It has become popular for ecommerce merchants to start blogs to improve search engine ranking and for marketing purposes of engaging and updating customers. Everyone seems to initially believe: Hey I’ve got a great product, and once I start blogging everyone will tune in. Let’s do it! However the reality is blog after blog yields little to no results, oftentimes for months or even years. And it’s getting harder to get noticed with everyone out there doing blogs, especially now that Google rewards original, fresh content. Some retailers are blogging twice a day, which means store owners are likely paying a full-time blogger to write continuously about store events, products, and other news. How can anyone compete with that, especially the ones who have just started their blogs?
Review this stats. graph below and notice the huge spike in traffic. Also notice how long it took before that happened.
Because this information was submitted to us confidentially we can’t disclose who provided it, but what we’re about to tell you will be no less meaningful. In fact, anyone should be able to use this growth strategy for their new blog to see the same level of success if not more than what is displayed in the above graph.
This new WordPress.com blog was actually started back in October. Notice how long the organic growth rate took; traffic doesn’t start to pick up until December, and even then it’s not that much. During that time, about 15 blog entries were published, and most of the traffic was coming from Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. Less than 15 unique views came from organic search traffic, though SEO tools report that Google is indexing the pages. Every blog that was written was tagged with low competition/high traffic keyword phrases (according to Google’s Keyword tool), and the writer was careful to write original articles without overly stuffing them with the keywords for which they were tagged.
On December 21, something very rare happened: daily traffic increased about ten fold. But the key to seeing this traffic surge wasn’t starting an advertising or PR campaign (which can cost thousands). It wasn’t submitting the blog link to a hundred directories. It wasn’t asking a friend to click on the blog several hundred times. It wasn’t beefing up social media (which was already done and yielded only small incremental increases in traffic).
The key to this amazing traffic increase was simply having a guest blogger submit a post. What did it cost? Well, this is where it gets interesting.
Here’s how it all happened. The new blog manager, let’s call him Jim, asked a relevant industry (non-competing) expert, who we’ll call Mary, to submit a guest blog, giving Mary the pitch that it’s good for backlinks/SEO etc. But that wasn’t all. There are a lot of those emails out there, and most people look at these opportunities as serving only the one asking–who wants to write a post for a new blog, when you could do the same for an established blog and get so much more benefit?
The key to the guest blog email proposal was remembering to offer to give before you seek to gain. So early in the email, rapport was built by showing interest in the other person’s business first, and asking Mary to share her expertise on a very specific subject. That means Jim spent about an hour learning about Mary’s business and thinking about what she could write about that would be useful for her first. Jim researched the keywords and content Mary should use and the links she could drop in there to make the blog very popular. Jim took the time to care about how this would benefit Mary more than himself. And not only that: Jim asked them if Mary could use his expertise to write for her blog (which she took advantage of).
Choosing who you ask is very important. Mary managed a social network with nearly 20k fans. So naturally when Mary’s guest piece was posted to Jim’s new blog, she began promoting what she wrote on all her channels. She was in effect sharing her hard earned customer base, and trusting Jim enough to do that…because he was genuinely interested in her success, and had in fact, put it ahead of his own. The blog he guest wrote for her blog turned out to be just as popular, as he put a lot of work into researching the subject and writing the article well. He never saw it as a big promotion, just a chance to share great information with her readers.
The moral of the story here is to think about the other person first when you ask a favor. Think about how you can help them before you seek to gain.
Try it out and tell us how this blog growth strategy works for you.
