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Does Blogging Make Sense for Local Home Improvement Companies?

Inbound marketing is the future. We’ve all heard it said a thousand times by now. All companies need to maintain social media accounts, blog regularly and be very active online. Informative, regularly published content will attract readers and online searches and ultimately lead to more business. That sounds about right, but is it true?

Blogging for Home Improvement Companies

Inbound marketing Versus Outbound Marketing

Outbound marketing in simple terms is just advertising. Radio ads, newspaper ads, billboards, signs on work trucks, yellow pages listings, and direct mail are all different types of outbound marketing. A primary characteristic of this type of marketing is that it costs money and it’s often difficult to measure the return on investment.

Inbound marketing, on the other hand, doesn’t cost anything. At least, that’s what many people think. You can put up an informative article on your website and share it on social media for free. It costs absolutely nothing, except the time to do the writing, editing and sharing.

Therein lies the problem, it’s not free at all. Inbound market has costs associated with the time it takes to get your content seen online. If you are a local restaurant or trendy shop, regular time spent on social media can be well worth the investment. However, the investment has to be weighed against other opportunities.

Blogging for Home Improvement Companies

Most marketing people have heard that they need to blog for search engine optimization. Organic searches can bring traffic to your blog and more customers to your business, but it has to be done right.

What you don’t hear the marketing gurus tell you is that writing regular blog posts without proper keyword research, onsite search engine optimization and promotion is often a waste of time.

Imagine you are a Calgary Roofing Company and you write a blog post about “metal roofing”. It’ll show up under a URL structure something like this “/blog/metal-roofing-benefits”.

There is nothing wrong with that if you have a high-traffic website with email subscribers waiting for your next article. Unfortunately, a typical home improvement company probably won’t attract a long term audience like that. People only visit a site like a roofer’s for as long as they are shopping for a roof. Even then, they are not likely to want to join a mailing list.

So what happens to that “Metal Roofing” blog post?

After a while it’ll get buried under a whole bunch of other blog posts and will unlikely to be seen by anyone.

It makes far more sense to have a “Roofing Category” on the main menu and then have a very comprehensive guide on everything you need to know about metal roofs linked from that page.

That is the type of content that  content that has the best opportunity to get shared and bookmarked.

So the moral of the story is, don’t blog. Write comprehensive content and make sure you optimize it very well with a proper title, H1 tag, sub-headings with H2 and H3 tags, emphasized text and a good, keyword rich description and image alt tags. Then do some work to promote it to suppliers and partners.

Connect to Customers by Telling Stories

Companies are beginning to understand that they need to form deeper connections with people if they are to foster lasting brand loyalty. Mass market advertising doesn’t cut it in our hyper-competitive markets.

One of the best ways to form those deep and meaningful connections is to tell stories that resonate with your audience. Not the “we care about quality and service” marketing hype, but real stories about what your company stands for in a way that is authentic and simple enough that they spread.

Azita Ardakani of LoveSocial shared three tips for telling good stories with Shawn Parr on PSFK:

Expand your idea of value.

“When you’re telling your story, people don’t want to hear about how much money you’re making or even how great your product is – they want to hear what you truly care about and the problem you’re solving for the world.”

Establish common language.

“When sharing your story online, consistency is key, and if people—even your own employees—are left to create their own explanations, the output is likely to have a wide array of confusion-causing variance.”

Give your brand a human voice.

“What type of person will best deliver the message of your brand? Think about what they would sound like, what their tone would be like and what type of personality they have. Write down all of their unique attributes and always communicate from the perspective of that person.”

What story is your company telling?

You are definitely communicating some story, whether you are conscious of the fact or not. Rather than leaving your reputation to chance, proactively choose the story you want to convey and make sure everyone in your company has the ability to communicate that message.

 

Would Higher Taxes for the Rich Harm the Economy?

While the many ardently push for lower taxes for all with the goal of increasing economic, research seems to show that current US marginal tax rates are not maximizing government revenues.

In “A review of the economic research on the effects of raising ordinary income tax rates” on the Economic Policy Institute website says

“recent economic research suggests that past reductions in top marginal individual income tax rates have had a statistically insignificant impact on growth and its driving factors—labor supply, savings, investment, and productivity growth”

The paper also states that,

“Recent research implies a revenue-maximizing top effective federal income tax rate of roughly 68.7 percent. This is nearly twice the top 35 percent effective marginal ordinary income tax rate that prevailed at the end of 2012, and 27.5 percentage points higher than the 41.2 percent rate in 2013.2 This would mean a top statutory income tax rate of 66.1 percent, 26.5 percentage points above the prevailing 39.6 percent top statutory rate.”

