blogging Archives - Page 13 of 16 by Mark Murnahan

Imitation Marketing Means Imitating Marketing Failure

Trend, fad, popular, meme, hot, new, fashionable … word it however you like. Everybody wants that piece of whatever it is that works in marketing today. Companies and individuals frantically try to be on the leading edge of a wave that promises to be the “next big thing” that will bring them success. They hear how well it worked for this company or that company, and then make carefully calculated efforts to imitate that success. Perhaps they always heard it is best to imitate success, but on the flip-side of that coin is the far more likely outcome of imitating failure. I call it “imitation marketing” when people strive to imitate success, and it comes with a good side and a bad side.

Anybody who has used popular social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and the rest, has surely watched the imitation that happens every day. Somebody tweets, facebooks, or blogs about something “hot” and all of the sudden every other blogger scurries to their keyboard to blog about the same thing. If you catch on with things that are “hot” in a market, you have a greater chance of catching your 15 minutes of fame that was promised. Let’s face it, a lot of what we see each day on the internet is just the same thing, regurgitated with an alternate slant, and worded slightly different. If you look at any industry, you can see all the competitors mocking each other while only a few really stand out. Is that imitation really going to produce the results they are seeking? The odds are against it. There is a near infinitely greater chance of wasting time, energy, and money!

The Imitation Marketing Monster Eats Its Young

In this Internet age of vast information and lightening fast social media reach, we have collectively created a monster of sorts. What many people do not understand is that it is a monster that eats its young and as the cycle goes on, it eats itself.

Along with economic insecurity over the past couple years, it has become easy for people to believe they can save money by handling their own marketing. The Internet is the obvious place for this to happen, because it is easy. Anybody can put their name out there on the Internet and cross their fingers. The craze for do-it-yourself marketing on the Internet has created “marketers” out of about every living being that has a pulse, and a mouse to click with. Standing out from the crowd will take something unique, and not just “imitation marketing”. If you are up to the task, I am here to try and help you with my experience.

Whether you like this or not, you are right there in the thick of it. There is no other reason for you to read my blog than to try and know a better way to market what you offer and to become more profitable. Face it, you are here because you want more money, and you think you may pick up a tip to make that happen faster and cheaper than your competition. It is either that, or you have it in the back of your mind that you may pick up the phone and hire me to produce and implement a plan for your marketing … but that is only a tiny fraction of the people reading this. I am here to try and help you in either case, because it is what I do. I want to see you be successful.

Pay attention as I give you a surfing analogy: The waves of popular methods of Internet marketing exposure come a lot faster than ever before. By the time you see the wave, your window of opportunity to surf it to the beach has already closed. The riders of that wave were on it way out at sea, and it is moving far too fast to jump on now. If you want to surf in today’s marketing ocean, you are better off making some waves of your own.

I do not want to discourage you, and if I do, I will make it up to you with some encouragement. I am going to tell you what you are up against in your marketing, in order that you can prepare for the challenge.

Meeting the Creative Marketing Challenge

I just have to share a piece of reality in order to emphasize my point. Most of my readers are still swimming along in the vast open water and trying to stay afloat by imitating success. What they seldom realize is that by doing so they carry a higher risk of failure than hiring it out to experienced people like myself who do this all day long … for decades. They will soak up every bit of useful knowledge the vast Internet has to offer, and then try to create something more inspired and genius than all of the trained marketers who have facts, figures, creativity, and experience on their side.

Just as a simple example, consider how creative you are feeling today. Do you have it in you to write three, four, or five blog articles and marketing copy to promote your brand … or even one article? Do you have it in you to be sure what you produce is in front of hundreds of thousands of people … or even a thousand people? The right people? Can you write three books in three months (and actually have them sell) … or even one book? Can you write something and be assured that it will be listed within the top five results for the keywords you targeted less than ten minutes after you publish it … top 2,000 results? Do you have these things on your side? Well, I do, and there are others out there like me. That is what you are up against. When you get busy with your marketing, be aware that a lot of us make it a full time job, and some of us are damn good at what we do. To get ahead, you will have to be damn better.

The rampant drive for do-it-yourself marketing is one of those crazes that, like all other fads, has seen its time and is a wave that already crashed on the beach. It was a great idea, but when you are one of millions of people attempting to be the loudest, smartest, and overall best at what you do, your voice is squelched by the static. So, is there a fix? Yes! This is where I make it up to you if I discouraged you.

