Passion is Your Online Marketing Strategy
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small businesses are looking for cost effective ways to rank higher on search engines like Google, driving traffic to their Web page without investing tons of money. here’s how.
SEO
I can’t lie, there’s more to rankings than passion. But you guessed that — there’s always more. Before we get to the way passion can help, I need to get basic SEO out of the way. It just can’t be ignored. But as you’ll learn, your heartfelt Web posts feed directly into your search engine optimization (SEO) fuel tanks. Passion for your product can’t be the only thing that drives your model for success. Without SEO, you’re keeping online customer in a long-distance relationship with your brand. They will never connect to that emotion in your posts if they don’t get to see you — on their Web browser, that is. And that’s what a lack of SEO does: It separates you from your audience’s searching eyes and click-y fingers.
Having basic SEO means you’ve got a well-designed site where the contents are organized, tagged and titled so search engines can index and store your data. Whenever someone does a search, that search engine can reference your stored data in one of the billions of queries it performs every day. Without that, your website will end up lonely, in a digital no-man’s-land, virtually disconnected from the rest of the Web. I’m imagining some kind of Western scrubland. You don’t want to be there, alone with the tumbleweeds.
So to stay in a friendlier climate, so to speak, first invest in professional SEO if you haven’t already. It’s important to read up on it before you hire an expert or trust your designer with it. In your research, you’ll learn about “white hat” and “black hat” practices — think spaghetti Western villains here, and you know you want to avoid the latter. Black hat SEO schemes are meant to exploit loopholes and specific factors in a search engine’s ranking algorithm in order to move your site up the list of search results. If done right, it will work — for a while. But considering that Google spent $2.5 billion last year trying to update their formulas and stay ahead of black hat practices, please don’t expect the company to take kindly to you testing its limits. Sooner or later, the spiffy new algorithm will recognize what you’re doing and penalize your site by dropping your rankings in the search results; effectively sending you back to that lonely scrubland where not even a rescue posse will ever find you. Put lightly, it’s hard to bounce back after being caught in a stunt like that.
If you have no idea what SEO is, but know that you need it, moz.com has an amazing in-depth explanation you should read before hiring an “expert” that promises you’ll be ranked #1 on Google in no time. Here is the Moz SEO Guide.
content marketing — aka selling your brand by selling good content.
the better your content, the better it is for your SEO.
The best part about content marketing is that it targets both your niche audience and lets Google know that you deserve a higher search ranking. It benefits your SEO and focused marketing efforts at the same time. Win-win.
this is where your passion takes over, and I use the word “passion” because you will rely on it for this strategy.
Content marketing works, but it takes time and effort. Unless you create the world’s most viral blog post on your first try, you won’t immediately see results. Posting your ideas may discourage the digital faint of heart, but commitment to that mission/message/product/lifestyle is important. Although the Internet is enormous, it proves one fact every single day: There are other people out there with similar ideas and the same weird sense of humor that will gravitate toward your voice…you just have to find them.
Post your content via your businesses blog, your Google+ account, or just add great informative articles directly to your site. Do it well and as often as you have the time.
rhetorical question time:
If your website sold specialty chalk and you took five minutes out of your day to find this image in a Google search, and another ten to post a short accompanying article on your blog, do you think it would be shared by other chalk artists? Perhaps it would be shared by a few street artists around the world. Further from your audience, it might be reposted by people who love tigers, or get other shares from people who just like cool stuff. Regardless of why, they are all sharing your Web page for you. Further, what if you reached out to this artist (Nicolaj Arndt) through Instagram or his website and got him to talk about his art, and added his quote to your post? Would that attract your target audience more? You bet.
“I should send this to my friend Ryan, he’s an artist .”
Once the right people start noticing your posts, they’ll be on your site for at least a minute and perhaps notice the collection of other information and cool topics you’ve been posting about. If the Web gods are smiling upon you, you will get your first follower (outside of your significant other and your sympathetic friends, of course).
To be clear, this is not marketing copy you’re writing, it’s interesting articles, videos, tips, lists, charts or any other type of material that you and your target market would find useful, thought-provoking or even funny. Let the passion you have for your business drive your intuition about what to create. It’s best to generate the content yourself, but good commentary on other media works, too. The idea is to be a voice and an authority for your niche.
links
The more consistent and reliable your posts are, the more others will link to your site, and this plays a key role in content marketing. When more people link to your content via backlinks, search engine ranking algorithms “think” that your pages have value to others. The more popular and respected the other website is, the more valuable the backlink is for your search ranking.
a tale of trickery and deceit — a wiki-story
You’ve probably heard that a link to your website from a Web authority like Wikipedia can immediately boost your ranking. In fact, an actual SEO scheme involves becoming a legitimate Wikipedia contributor. One would first have to author several credible articles so as not to seem suspicious, then start burying their links somewhere in the often neglected reference section at the end of articles. Seems a bit ridiculous and unscrupulous? Yes. Effective? Also, yes.
This illustrates two points: One, the links don’t necessarily have to be used to boost your own authority, and two, backlinks from powerful Web authorities are a boon to up-and-coming sites. Think about it — the work put into writing Wiki articles is nothing compared to the time and money spent on other SEO and marketing practices that often fail miserably by comparison.
Link building is like practicing professional networking with the entire Web. Your colleagues are other websites, their resources are their audience and domain authority, and you’re all there to get linked up. Savvy bloggers and administrators know that links with the right and wrong (spammy, low-quality content) sites can and will affect their ranking accordingly.
conclusion
There you have it. It takes dedication, practice and a passionate belief in your business to diligently produce good content for your website and blog. The World Wide Web may seem like it’s ignoring you, but keep your fire burning by feeding it inspiring content, sprung from your fertile mind, on a regular basis. One day, one of your sparks is bound to be noticed by the right person.