While it is highly unlikely that the US will every raise the top tax rates to 68.7, it is interesting to consider that the  American government is not economically rational, in that it is not seeking to maximize the revenues it could generate.

The US is much more willing to increase debt, rather than tax the wealthiest Americans.

Is the goal of a developed society to maximize the incomes of the ultra-wealthy? What about providing services like education, health care and old age security?

 

 

Why Do Most Bloggers Fail?

Derek Halpern of SocialTriggers.com wrote a good post called “Why Bloggers Fail“

One key point he made is that bloggers spend too much time creating content and not enough on promotion.

Time-Waster #1: Creating Too Much Content

When I asked bloggers, “How do you spend time on your blog?”, they said “I spend about 80-90% of my time on creating content.”

This makes ZERO sense.

Here’s the deal: When you run a blog that has a few readers, adding more content doesn’t help you get more readers. The math just doesn’t work.

Let’s say you have 100 readers. What are the chances that one of those people will love your content so much that they tell ALL of their friends about it? 1%? 2%? If that?

Whatever it is, it’s low, and at that rate, you might get 1 new loyal reader. Going from 100 readers to 101 readers isn’t how you build a blog readership.

To build a blog readership, you’ve got to go from 100 readers… to 500 readers. Then, from 500 readers to 700 readers, and so on.

How do you do it? The secret lies in your ability to promote the content you already have, because if you’ve got something that was only seen by 100 people, chances are there are at least 10,000 or 100,000 other people in the world that can benefit from what you wrote.

What Should Bloggers Focus on?

I know I’m guilty, I focus on getting content out, but don’t do much guest posting or other promotion.

Another related problem is what bloggers spend their time on. We all know it’s important to network and connect with others, however, spending hours a day on social media, or on other non-critical tasks like reading blog posts, isn’t going to help build our businesses.

So if we all know that 20% of our efforts generate 80% of results, why do so few of us focus on that 20%?

The first step is identifying what that 20% is. What are the absolutely critical focal points of building an online audience, and therefore growing a business?

Critical Blogging Success Factors

1. One long form, extremely detailed post per week. Preferably with links to other bloggers to get their attention and support.
2. Two quality guest posts per month. Although, in another post Derek talks of the benefit of grouping all of these posts in a short time frame to ‘launch’ your internet presence as wide as possible.
3. Be Everywhere. Pat Flynn’s approach of doing of great posts, video, podcasts, attending conferences, etc. seems to be very effective, although it takes a lot of time. I’m not sure about this one.

What do you think? Should more time be spend on promotion than content creation? What are some of the best ways of promoting that content?

 

Marc Andreessen: Not every startup should be a Lean Startup

(GigaOM)

Marc Andreessen on Lean Startups

The idea of the lean startups has gained fantastic momentum in recent years. Building a minimally viable product at low cost and failing fast and failing often have led to an exploding culture of entrepreneurship. Lean startups just build things and rapidly pivot to meet the demands of the market. That can be a great strategy but investor and tech entrepreneur Marc Andreessen notes that there are limits to the lean start up philosophy.

Some Ideas are Too Big for the Lean Startup Strategy

You can’t incrementally build and sell a massive idea.

“I would serve this as a challenge for the Lean Startup community. Especially the ones with the really audacious goals. Sometimes they start audacious because otherwise the product will never get to market. The Macintosh, that product had to exist in its entirety for people to wrap their heads around it,”

Sales and Marketing Still Matter

Keeping costs low and focusing on the product to drive sales may be cheaper, but not investing in sales and marketing isn’t the wisest business strategy.

“We see Lean Startup methodology being used inappropriately as an excuse to not take sales and marketing seriously,” he said. “Founders tell us that all that matters is product, and sales and market will happen automatically.

Failure is Not Cool

There is opportunity to learn from every failure, but ultimately entrepreneurs need successes to get to profitability. The lean start community may be over glamourizing the value of failure.

“The pivot. It used to be called, ‘the fuck-up.’ Taking the stigma out of failure is very exciting,” he said. “But we see founders who give up too quickly. It’s permission to give up very fast. Are they really going to do the heavy lifting over time?”