Stop Seeking Marketing Waves and Start Making your Own

Stop doing what they are doing. Stop trying to play follow the leader. Do something genius. If you spend your time making more waves and less time trying to catch one that is over your head, you have a lot better chance of surfing all the way to the beach. It may be easy to look at successful marketing and say “I can do that, too” but the odds are overwhelmingly against you. We trained and experienced marketers stacked the cards a long time ago as we earned our battle scars. We have been there, and we have done that. There are a lot of guys like me who spent 100 hours per week for years of our lives studying, practicing, learning, and tapping into every resource available to crush the competition of our clients. There is simply no way to beat us at our own game, so instead, you must create your own rules. Make your own waves. If you want to do it yourself, do not even try to do what everybody else is doing. You do not have the same resources as the competition, so don’t try to market as if you do. Take a serious inventory of your strategy and what resources you have at your disposal to implement that strategy. Stop trying to figure out how to do what the others are doing and get serious about what makes you different and better.

Tips for Overcoming Imitation Marketing

Try sitting in a quiet and dark room for an hour and think about what makes you different. Bring a voice recorder to take notes. Repeat this as often as you can. Read more books, blogs, and do everything you can to exercise your brain. The more you use it the more creative you will become. Read my blog. It really has a lot of great brain food to boost up your creativity. Start blogging! Read these really good reasons to blog and also read about how blogging improves intelligence. Seriously … go do it and stop trying to make excuses. This is for your benefit, after all. This is intended to help you increase your marketing talent.

Get really serious about what you are doing and stop letting yourself become comfortable. If you are going up against professional marketers, you are going to have to get serious with your marketing creativity, and it just doesn’t come naturally … it takes a lot of hard work. I get paid to make my clients successful, and if you want a piece of any market I am in, you had better brew another pot of coffee and plan to stay up all night.

Go sit in that quiet place and think really hard about how you are going to do something that nobody else is doing, and start figuring out how to make some waves. If you are not up to it, you should start getting settled with the lackluster results of “imitation marketing”, and be ready to take some heavy risks of failure. My hope for you is that you will try harder than ever, and take some of my tips. Otherwise, hire me to do the work for you and go get some rest … this marketing stuff is exhausting!

Improve Local Search Marketing with Global Authority

I recently visited with a local search engine optimization (SEO) client who did not understand the value of blogging about things outside his local market and having items of global interest on his website. He believed that focusing more on things local to him were of the highest importance. It got me to thinking that a lot of people with a local marketing focus may have similar belief. I want to shed a little light on the subject and explain why globally appealing content can create huge benefits to local search results.

Since I have been in my industry for well over a decade, I sometimes forget to break things down and make them really simple for those who are less familiar with my work. That is what I want to do today. I will try to make this easy to understand.

Local Search Marketing Made Easy

I notice a lot of people trying really hard to accomplish local search marketing goals by focusing on website content about local topics. These things have their place, but a common mistake I find is people attempting to tap into the same local resources that all of their competitors are using. It is a sad shame that many of these people are just wasting a lot of time imitating failure.

If you want to know an easier way to improve local search marketing results, try looking outside of your back yard and appeal to people on a broader basis. With a global audience on your side, beating the local competition is easy.

Website Authority is Authority, Wherever the Location

When you produce information on your website that is relevant to your industry, whether in your local market or globally, it enhances your authority. It can do this in a number of ways. It gives more potential terms that people can search for and find your website, but you just want the local ones … I get that. I understand how you could think that somebody finding your website in an outside market may not seem very useful, but it is! It is extremely useful, and in fact, even more useful than all the locally focused content put together.

You may wonder why this is the case. Simply put, information with broader and less localized appeal will help to enhance and grow the incoming links to your website. This means links that point to your website from other websites. Links create quantifiable authority by showing search engines that other people see you as a quality point of reference. Now you may wonder how the broader appeal will build valuable links to your website. I will explain.

Local Content Means Local Links, But You Need Diversity!

If you spend much of your effort trying to focus only on local matters and excluding the rest of the world, you are making a costly mistake. You may find some people linking to your website, but it will be far less diverse, and far less beneficial than a wider global reach. Sure, a link from your local newspaper or television station is great, and it will certainly give emphasis to your location, but location is not the real battle here. It is easy to show where you are, but you need to be an authority in what you do and not just where you are.

