How do you market your blog?
One of my favourite bloggers is Seth Godin, I always find the time to read his posts.
Seth is a marketing mastermind, and while most of the topics he talks about are basic principles, they are things that many people get wrong and ones that we need to be constantly reminded of as bad marketing habits can be so easy to slip into.
One of his recent posts talks about ‘the spirit of the game‘ or more specifically, why it’s better to make the ’system’ work for you, instead of you trying to beat the ’system’.
It doesn’t matter how you’re trying to beat the system (think counting cards in Las Vegas, or black-hat SEO tactics etc.), eventually the system will adapt and either you adapt with it or you face complete failure (depending on what system you’re trying to beat, the consequences and the rewards will vary - it’s this long-term risk v short-term reward that usually defines the arguments about which path you take).
I started marketing online in 2002, and during that time there were a lot of people trying to beat the system on the Internet, especially using black-hat SEO. Back then it seemed like everyone was trying to do it (Google wasn’t anywhere near as sophisticated at stopping spam as it is now), some of the success that I had in my early days of affiliate marketing was (at least partly) due to scripts that automatically created several hundred pages of keyword focused content. I managed to get the #1 spot on Google for a reasonably profitable keyword and was regularly making around $1500 per month in affiliate commissions… and then Google caught up and my earnings dropped to $0 overnight.
At the time it wasn’t such a huge deal, affiliate marketing was just a hobby, and I wasn’t being overly sophisticated in my approach to it, so I took it on the chin and kept working for other companies (who had other ways to beat the system - one had over 1000 domains all elaborately linked back to a few main ecommerce sites… none of which are still around today).
Since then, I’ve spent the last few years working on other people’s websites instead of growing my own, it’s only been the last six months where I’ve started to pick up the pieces and focus on my content again… I don’t want this to be a hobby any more, I want my websites to support my family long-term.
Today, there are lots of people telling you that content is king, the easy road (if there is one) is for fools, organically grow your site and give your audience what they want… the thing is, back then I was always looking for shortcuts - if I spent that same time concentrating on valuable content people wanted to read, organically growing my site in ways that made sense, imagine the fantastic position those websites would be in today. I would be generating far more money, and be sustaining that over a much longer period of time than the bits and pieces I managed to scrape together in several short months.
There are no short-cuts… develop your content, give people what they want and make the system work for you instead of wasting all your time figuring out how you can beat the system. The long-term rewards will far outweigh the short-term gains.
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