This is what the purpose of the blog is. It's that opportunity to educate, entertain, etc. which, you know, I've already said in this, this in this podcast is, is hackneyed and feels tired, but it's, it is what works. I mean, the whole, the whole idea of content marketing feels like, oh, really?
Well, yeah, I mean, this is the thing. It works, but it's super high effort. You actually have to walk the walk. It's like to actually prove you're an expert, eh, you have to be an expert and be you have to put the time into writing all this content, not knowing necessarily whether or not it's going to make you a sale for the next two, six or twelve months.
But although it is a major undertaking to create a blog section of your website, and then to fill it full of great content, it can be the gift that keeps on giving. Oh, yeah. Okay, welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface with me, Dave Robinson and Alex.
And some technical issues.
And we did have some technical issues. Our card was protected. Imagine having a protected card. Um, we're going to talk today, probably one of the shorter ones we're going to do maybe maybe not. And I'm doing this on purpose because.
I have no idea what's happening or what we're talking.
About. Still doesn't know. I'm gonna surprise him. Um, what we'd like to talk about is, is what? Just what is the purpose of.
Do it already.
What is the purpose of a blog?
Oh, well, that's a big question.
It is. Yeah. I mean, we blogged about it. We blogged about what is the purpose of a blog?
Is that when I wrote, I didn't write that.
You didn't know. It's, um, it's been around for a little while, that one. And it is quite a popular blog, because I think it's a question that a lot of people do need to know the answer to. And the reason they need to know the answer to it is a lot of people in marketing. Well, if you're in marketing and you don't know the purpose of a blog, that's probably a bit of a surprise. But hey ho, it might be the case. But generally speaking, if you speak to business owners about the purpose of a blog, they are a bit confused.
It was very trendy for a while, wasn't it? That was the advice. Every website should have a blog, every business should have a blog, you need a blog. And then people would be like, well, what do I put on my blog? And you end up with that kind of, well.
You did and you finished up with things like, uh oh, we'd just like to announce that Alice from accounts has done a sponsored walk at the weekend. She's raised thirty bob for a well known charity and walked for miles and think, that's not a blog post.
No.
So I think there's, there's, there's lots of different ways of looking at this. Um, and I think if we work through them, it hopefully will we'll give people some insights as to what the purpose of a blog really is.
And probably what it's not for too.
Yeah. That's right. I mean, I think a lot of people use a blog a bit like the news section. Now on the news section of your website. It's fine to say that Alice from accounts did a sponsored walk at the weekend and raised some money for charity and walked three miles. That's fine. That's news. That's something that happened in the business. People might flick through the news and what are these guys up to? What are they doing? But it's not the purpose of the blog.
No, definitely shouldn't be. The other thing. I think we see people using blogs for an awful lot. Thinking of one client in particular, without naming any names, is this kind of overflow, right? It's like this content doesn't belong anywhere else on my website, so I'll put it on the blog. It's kind of like the repository for everything that doesn't really have a home. There's no real strategy behind it either. It's just kind of like, we'll bung it on the blog.
That's right, I agree. And so let's get, let's get to some of the, some of the, some of the reasons you should have a blog. So some of the, let's say it purposes, not just the purpose because it might have multiple purposes. So the simplest one to think of is it's an opportunity in a non salesy way to communicate your expertise. Answer a question they ask you answer answer a question.
Do you get commission for.
I wish I did.
I wish I did.
Yeah. Good old Marcus Sheridan. Um, I think it would be good if we just looked into that a little bit. This idea of sharing expertise, having non salesy content.
Sounds a bit pie in the sky doesn't it. And I think that's one of the main objections we probably see to this kind of thing. It's like why would I, a business person, waste my time sharing my expertise for free on the internet with everybody else when there's money to be made? Um, I think that's certainly one of the biggest kind of things we have to combat is this whole idea that, yeah, you should be protecting your kind of knowledge and expertise rather than sharing it, but ultimately that is what Google and your potential customers want to see, isn't it? They want to know that you're an expert. They want to know that you know this stuff inside and out. And a blog is, I guess, at its most basic level, a way of kind of proving that to people.
