TILT Your Marketing

I made what most would call a big mistake: I deleted about half of my blog posts from five years ago. I spent months reading into the repercussions of this and how it would affect my Google search rank, and how it would impact the volume of my blog. None of it mattered in the end.

I grew as a Writer.

After writing for nearly eight years, I grew as a writer, and will continue to grow. I read some of the content from way back when and wondered why the hell I wrote about that. Why would I have written 573 words of nothing. My writing goals were very different back then. I was writing to make noise. Today, I am writing to make a point. At least I hope that I make a point.

A Change of Topic.

With growth, also comes the change of topic. Five years ago I was blogging about technology news and marketing trends. None of that is applicable today. While I don’t have a specific topic that I write about here, I do have a genre now. (Creative non-fiction for you curious ones.) I’m not writing about the same thing iVerge and Ars Technica are writing about. That’s not what this blog is about. This blog is a collection of my experiences with a couple of morals and perhaps lessons that my readers can benefit from.

Low Quality Posts meant Low Organic Traffic.

If it’s a shitty post, are you going to share it? No. I wouldn’t even read half of what I wrote way back when. If you don’t share it, it doesn’t get organic traffic. If it doesn’t get organic traffic, it gets a lower search rank. But more importantly, I wasted time and energy writing a crappy post when I should have spent that time writing something valuable that someone will benefit from and want to share.

Now here’s a lesson for those of you who are blogging. Make sure that all of your content is high quality. Take your own photos. Get down and dirty with your points. Don’t be a lazy writer. If you can’t expand on those points you’re trying to make then either get some education on the topic or change your career. Harsh I know, but sometimes, you’ve got to be harsh. It makes no sense you writing something that no one will read. It will hurt your confidence as a writer; something that took me quite a long time to come to terms with. That being said, I’m a shitty writer. I know that. But I have some decent points and I don’t bullshit and waste time making them.

That’s my leverage. What’s yours? 

“If you write it, they will come.”

No. They won’t.

Yes, they will.

No. They won’t.

Well, maybe ten years ago.

But, not today.

Blogging is not just about writing a couple articles and calling it a day. You have to research, write, edit, edit, edit, format, insert rich media content, *preview*, then publish. THEN the work really begins.

After you hit that publish button, what do you think happens? Do you think that some random magic blog fairy will tell all her fairy friends and they will shower you with traffic? Maybe in someone’s fantasy world, but not in the real world.

You have to work for your traffic, honey.

You have to publish it on social media networks, you have to email the links to all your friends and ask them to share it with their friends, and so on.

Little by little the traffic will grow, but you have to work hard. Your blog is a brand, and you have to do put in the man hours to make that brand popular, unless you don’t care about your blog, then you can just move along to my next article.

Every day, you have to network a little on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and wherever else you think your traffic lives. If you’re a serious blogger, I would even suggest buying some Google and Facebook ads to generate some traffic, and hopefully, you will be able to keep that traffic.

Then you have newsletters, which are so important now. You have to send consistent newsletters to keep everyone in the loop about your blog’s latest content. And putting together a newsletter takes time and some level of skill, and lots of Youtubing.

You also have to share your evergreen content (the content which is relevent no matter the date it was published). Tools like Buffer come in handy for this because you can buffer that content and then scroll through the list later on and rebuffer.

The great thing about this is that you can do this yourself, for just 15-30 minutes a day. And it’s not hard stuff, it’s hard to remember to do for most of us. People who write creatively are sometimes not the same kinds of people who will remember the somewhat mundane, routine tasks. But once you look at it as a part of your blogging routine, and it’s on the same priority levels as your blog, then you’ll be on the right track. It’s all a part of the wonderful world of blogging 🙂