With too much focus on location, you will be less likely to find people linking to your website from all around the world, and geographical diversity of incoming links matters … it matters a lot! The way you get this to happen is by producing things with a widespread appeal that will be picked up by bloggers looking for a resource to cite, users in forums looking for a link to reference a given topic, and other social media users who like your message enough to share it. This will only happen if it has relevance to them. If you focus on local issues that hold little relevance outside your market area, you are neglecting these people who may otherwise share the information with others. They will share it with others by using links to your website.

Do Incoming Links Really Matter?

I think a lot of people will underestimate the importance of the links pointing to their website. The value of these incoming links is not the people who click on them, but rather the search engines that follow those links and add them all up to determine your overall authority within your industry. If you want to know how to do the equivalent of killing a grizzly bear with a looseleaf notebook, you better stick around and read the article titled “SEO Backlinks: Why Most SEO Fail at Link Building“ When you have enough backlinks (links pointing to your website from other websites), you can put just about anything you want on your website and expect it to rank highly in search engines … local or not. For example, if you search Google for “unicorn hunting expedition” you will easily find my blog right on top. Similarly, if you Google “unicorn hunting expedition Topeka” I am still right there where my local market can find me.

Search Engines Know Your Location

Another factor of local search that should never be overlooked is that search engines pay attention to where you are located when you perform a search. When people search for something that has a lot of local results, all other things being equal, the local results will be given preference. Most search engine users do not override the local search settings of Google and other search engines, and many do not even know they exist. This is just another reason that you will do well to focus on useful and creative content that appeals beyond your back door. Again, I will remind you that you need to show authority in what you do, rather than trying to build emphasis of where you are located.

I welcome your comments here on my blog, or you may respond privately if you are feeling shy.

Benefits of Blogging You May Have Overlooked

I took a short break from my blog over the past week. I was very busy with other projects, and it gave me some time to consider why I blog and the benefits I receive from it. While I was away, I thought about some less obvious ways it helps me in my business. Some obvious benefits to a blog are easy to list, in fact, here are 10 really good reasons to blog. I want to share a couple additional benefits I consider to be extremely important, and perhaps you can relate to these as well. If you have a blog, I want you to think about those ways it benefits you and how you can further harness those benefits. If you do not have a blog or you are not blogging enough, I want to give you positive encouragement and help you recognize reasons you should.

Blogging as a Thought Portfolio

I want more business, and I know a lot of people feel the same way. In my case, I do not just want more business … I want better business. Blogging helps me to achieve this, because it allows my potential clients to have a better understanding of my work as a marketing guy. It allows people to know a whole lot about what I do and how I do it, before they even pick up the phone and call me. It provides excellent proof that I really know what I am doing with SEO, social media, and other Internet marketing topics. Here is my blog archive. It is like a window to my mind as it relates to my work. The people who spend a lot of time here before they call me are always better clients, because they already know we will make a good fit. That means better business, and not just more business.

Think about how blogging could benefit you in this way. Regardless of your industry, being useful to others and showing what you know and how you think can be very attractive to potential customers … the best customers.

Blogging as a Sales Tool

I am not the salesman type. I give great factual data and I let people make decisions based on real information. I like for people to make their own decisions. People who cannot see the benefits of my marketing services without my having to poke and prod them with a big sales pitch do not make good clients for me. If a business relationship begins with a salesperson pushing to convince somebody to buy, you can bet there will be a lot of hassle down the road.

I realized a long time ago that chatting somebody’s ear off to sell them something they are unsure of is about the last thing I could ever hope to do for a living. I think I would rather be a professional house mover, and with this body, I don’t see that happening.

Even when people email me or call me, I can often either reference something I already produced on my blog or give them an article to read about the given topic. Having so many of my thoughts and ideas laid out on my blog and indexed nicely by Google makes an invaluable tool when I need to answer a question for somebody. Just having written the information also makes it easier for me to have words to answer the question.

Give it some thought about how your blog or other website may be an excellent sales tool beyond just those nameless and faceless people on the Internet. You may find a blog to be extremely useful, because it already says all the things you want to say, and can prevent a lot of wasted breath. In my case, I find that if somebody is not willing to do some recommended reading about what I offer, they are probably not too serious about doing business with me anyway.

Other Blogging Benefits and Tools

Blogging holds extremely high value when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO) and it is at the core of good social media marketing. If you feel that you just don’t have the time for it, by all means, hire it out. If you feel that blogging is not important or does not have a benefit in store for you, reading the following articles will surely convince you otherwise. I am confident that there is information in these past articles on my blog that will provide value to you and help your business pursuits. Take a moment and find out for yourself.