Yes, I agree. Um, so, so that's fine. So it's a place to put content that maybe to slightly contradict what you were saying. It's kind of a place where content that doesn't fit anywhere else might might go. And I know, I know what you were saying. I don't disagree with what you're saying, but, um, it's content that will help people form an opinion about you by providing them with genuinely useful content. Now you hear this all the time. Fill your website full of really interesting, useful, educational, entertaining. And it's true, you need to do it. But I can understand why people are not in the industry.
Roll.
Their eyes, kind of roll their eyes and think, well, what does that actually mean?
Yeah, but I think you hit the nail on the head when you talked about answering questions, right? It's like whenever you're selling a product or a service, you've got, you know, you'll have your main landing page or whatever on your website where you're talking about that product or service in detail, but you know, around that subject, people will have questions. They'll want more in-depth information, they'll want to know how specific bits of the product or service work. And you don't have time to go into that detail on your main product page. That's the kind of stuff I guess you're talking about. You kind of kind of answer those questions later in more detail on your blog.
Yeah. And another thing. Yeah, you make a good point there because quite often on, say, product pages or service pages, people want to make the content really quite punchy, quite short, which is great, but it might not be the right thing from the point of view of securing good search rankings, getting your website or web pages seen by your ideal customers.
Well, like I think if we use our blog as a really good example, right? So a while ago we put like a landing page, technical SEO services, the technical SEO services landing page just says, we're really good at technical SEO doesn't actually say anything about what technical SEO is, how it works. So I then tried to go away and write a load of blog posts around subjects that were related, but you didn't want to talk about it on that main landing page, because otherwise it gets incredibly long and dry and boring. So yeah.
So are you saying that blog posts can be long and dry and boring?
I'm saying that generally people's expectations when they land on a blog post are that this is going to be in-depth. This is going to take time to read. I'm going to kind of sit down with a cup of tea or a cup of coffee or whatever, and kind of pore through it in my own time. And I think that's probably actually thinking about it. Quite an important way of looking at a blog. Like we're saying, what is a blog for? I think maybe a more important thing is like, what do people expect to find when they come to your blog? Right? That kind of content.
Okay. So, so when somebody comes along and sits down with a glass of sherry.
Sure.
And just to.
Read through the.
To read, to read your, uh, you read your blog post. They're expecting, you're saying that people are looking at, looking at blogs are expecting to get something meaty. Something in depth. Yeah. Okay. And again, what is the purpose of that?
Well, I mean, I mean, you've got to think about like, when was the last time you googled something and you saw a big long article that ranked for that search term told you exactly what you needed to know. You sat and you pored through it. And by the end of it, you thought, these guys really know what they're on about. Or, you know, this is a brand I can trust because you've just sat and read, you know, kind of three or four or five minutes long, you know, massive piece of content that tells you exactly what you needed to know about whatever your query was. Okay. That's the theory.
Yeah. And it is the theory. And I guess the challenge is that we keep getting told that people have the attention span of a gnat, and at the same time, we expect them to read this great long piece of content that we've written. Something we're experimenting with is to add on to blog posts, a short video, which kind of gives a precis. So hey, if you haven't got time, just watch this video and it'll give you the essence of what the blog post is about. But when it comes to long form content content that's designed to help people understand a subject more thoroughly, and guess what? They learned all of that stuff from you. So they will hopefully be now positively predisposed towards you. That's one of the reasons we write blog posts. That's one of the purposes of having a blog.
Yeah.
Okay. Don't just nod. Say something.
Yeah. I mean, yeah, exactly. That's it, isn't it? Establish your authority. I mean, it's funny though, because we're, you know, we're talking this back through now. I can see the floor. I can see the counterargument very clearly. You know, I run Acme engineering. I make, you know, a really specific tool, say an adjustable wrench. There's not really that much to say about adjustable wrenches. I don't really care whether or not people trust me because I'm selling a product and they're going to come to me and buy it anyway. Does it really matter? Do I have to sit there and kind of laboriously pour my heart out onto the internet like I see it from both sides, but I think the point is, whatever you're selling and kind of whatever industry you're in, people are interested in things around the periphery of whatever you're doing, like how it's made, how it works, what they're actually buying. Yeah. Why yours is better than the competitors, what to look for when they're buying an adjustable wrench or whatever. There's plenty you could be talking to people about. And I guess that's the thing, isn't it? Just use your blog as a platform to establish yourself as somebody who knows everything there is to know about adjustable wrenches.
