Blogger or Wordpress

Clay Posey of Mychiefmarketingofficer.net, who is helping me on developing and managing leads, shares the perspective of Hubspot that business bloggers should always host their own blog rather than rely on external services such as blogger. He outlines his reasons in his personal Marketing Fusion Blog posting. (A screenshot of my own 'holding' Wordpress blog at constructionmarketingideas.com is on the right.)

I agree, in part, but think this issue is on the weaker side of the 80/20 rule; that is, 80 per cent of the value and business you create is in 20 per cent of your activities, or (conversely), 80 per cent of your frustrations and problems occur within the bottom 20 per cent.

Whether you place your blog on your own site with Wordpress or use something like Blogger is only vitally important, in my opinion, to the extent you don't get so cheap that your host is allowed to place or control ads for non-related businesses on your business site. If that is the case, you must take steps to find a better host or operate the blog server yourself.

(Blogger, to its credit, does not host ads on your site unless you wish to "monetize" it with Google ads, for which Google will share revenue with you. If I am using the site to promote a business or professional service unrelated to advertising, I would not worry about the modest potential revenue from this source, and just use the space for your own blog content, without third-party advertising. As my business's primary revenue source is from advertising, obviously this rule does not apply in our situation.)

Otherwise, the points made by Posey (and Hubspot), are helpful but really insignificant in comparison to the key issues: Your frequency, content, and relevance.

Too many people start blogs, and fail to update or maintain them. Others see the blog purely as a Search Engine Optimization ploy, and hope that just setting it up will significantly boost the interest and traffic to their main site. Still others crank out entries mostly by lifting material from other sources or referencing other blogs. Others hope for as many back links to their site or blog as possible without realizing that the principal of reciprocity works wonders when you simply offer your own free back links (without expecting anything in return) to truly relevant blogs or sites.

Finally, blogging success requires two other things. You need to be first within your niche, and you need lots of patience.

If you are second or third within your niche, you will have to consistently apply some of the other principals here to dislodge the first place player. I needed to wait for upwards of eight months before my blog broke through to page 1 on relevant Google search keyword listings, and it has taken another year for it to consistently be in first place (finally dislodging, at least in the U.S. and Canadian markets, a long-established British site.)

Remember, of course, that you may have less problem becoming first place if you are working within a local or highly specialized niche. Of course, you should also realize that the more focused you are, the less "traffic" you can expect -- but this won't really matter, because the people who visit your blog will be truly interested in its content, and the responses will produce relevant leads for your business.

That doesn't change the fact that I will most likely make the switch to the Constructionmarketingideas.com Wordpress site once I'm satisfied the template I elect to use is robust and ready as obviously I have the capability of setting up and running the site on my own. I can see how having the site under my own domain will ultimately be more professional and like the aspects of self-reliance and control a self-hosted site has. But I don't think these issues make or break a successful blog. You need to have your niche and content right before self-hosting becomes an issue. Focus on these issues first.

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The human (and personal) connection

This afternoon, my wife provided one of those insightful wake-up calls. I was explaining to her how we were starting to think about improving our methodologies in communicating within the inbound communications and requests for the Construction Marketing Ideas newsletter. I told her about my work with Clay Posey.

She gave me one of those looks that only someone who has lived with you for 16 years and knows you inside and out could get away with. "Why don't you just call them yourself?"

Gulp. Shucks, yes, this blog is receiving upwards of five leads a day, and many only provide email address contact information, but how long does it really take to respond with a personal, thoughtful email instead of just an autoresponder reply? And why do I need to pass these initial leads on to a sales representative within my organization when they are, indeed, responding to me, personally?

Tim Klabunde made something of a similar point last week when he suggested that I not use Constant Contact to communicate my offer of editorial profiles in the Design and Construction Report to people who attended the Design and Construction Network Happy Hour in Washington on June 30.

"My only comment would be that I think you will get a better response if you don't use constant contact as it would be much more personal. In the office I use eMail Merge from Outlook," he wrote.