10 Really Good Reasons to Blog
If you think blogging is just for geeks or those with extra time on their hands, think again! If you ever wondered if you should be blogging, or why to continue blogging, this list will give you very strong reasons.
Produce More Website Content … But Why? SEO?
More website content means more things for people to find in a Google search, but it goes a bit deeper than just that.
Blogging Improves Intelligence and Here is Proof!
Blogging can increase your business intelligence, expand your creativity, provide you with a better perspective on the intelligence around you, and more. Much relies on how you use it, and I am here to help you get smarter, so stop scanning and start reading!
Twitter is Useful but Blogging is Better
This article shows a statistical analysis of how blogging provides more value than any single social media effort alone.
6 Essential Blogging Tools for Non-Bloggers and Bloggers
Even if you are just a casual reader, I want to give you some really useful pieces of information to help you receive more benefit from blogs and to make the information more manageable. These will not take a lot of time to implement, and it will be worth the time you spend.

Blogging Dilemma: Truncated Blog Excerpts or Full Blog Articles?

Excerpts or Full Articles: A Grizzly Question

Blogging and SEO (being found in search engines) go hand in hand. If you have read more than a couple of my articles, you know that I am a strong proponent of blogging. Blogging is a huge asset to anybody wanting to be more visible to the public, and so it should not be taken lightly. If you do not have a blog, be sure to read “10 Really Good Reasons to Blog“.

Blogging comes with a lot of choices, and those choices include whether to truncate your blog posts and show excerpts on the home page, or to include full articles. Let us consider these options.

Truncated Blog Excerpts vs. Full Articles

As you may notice, I have opted to truncate the blog articles on my home page. Until this weekend, my blog has always included full length articles on my home page, archives, tags, and categories, but I decided to try something different. I will tell you a couple of pros and cons to the decision. I will talk a bit geek for some people here, but I will circle back around to something human that everybody can clearly grasp.

How Do You Like Your Blog? (My Blog Too!)

When I looked at the option of using blog excerpts on the home page, I thought of readers first. Perhaps you have had to make this judgment call as well. Sure, I see what other bloggers do, but I seldom do things just because somebody else does it. Well, except for smoking … the cool kids smoked so I fell into that trap. When it comes to writing a blog, I like to believe I can do something original. Please tell me you didn’t already read this somewhere else. There simply is not a solid rule for this, because bloggers have different styles … millions of different styles.

I tried to be deliberate in my decision making. I tried to think of everything, and I crossed my fingers hoping it will not explode in my face on Monday when you see this, or in the future, after my decision kicks in with more readers. I considered website performance issues such as page load times, average article length, length to truncate the excerpts, search engine indexing, and others. I will be happy to share my thoughts on these matters and l how I addressed them if you ask me.

From a reader standpoint, I know that you do not want to wait around for a page to load. Nobody wants to wait … even for me. Crazy thinking, I know. I considered how it may affect existing search engine rankings, because my home page ranks very well for anything I write. I considered a long list of other technology issues, but I mostly considered you, the reader.

How do you want my blog to work? After all, I am writing this for you as much as for me. I do not just write this to be stagnant and without public attention. Without readers and potential clients who actually take action on my blog, I will have a pretty hard time explaining to my wife why our kids are eating so much cake instead of other kid food (my wife is a totally amazing cake decorator, by the way). Cake does not make a great diet in the long run … believe me, I tried. I like eating grilled animals, and she does not make that kind of cakes. I have to buy my animals the hard way, so I need to find readers with action running through their veins and ready to push the marketing go button. That means I have to reach about 30 squillion of you before one reader takes their business to the next level with my services. I cannot do that alone, and I cannot do it with a mediocre blog … and neither can you. So I had to take this pretty seriously.