Yeah. And if what if people are not reading it, does it, does it still have purpose?
No.
I think it does. Do you?
Yeah, yeah. Go on. Elaborate.
I mean, I, I think you can be quite cynical about blogging. I mean, what we're trying to achieve with search marketing, content marketing is to create a body of evidence on a website. Over, over, over many web pages that you are across a subject. You understand a subject from all angles in depth. It's something that, um, you're you're an authority on that subject, right.
Because you don't want to if.
Yeah, if you do that, if you, if you blog like crazy around a subject and show the world or show Google that you're an authority on it because you've got tons of great content and you're covering all the different angles and everything else, all the, all the subject matters well covered. That is likely to help and improve your search rankings.
Yes.
So you actually don't care if nobody ever reads it. If it gets your website into the search results and gets people on your website, isn't it serving a purpose? Even if no person, human being, human being actually reads it?
But I mean, sure. Right? Yeah. But surely if it's kind of ranking well and your content's getting you noticed, people will be reading it, right? Because because I guess that's like more the fundamental point that I was kind of the way I wanted to take that was If you're not careful, you can blog around or about things that don't get you any traction because they're not searches or questions. If you like that people give a shit about. Yeah, it's entirely possible if you don't sit down and plan it out, if you don't have a decent strategy going in to spend all of your time writing blog posts that you think people will care about, but that never get any traction in search or otherwise, because that's not actually a thing people care about. And I think that's one of the key dangers, right? That's one of the key things we see. Somebody says, oh, go away and blog about your expertise. And people go off and blog about very technical, very in-depth things that, you know, nobody searches for on Google and suddenly you have kind of wasted hours of your time.
Do you know why I wrote a blog post called what is the Purpose of a blog?
Go for it. Was it was it to rank for a search phrase that you knew that people searched for?
Exactly. Was. Exactly. Was and and, and that blog post, which if you, if you just Google what is the purpose of a blog? You should find a blog post by Red evolution on page one. Um, and that's what it does. It sets out this idea, which it sounds soul destroying, bone crushingly horrible waste of time in some respects. Like, wait a minute, I'm going to spend a lot of time, a lot of energy, a lot of money writing content that nobody will ever read. Well, no, because people will read it.
Yeah.
But what the point I'm making in the post is, even if they don't.
It still.
Will actually feed into the end goal of improving the way that your website is viewed by the search engines, and the way your website then appears in more searches, I suppose.
Because I think the other thing it's fair to say about that is it does take a long time, doesn't it? Because one of the other key complaints we have with blogging is people are like, oh, I tried that. I tried that for three weeks and it didn't work. I published one blog post a week for an entire month and I didn't get anything. Yeah, it's not a short term strategy, is it? It's not something that is a quick fix, a bandaid at all.
No. That's right. If you're going to try and build up, um, a blog that's going to add some value. You know, that's got real purpose then. Yeah, it is a long a long term endeavor. Um, I'm trying, I'm trying to think of if we've ever had some really quick wins. If, if you find something that people are typing into Google and, and that that query, that question that people are asking isn't being well served, right? Then there's an opportunity perhaps to write some content to answer the question, provide the information people are looking for, and for that to appear reasonably quickly, high enough up in search that people will click on the link and find you, I suppose.
But I think it's also fair to say going off piste a little bit, that that is that is more likely to happen easier if you are doing it consistently, right. The more you blog, the more traction your blog gains, the more likely you are to rank content for the searches. So there's a as an argument for not just kind of finding those quick wins, but just being kind of consistent with it. Yeah. Because I think that's something we see with our blog, right? If we stop blogging for a month and then we start again, the blog posts we start publishing after a month of silence takes a lot longer for them to get traction than when we're doing it every day for, you know, three weeks. It's, it's night and day. So I think there's probably like, yeah, an argument to be made for doing it in a sustained fashion if you're gonna do it.
