I believe and I've seen it with my clients that you can achieve a similar type of success that obscene. And if you're curious about that, let me give you an I continue to work on this stat. But I have been actually measuring over time, for this library of content of influencer marketing keywords. These are the 52 keywords that I want to rank for. I started creating this spreadsheet it on actually November 1, but a year ago 2021. At that time, I had three of the 52 keywords. And these were for new posts. Because I only started blogging like you know, late 2019, early 2020, I only had three posts that ranked in the top 10 on Google for those keywords. Fast forward to October 1 of 2021. And now I'm on the top 10 for 29 of those 52 keywords within one year. And you can imagine how much that can impact traffic. In fact, I rank for those 52 keywords that I created brand new blog content from over the last year, year and a half. I can say on October 1, I ranked number one for six of those for more than 10% of the keywords that I was targeting. I have seen my clients do similar things based on this same process. And it's why I want you to double down on blogging as well. Because guess what, we got the social, we got the email, we got the search, you need to be found everywhere. And if you're not creating that content that is truly useful and resourceful that would normally be in the format of a blog because you are missing out on the search aspect of this. In fact, everybody's searching is going to your competitor, or they're going to irrelevant or bad content. So that's why I'm really passionate about this. It's why I talk a lot about content on this podcast. It is one of the pillars and it's also why after I wrote the age of influence, I had a lot of companies reaching out to me about influencer marketing about social media marketing, and I saw the opportunities with SEO, I'm saying hey, I get the shiny new object. But there's a lot of things we can be doing here and guess what that actually might be more impactful based on your objectives, especially if you're a b2b company. I think it's more objective more impactful but not necessarily But I want to give you the confidence that when done right, and when I write this book, I will hopefully make it very clear as to how it is done right? That you too, can achieve this type of result. No guarantees, obviously. But it begins with the mindset that the search engine rankings are exposing bad incompletes old or irrelevant content and my company or me, I can do better. I am the best I am the expert, our company's the expert, we need to get this content out there. And when you have that mindset and when you have that passion, you can achieve exactly what I did. Beginning with influencer marketing related keywords I've actually moved on from that, but I can safely say In fact, I'll give you some more statistics here something that I follow using my favorite SEO tool sem rush and maybe I've talked about this before, but when I look at the search engine rankings compared to what sem rush believes are my competitors and I look specifically at these influencer marketing keywords This is a great you know function that sem rush allows us to do through their position tracking functionality. So I'm going to go in and as I speak, I know you don't see my computer but I'm going into my my 52 tagged influencer marketing keywords, and I can see that I am actually beating sites like Sprout Social, Hootsuite, Neil Patel, Neil, Neil is a great guy. But anyway, when it comes to these keywords, I am out ranking him HubSpot, Social Media Examiner buffer, even sem rush, who they recommend as someone else that is competing with me, the only competitor that I'm not out ranking is a site called influencer marketing hub, which when I started blogging, they already had tremendous authority. And guess what, you know, influencer marketing is part of everything they do, it's in their URL. What's also interesting though, is influencer marketing hub similar like these other sites, is starting to talk about things that aren't related to influencer marketing. So we'll see what happens with with their authority over time. But guess what, of these 52 keywords, those that rank in the top 100, I have 51 influence marketing hub only has 50, those that are in the top 20. I have 44 keywords that rank their influence marketing hub only has 42. They're not really competitors. There's no real competition here. But it just goes to show you that you can outperform the big companies, when you do it right beginning with that passion. That's why I will continue to double down on blogging in the foreseeable future until I have created my library of content. Once I create that library content, maybe I will start republishing twice a week instead of once a week. But blogging becomes a natural part of the infrastructure a natural way to gain more and more momentum in search engines. And you're building asset you're building equity. It's going to grow over time. Do this before your competitors do it. Stay tuned. Obviously, subscribe, make sure you don't miss future episodes. Go to my website, Neal schaffer.com. Make sure you opt in so that you stay abreast when I offer this new information. I think it's going to be really beneficial. But hopefully this episode alone has given you a new mindset into why I'm so passionate about blogging, why I'm doubling down and why you should too. Alright, this is your digital marketing coach. Neal Schaffer signing off. We'll see you in the next episode.

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