I have some fear that my "individualized responses" to people who respond to the blog/eletter invitation will start turning out to be a little bit canned -- and that may be the case, but does it hurt to communicate directly?

I think not. For the next month, I'll keep track of the number of leads who received a personal communication from me, and the results. We'll see what happens.

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Lead nurturing

Clay Posey posted this entertaining video from Hubspot.com on his site.

Clay Posey at mychiefmarketingofficer.net sent me this email after completing my "spammy" survey seeking to understand if there is a way to convert initial inquiries from this blog to requests for special advertising-supported features within the Design and Construction Report.

(If you wish to see -- or take -- the survey, you can find it here.)

I read your blog post about the results - interesting. Yes, the survey you sent out tends to be on the “outbound” side of things. Emailed surveys are perceived as “spammy”. Even unsolicited emails to an opt-in list get bounces these days. Let me offer a couple of observations if I may.

First, in regards to the instrument design, your choices were very narrow (which can be good) but they were not inclusive. Regarding question three, your answers are restrictive. I would have included an option for “available at no cost to me.” Everyone knows that advertising pays for publication if they’ve ever done any advertising at all. The fact that you can create an advertorial piece at little or no cost to the client is really quite amazing. You could always explain the advertising in a marketing or sales conversation. And I’m sure you realize 15 is not a statistically valid number. Any given outbound campaign I do results in a 2 to 3 per cent opt out with the occasional spam. If your bounces were shown as SPAM and not just unsubs then I’d really have to think about why. I know Constant Contact's Spam check feature would have caught any obvious problems. That fact is disturbing.

Second, in regards to inbound marketing, it is anything but passive if done correctly. Your blog and your high Google rank are huge for lead generation. They are inbound tools at their best. Inbound, in a nut shell is about getting found (Creating interesting compelling content coupled with superior SEO efforts), converting (this is the "not passive" part of calls to action {step 1} leading to stunning offers {step 2}) that change visitors to leads) and then a solid LEAD NURTURING PROGRAM to convert leads to sales. You’re a pro so I don’t even want to begin to sound like I’m schooling you on marketing, but I’m betting that the gap in your program is related to lead scoring and lead nurturing. What you are doing so well with your blog and your SEO works so well that when coupled with the rest of the program, the results eclipse all other marketing efforts.

I have a client who is an architect. He was actually my first client. Last year he had two leads off of his web site. Every keyword he wanted to rank for was at least 100 pages deep in Google. I started working on his inbound marketing in earnest last March. In June, he was on the front page of Google for 15 of his keywords. For two of them, he ranks number two. He also had 17 leads off of his website. Zero from his outbound efforts by the way. It all boiled down to getting him found, giving folks a reason to stick when they got to the site, creating specific landing pages for specific personas, having a stunning offer for them to respond to and then tracking to analyze and improve the effort. It will only get better over time.

Intrigued, I have invited Clay to work with me to solve the lead nurturing problem with this blog. Can we redefine our methodologies to encourage more positive results, and relate more closely the lead quality and ranking to our sales efforts?

We discussed the best approach to take, and Clay recommended that we try out variations in the communication/copy and measure results with a/b testing. That is, we compare the existing/standard approach with an alternative, and see which one pulls greater responses. We may need to conduct several a/b tests over time, as we tweak the system, hoping to find a "home run" but regardless, seeing how the quality and effectiveness of the leads management system can be improved.

In the weeks ahead, I'll report on our progress. You'll see as the story unfolds how we develop new business and build a system for leads management and sales which can be effectively adapted to your own organization. If, as I think will happen, Clay succeeds in solving my challenge, he will rightfully earn the strongest endorsement possible (and of course validate some other marketing principals outlined in this blog, namely that respectfulness, sharing, and contributing without worrying about immediate results are far more effective marketing methodologies than conventional, irritating and intrusive advertising and sales practices.)

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