And be realistic as well. Um, we, we've spoken before about writing content, be it blog posts or anything else, mainly blog posts. I suppose that, um, you write them in the hope that you will secure some search rankings. Yeah. Without looking at what Google is currently ranking. So, you know, we've had some examples recently where we did some research, like people are typing this into Google. Great. It'd be nice if they found us. When they type that into Google, they don't currently find us. Right. So what are they finding? Well, the finding company A, B, C, D, and E, and those guys have written fantastic pieces of content where they've put in some original research, they've put in a video, they've put in maybe some, some, um, some data and, and, and written maybe a couple of thousand words on this subject. They've created a, you know, a decent, chunky, well put together piece of content. So that four hundred word blog post that you put together in ten minutes isn't, isn't going to cut it, is it?
No.
So it's not just a case of, to your point about people getting disappointed, it's not a case of just like banging out blog posts. You can. We've been there years ago. We just kind of, oh, you know, I mean, I, I removed content recently and I think I spoke about this recently when we did our big sort of, um, uh, improvement. We did a big improvement exercise on our own website. And I found in there some content that I'd written masquerading as a blog post, which was like two or three sentences.
Right? And that's not a blog post.
It's nonsense.
Yeah. And maybe that's the thing we should do. Actually, since this is an episode about how to use your blog properly, is run through a little checklist of things that you should try and include in blog posts.
That's a good idea. I like that.
Because one of the things I want to have a very quick rant about that very quickly.
It's a slow rant. Honestly, just take your time.
It's a.
Slow rant.
Right? Well, the issue is this. No, I mean, the the other thing I will say is that a lot of people treat blog posts as kind of like a, a one and done thing. You like bash something out and you put it up on your website and you forget about it. The question I always find myself asking is, if somebody stumbles across this blog post a year from now and they click on to it, are they going to be a impressed with what they find? And B, are they going to want to get in touch with you? Because the one thing that I see people miss out on blog posts, and to be fair, we're guilty of this as well, is like not putting call to actions, not not like giving people links to other resources to read, not kind of tying the whole thing together into a process. It's just like is an essay about a subject I think you'll be interested in. You get to the end of the essay and there's a full stop and that's it. You're done. It's like, that's not the point of a blog, really, is it? The point of a blog is to feed people into this kind of web of content that you've got on your website, convince somebody that you're an expert in whatever subject matter you know you're writing about. You can't do that with just one web page that just ends. And you know, people are going to think, oh, well, that was interesting.
So how do you strike the balance between, hey, here's some impartial, genuinely useful information which will help you solve the problem that you try to solve. When you went to Google and typed in this particular search phrase and you found us without, you know, it coming across as, hey, yeah, this is, this is a, this is a great information, buy it from us. And, and he's a little bit more of it, still buy it from us. You know, it's kind of how do we avoid that?
Yeah, it is.
Because you're going to lose people. It's back to that conversation we had about the advertorial. Yeah. You start reading a piece of content, you think, oh, and then you go, oh, wait a minute, this is an advert. You know, I'm not interested anymore.
So I think this is a great power and it's something you call me out on all the time. When I write blog posts, you're like, there's no links in this to other blog posts, but I think that's the simple and most effective way of doing it, right? It's like when you're writing about something, if you are truly an expert and you're blogging consistently, there'll be crossover in your blog post topics. There'll be times when you're talking about something that touches on something you've mentioned in another blog post, and the simplest thing to do is to be like, oh, you know, we wrote about this here, or here's some more detail about this kind of, you know, related facet. And you can link people off to another article and then people are getting lost in that web of content. They're getting that impression that actually these guys, they're not just written this one blog post to capture some search traffic. They're consistently talking about this, this subject. They're experts at it. They've got loads of content. And I think that's the probably the easiest way of doing it nowadays. Yeah.
What we're actually talking about, I guess with blog posts is in, in the olden days, when I was a lad, you had a very simple system. If you had enough money, you advertised on television, you had a captive audience because there were only two or three channels.
There was TVs. When you were a kid.
Just about black and white.
Black and white.
Originally.
Um, I'll get a pay cut after the episode.