Blog Excerpt Pros and Cons

Something I knew going into this is that by truncating my blog posts and using short excerpts on the home page instead of full articles, I would be increasing the number of blog posts showing right upfront. This means people can scan through things easier to find what they want to read, and then click on it if it looks interesting to them. A couple of thoughts on this were that it should look interesting, and even quicker than before. I would have to try and set the hook with new readers sooner than ever with just a short excerpt. People don’t like to click around to find what they want to read … they want it right now. The three click rule is written in the laws of Internet statistics (I should add that to my 11 Important Internet Marketing Laws article). We “Web Geeks” know the rule of three clicks, and we know that readers will go *poof* like Cinderella’s carriage at midnight if we ask for a fourth click. I also had to consider that a massive number of people enter through pages other than my home page. I had to know where they enter, and why. I had to analyze their usage and consider the user bounce rate of the home page in relation to other pages, and a whole lot of other great geek almighty blogging factors. I really needed to feel secure about this decision, but I do not want to feel too secure, because it is not my decision as much as it is your decision. If you do not like it, I need to have a quick fist-full of clicks to bring it back to blogging as usual. Even if you do not tell me with comments (which I hope you will), you will still tell me by your usage patterns. Make no mistake … the masses will win this decision, and mine is only one little vote in that decision.

Using excerpts also means more database work to load all the articles, tags, categories, and images. Since I generally try to include just one or two images per post. Using full articles, including one image per post was fine, and I could still load full articles pretty quickly. Increasing the number of posts on my home page means increasing the number of images on the home page, because I wanted each article to be represented with a thumbnail and I would be adding more articles. More images normally means slower pages. At the same time, I had to weigh in the consideration that most of my blog posts are very long. Yes, I have no idea when to shut up most of the time. So maybe I could balance that out, since the text of a typical Murnahan blog post is about long enough to make up for a huge image download.

Another consideration in favor of truncated excerpts in place of full blog articles is reducing possibilities of duplicate content. It is a big problem for a lot of blogs, because the same full article content is on the home page, each individual article, archive pages, tag pages, category pages, and etcetera. I have always done things to help reduce duplicate content issues (search engines don’t like duplicate content) like using a meta “noindex, follow” tag in my archives, blog tags, and category pages. That helps, but I also really wanted to focus on individual articles, so along with implementing excerpts, I reworked my XML sitemap to boost the indexing priority of individual posts and reduce the priority of categories, tags, and archives, which already had “noindex,follow” meta tags in the headers.

Blog Usability Comes First

What I know above all else is that you, the reader is what matters more than anything. I know that if I write information that people can use … the things that they really like, and that other people cannot or did not produce as well as I did … that is what matters. How much does it matter to me, and to blogging in general? It is what makes the big difference in why most SEO fail at link building. Great … no, fantastic website content is what matters more than even the blog structure. If you have great usable content on your side, you can kill grizzly bears with a toothpick and a rubber band.

Grizzly Bear SEO and Pink Ponies for Sale

Just as I was writing this, I was alerted to a very fresh article about grizzly bear SEO writing. The article linked back to a piece that I wrote titled “SEO Directory Submissions and Pink Ponies for Sale“. What?! Yes, this is what makes my SEO world spin, and I do know when people link to my work. It is usefulness and marketing talent that matters more than website structure, alone. Blog structure matters a whole lot for SEO, so do not get me wrong, but the bottom line is usefulness. That means useful in every way, and sometimes that means testing and pushing the envelope.

If you get all the pieces just right, and you give people something useful and interesting, the rest of the SEO factors fall into place divinely. To see what I mean, just brave the wild Internet enough to go and see the grizzly bear article I mentioned, along with my response to the grizzly bear poo and pink ponies offered out there in the SEO marketplace.

Now I ask for your input. What do you think? Do you like the new truncated blog excerpts or full blog articles? Answer me with your comments, or answer me with your actions. Either way, I am paying close attention and I do care. After all, my kids can only eat so much cake!

I Like My Facebook Like Button … Will You Like it Too?

I added a Facebook Like button to my blog today (at the top of each blog post), and I must say that I like it. I like it very much. So, what does it do and how does it work?

The Facebook Like Button is the fastest and easiest way to share things with Facebook friends to date. It is as fast as if you “Like” something right on Facebook. That is because it actually is on Facebook and uses an iframe. If you like, there is an alternate implementation, but the iframe is just fine for most websites. It requires no additional action from users … no popup, no filling out a Captcha, no adding descriptions. It just takes a single click to “Like” something.

For content producers like me, and there are a squillion of us, it is like a new toy. It takes Facebook to a new level, and should not be overlooked by anybody who cares about reaching people in social media.

The Facebook Like button documentation makes it easy enough for non-programmers to add the button, but I also found that my friend, Ruhani Rabin has blogged a really nice piece for integrating the Like button with WordPress.

It has caught on quickly, and I expect to see it on a whole lot more blogs. Perhaps on yours!

“Like” it if you like it. 🙂