We’ve got this client. It’s a good-sized company in a specialized field bringing in about $10 million of revenue per year, with hopes of doubling, tripling, and quadrupling that figure as soon as possible.
They’ve been talking about getting a blog up and running all year. They’ve heard the benefits from us and from others. They’ve hemmed and hawed. They’ve groaned and stalled.
Last week Allen wrote their marketing gang an email, hoping to find a way to get their blog up and running as quickly and easily as possible, once and for all. He led off by using us as a first-hand example:
First, a blogging testimonial. In July of 2006, the Epiphanies, Inc. website had just over 1,000 unique visitors. In July of this year, we had 22,667 unique visitors.
Of our marketing content activity during that time, blogging was the A#1 item, with a dash of article marketing and a press release or two thrown in. It took about three months before we started seeing the upward curve, but boy, has it been steep ever since.
If you want to drive more traffic to your website, blogging has to happen. Period, paragraph.
Now, that year between July ’06 and July ’07 has flown by. We’ve been soooo busy (and yes, a tad overwhelmed) learning better ways to: assist clients, manage our time and commitments, leverage our passion and know-how, and “be the tide that raises all boats” (one of Allen’s favorite sayings!), we’re just now realizing the implications and advantages of such a wonderful traffic increase.
More and more often, people are letting us know they’ve learned valuable things from our blog, or they’ve enjoyed an entry or three, or they found us recommended on someone else’s blog or site, etc. It’s a little scary (“What do they know? Which entry did they read? Did I share anything embarrassing? Was there a typo? Do they really think I’m lame?”), but so is business, right?
Our blog is imperfect.
It’s an unapologetic work in progress. About half of the things we had hoped to add and implement never made it to fruition.
And yet…
We’ve made connections through our blog; been published in a wonderful book alongside award-winning authors and laudible experts in the fields of writing, marketing, and creativity; and created a searchable, indexed history of the information we’ve learned and the ideas we’re passionate about.
As business owners, we all know the pain and frustration of tabling soooo many hopes and initiatives because of lack of resources – like time, support staff, money, energy, etc.
That being said, not a week goes by during which one of us doesn’t sigh a big fat sigh of relief that we started blogging when we did, and we’ve got an easy, wicked cheap way to connect our approach, advice, and musings with the online world.
As our own implementation of the other marketing tools and tactics we recommend to friends and clients gets a little bitty bit better every month, we realize how lucky we were to have gotten at least one big marketing ball rolling – the blogging ball – especially the one that’s delivered the most OOMPH for the effort.
Soooo, what are YOU waiting for? 