Uh, you get paid, right? So, you know, it was a very simple system. You didn't have to earn people's attention. You. You could just pay to get in front of people a bit like you do now with Google ads. You're actually paying to get in front of them when they're actually looking for what it is you're trying to sell. Um, but the whole point of, of the, the approach with content content marketing and at the center of that is blogging and we're talking about the purpose of a blog is you've got to earn their attention. So, you know, you can't just chuck up a bit of content that is, is, is clearly, um, masquerading as useful content when in actual fact, it's just a sales pitch. And I think, I think people do miss that. Yeah. It's, you know, but even in a blog post, we might even talk about how fantastic another agency is because.
There's no harm in that.
There's no harm in it. The subject means that we want to talk about stuff, and it's not just talking about ourselves.
It's not a hard sell, is it? I think that's the thing. You can't use a blog to, to kind of ram somebody's services down, down the throat.
Yeah. I mean, you might even argue that in this day and age, nothing is a hard sell. Yeah. You know, the day of the hard sell. The people laughing at this, I know because they do hard selling very successfully. But the day of the hard sell is is probably gone, which means, you know, the soft sell. Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo. Yeah. The soft sell is showing people that you know your stuff and giving them great information that's genuinely helping them on their journey, if you like. Sounds all philosophical, doesn't it? Doesn't it? Yeah. It's not, it's not.
The journey.
Of.
Buying a bike.
The journey to buying a, buying a new bike. Did I ever tell you about what journey I took to buy my new e-bike? I did. Um, so this is the, this is what the purpose of the blog is. It's that opportunity to educate, entertain, etc., which, you know, I've already said in this, in this podcast is, is hackneyed and feels Tired, but it's it is what works. I mean, the whole, the whole idea of content marketing feels like. Oh, really?
Well, yeah, I mean, this is the thing. It works, but it's super high effort, right? This is, I think because I think this is kind of what we're cutting at. There's no way of duping people nowadays into believing that you're authentic, an expert, that you know what you're talking about. You actually have to walk the walk. And I think that's the thing that has people rolling their eyes, right? It's like to actually prove you're an expert, eh, you have to be an expert and be you have to put the time into writing all of this content, not knowing necessarily whether or not it's going to make you a sale for the next two, six or twelve months and put it all out there and wait. And that's the the bit. That's difficult, isn't it? People want a shortcut. They want a quick win. They want an easy way around it. But I really don't think you can anymore. I think people are just kind of immune to it. Like you say, the amount of times you Google something, you click the top link, you see that it's like three hundred words long, like four paragraphs, maybe thin bit shit. You think, well, I'm not gonna waste my time reading this. I'm not even going to bother. And you click off and you go and look for something else instead. And you don't want to be in that. That's not the purpose of a blog. That's the antithesis of what a blog is for. So yeah. Don't half ass it, I guess.
Yeah. That's right. You know, and but although it is a major undertaking to create a blog section of your website and then to fill it full of great content, it can be the gift that keeps on giving. I mean, right now, if I went into our web stats for today, I would one hundred percent guaranteed I would find people who have visited a blog post that I wrote three or four years ago, and maybe even longer ago than that.
And it works. Like you can see when we look at tracking tools, we can see that people move from those blog posts to other blog posts, to service pages. They interact with us, they email us like it's not. This is the thing. Like, sometimes I think a lot of this stuff starts to sound very kind of pie in the sky, very theoretical. It's like, oh, if you write these blog posts, people will come. And I know what people online from places like Reddit and stuff like that say about this kind of thing, you know, it's all search marketing doesn't work. It takes too long. It's too expensive, it's too time consuming, it's boring, blah, blah, blah. But at the end of the day, like this stuff really does work. There are plenty of businesses out there who are literally sustained by the power of their content. That's where all the leads come from. I think that's true of us, really, isn't it?
Yeah, I guess I guess it is. Yeah, we do kind of eat our own dog food.
We do- ahaha.
I only said that because it annoys Caron. Um, okay. So the purpose of a blog is to show people what a clever clogs you are and give them some great information, and hopefully they'll then feel positively predisposed towards you. They may they then might reach out especially is if, as you said, there's a good call to action on the page, which encourages them and makes it easy for them to reach out.
