Are You Blogging? Is Your Competition? Does It Work? Why?
I read a lot.
In fact, it often feels like I read too much, and that there are way too many “experts” clamoring for my attention. I receive hundreds of articles each day in the news reader app I use in my Droid, and many of them are redundant. Hundreds of tweets fly by me, too.
The problem is wading through all that noise. And it’s become such a large problem that often I find the 140-character musings of the 40-odd people I follow on Twitter to be more useful than the more fleshed-out information in my news feed.
This would be the perfect place to tell you about a new service called Summify. Summify looks at all your information sources, applies a software filter, and spits out a short daily digest of what it believes you’ll find important. I’ve been testing Summify for about a week, and if I trusted it a little more it might save me a lot of time. Ironically, thus far Summify is just adding to my information overload. Yikes.
But I’m not writing today to tell you about Summify or other software that “helps” with information overload. Today’s topic is how you can avoid being part of the overload that your customers and potential customers are dealing with, but still be heard.
This is the point where I insert a reference to Search Engine Optimization, tell you how great we are at SEO, and how you need to hire the Answer Guy to be your SEO Consultant. And I have, and I will again, both later in this post and in posts to come.
And I’ll keep using the words “SEO”, “Search Engine Optimization”, and “SEO Consultant”, because by doing so every now and again I point out to Google and other search engines that they should see us as important and authoritative on those matters.
Of course, I’ll also worry about how what I write reads to you, because if I’m not careful you’ll think that Search Engine Optimization is some sort of scam.
I point this out because I want you to understand that every time I write at Answer Guy Central that I’m building on a message. More important, I want you to understand that when you post on your blog you’re doing the same. The question is, what is that message?
Yesterday I can across a post at HugoGuzman.Com. Hugo is also an SEO Consultant, and I’m guessing he does work almost as good as ours ;-) . And I commented:
The bottom line on blogging is that to do it effectively you need to decide what the purpose of your blog is. If it’s customer service, do customer service. If you’re selling something, that’s fine too. If you either wish to be famous or need traffic to monetize ad traffic like media companies and content farms, just write well.
Blogging takes a commitment, and it’s been suggested that the commitment is to a dying, pointless endeavor. It’s not. There’s evidence that lots of what you post goes completely unnoticed and unread. But none of that changes the absolute fact that unless you keep getting your message “out there”, you’ll one day have no reason to try.
So write. Do the SEO / Search Engine Optimization thing to make it reach more people. And make sure that when you say something you have something to say and know how you want to say it — and to whom.
Any way you look at it, though, the secret is letting your passion show. In business, and especially in SEO, that pays off.
Need help? Contact The Answer Guy Here.