Without making you sound like a cillit bang salesman.
Well, that's right, I remember those adverts were fantastic. Um, so is there any other purpose of a blog? There is.
Isn't there a leading question, Dave.
Yeah. I mean, the other.
Purpose of a blog is if you want to increase the authority of your website so that Google trusts it more and ranks it better. Then there's only so much you can write in a sales context about what it is you do product service. All right. If you're Amazon, there's no limit, is there? Because, you know, it's just like product after product forever. But you know, if you're a professional services company, if you're an engineering company, there's only so many pages you can create which tell people about the services and products that you've got on offer. And so, you know, you'll quite often, we'll quite often see websites and they're perfectly nice websites, but they've got ten, fifteen pages because the person has or the company has created them and said, well, we've said everything we can really say about the products and services and that, you know, that means that they're always going to struggle to get search traction. And that's again, where the, where the blog post can blog posts can come in. And just to finish the point, that's when we're into the realms of, does it really matter if anybody reads this stuff, as long as it's helping the website to become more prominent.
Yeah. Well, it's interesting, isn't it, because we've talked before about, you know, this whole idea of keywords that the kind of the longer tail keywords, if you like, the kind of really high intent keywords that aren't searched very often, that are very specific. You can't really like with our digital marketing services page, for example, we can't go after digital marketing for the renewable energy sector, because that's a ridiculously long and complicated keyword to try and squeeze into a page that has to be focused on digital marketing from a kind of umbrella perspective. So if you want to pick up all of those searches, all of that kind of peripheral traffic, if you like, blog posts are the best way of doing it. Like you say, it's, it's not overflow. It's just when you can't make your page rank for any more keywords. Go and write blog posts about those keywords instead, because that is the best way of picking that traffic up really, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah.
I'm trying to think if there's, if there's any other aspect that we need to try and communicate. If hopefully by now people have recognised that the purpose, the main purpose of the blog is. It's an opportunity to show your potential customers, your ideal customers that you really don't do. Know the stuff, your stuff you know, the products you offer, the services you offer, etc. and from a search engine optimisation point of view, it's a great opportunity to chase specific search terms in the hope that people find the blog post, but as importantly, because it overall is going to start to improve the way that your website ranks in search across a whole range of, of, um, you know, search terms, etc., just in general, in your, in your specific niche. Um, what else we must be missing?
Well, the other stuff.
There's one other use case that I know that kind of springs to mind immediately, and that is using blogs as a kind of lead, uh, or a link magnet. Even the whole idea. So before I get slapped with a ruler, I've talked before backlinks a bit like citations. Every time somebody puts a hyperlink to your website in their website, Google sees that as a sign of trust or authority. So one of the things that I've done in the past to help websites build authority is write like you were talking about earlier blog posts that praise kind of people in the periphery, not competitors, but other people that supply related services and products to you, people that supply software that you know, your customers frequently use or that kind of thing. And then when you do that, you link out to their websites and then you reach out to them and you say, look, you know, I've just published this big kind of tell all blog post that mentions your tool a few times. Would you mind promoting it to your following, that kind of thing? It works as a kind of like promotional tool. I guess it works as a way of kind of building rapport with other people in your industry. It's kind of a bit more, I guess, like I was saying before, it's a little bit softer, it's a little bit more kind of conversational, so you can afford to kind of spend time talking about people who you like and respect in the hope that they'll do the same back for you. Um, I just, I worked for a health company for a bit that did that a lot. You know, they'd write about a health condition and then they'd link to apps that could help you kind of manage it or diagnose it or whatever. And they, the primary purpose of doing that was to get those apps and those tertiary services to link back to them and say, you know, we've been mentioned in this blog post is really great. So stuff like that can be useful sometimes.
Mhm. Okay.
Anything else that we can think of? The purpose of a blog? I think we, I think we've kind of covered it. There is, there is something and I can't remember what it was off the top of my head. We'll have to cover it in a, in a, in a, in one of the next, uh, shows maybe. Um, but hopefully by now people have recognised that, you know what the main purpose is? Uh, you know, primarily it's not about Sally and accounts doing a sponsored walk. It's about illustrating, demonstrating, um, deep knowledge across, um, but it is across your subject, but it is a little bit cynical, you know, you are kind of not, you're not setting out to be, I don't know, you're not setting out to be like super helpful in a traditional sense. You're doing it because you know, it is ultimately going to help your website to rank better. It's going to put you in front of more potential customers, and it's going to help you grow your business. So although it might feel like what's the point of giving people all this great content, it feels a bit like, I don't want to be altruistic. I just want to make money.
It actually.
It actually does feed into that. And if you look at the stats, if you just Google something like HubSpot stats on companies who blog, the stats are fairly compelling.
Well, I mean, that's the.
Thing, isn't it?
It's, there's no doubt that this stuff works, even though to people who are not doing it or people who've tried it, that's maybe harder that the people who think they've tried it because they've written four or five blog posts. And as you said, nothing happened. You know, it's hard for them to get it. Um, so it's, it is a long term endeavour. It's something that you need to start doing and don't expect any quick returns unless you're, as we mentioned previously, unless you get lucky. Um, and as well, you know, another thing is like sometimes, you know, you, you often put an awful lot of work, an awful lot of work into blog posts. They are things of beauty. Lots of research, some great citations, all the whole nine yards. It can be quite dispiriting when you do that and you don't get much traction with it. Yeah. That's right. And then and then there are other blog posts which just seem to get so much traffic and, you know, because they just kind of, they just hit that sort of zeitgeist. It's like people really want to know what the purpose of a blog is. And so that blog post keeps coming up.
That keeps.
Bringing in traffic.
That random blog post that we have about why do marketers target women? And it's just like always at the top of the list. And I'm like, oh yeah.
I.
Know, that's right.
Yeah. But and some really odd ones. I mean, one of the ones that seems to get a lot of traffic is like white text on a white background, which is, which is a blog post talking about one of, you know, an ancient search engine optimisation technique of filling a page with content that people can't see because it's white text on a white background. But Google at the time didn't realise that. And so thought this was a fantastic piece of content We load as page rather with loads of content on it and ranked it. Um, if you'd actually put all that content on the page, you would have been a huge turn off was the thinking. I mean, by the way, don't do that now because it's very easy to be for Google to figure it out. And it's a, it's a horribly spammy way of trying to convert the top of the search rankings.
Yeah. Um, but back to your original point. Yeah, I think what.
Was my original.
Point? Oh, well, who knows, but you were talking about the way that we approach blogging. I think the thing I'll say is that like, I would always have the mindset that you're blogging for six to nine months in the future. Like I, it's, it's nice when we write a blog post and suddenly it does really well and it brings in loads of traffic. There have been times where we did that expo roundup, for example, where it got kind of hundreds of views and you think, oh, that's, you know, it's a nice little boost. But ultimately, I guess the way I would say to approach it is don't be looking for any payoff for six to nine months. Yeah. Don't because you'll get yourself into this horrible loop. Like you say, you spend ages writing a blog, you put it live and then people see it. You're like, what the f*ck was the point? But in six months time, that could be doing really well. In nine months time, it could be bringing you actual leads. You just have to have your eye on the horizon. Yeah.
That's right. And then, you know, constantly hitting refresh on your stats page to see if it's if it's been looked at again and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah.
Just sometimes I like to see if my blog posts beat yours. I'm like.
I'm sure they do. I'm sure they do. They should.
Very rarely do.
You actually put real effort into your.
Posts.
Yeah. Uh, do research and everything. Okay. Um, okay. Well, we'll wind this one up. So that's been, uh, Dave and Alex talking about the purpose of a blog. Hope that's been useful. If you want to come on the show and talk about some aspect of digital marketing, you know how to find us redevolution.com/digital-marketing-from-the-coalface or redevolution.com. Uh, we like having guests. We've got some great guests lined up and we've had some great guests on already. Uh, we like answering questions, so feel free to fire them through. But in the meantime, we're about to get, like, tons of snow dropped on us, aren't we? So we're gonna. Yeah, we're all gonna leg it, I think, from the office fairly soon, and then, uh, get the hatches battened down. So, um, we'll speak to you all soon, and thanks for listening.
Thanks very much.