Category Archives: Marketing

The Trouble With Getting Your Friends, Family & Local People To View Your Blogs

Just over 12 years ago, me and a couple of friends had a weekly video conversation using Google Hangouts (how many of you remember that?), calling ourselves the Google Hangout Crew. Most of the time it was just the 3 of us, but sometimes we’d invite someone else onto the chat to talk with us and share their opinions on the topics of the day.



Sheryl Loch, Brian Hawkins, and me

On one of those days, which was always a Sunday, we decided to discuss the topic of blogging for local folks and businesses, and the issues we all seem to have in getting those people to take a look at what we write. This wasn’t a new topic for me actually, as I talked about it first in 2009 when I wrote a post leading with If You Can’t Get Your Family And Friends To Subscribe… and again in 2011 when I asked Why Aren’t You Well Known Where You Live?

This conversation was slightly different than our general conversations, but the overall theme is the same. I always make the recommendation to businesses that if they want to increase their search engine optimization and the potential for doing more business locally and online, that having a blog can do wonders for each. Just being a player in the online game gives you a great boost in local search, which is a great thing, but the question was do those visitors read your stuff, and if not why not? For that matter, why don’t they ever comment on any of it?

I tend to want to look at my own sites, and I’m going to share statistics on two of them from that moment in time. I request that, if you have the time, that you check out the video at the end of this post where we talked about it all, and the other site I’m going to talk about that’s mentioned in the video; the statistics I’m sharing is what they were back in 2012, as I haven’t put much effort into figuring out how to track my Google statistics in the last couple of years.

Anyway, for this blog, the month’s stats at the time showed that there were 32 visits from what I’d call the local area, which includes Rochester, which is about 75 miles away. If I only included the Syracuse area, I’d have had to remove 11 visits. That’s pretty poor if you ask me.

New York state is my highest volume state, and the majority of visitors were coming from New York City (which makes sense), but that’s not quite local. I consider this my flagship blog, even though it wasn’t the highest ranked blog at the time. I didn’t have many local visitors who were subscribed to the blog back then, which means I wasn’t sure where they were coming from, but I knew they weren’t subscribers at the time.

My other blog is called Syracuse Wiki, and it’s my local blog. It’s not a highly visited blog now, but even then it wasn’t seen by many local people, even when I wrote specific articles regarding those times when a bunch of us met up for some kind of frivolity, but I also didn’t and still don’t write a lot of posts there because I mainly write about local events and issues, and it helps when I can capture pictures regarding local events. I couldn’t gripe all that much because the visitors on that blog were 54% local, but I also knew that blog would attract way more people because it talked mainly about local topics.

This brings us back to the original issue and why it’s a problem. If you’re running a local business and you’re trying to get local people interested in what you do, what can you do to advertise yourself and get local business consumers? On the video above, I offered suggestions to companies that sell products, which includes coupons and lots of pictures, and even advertising their blogs in their stores and advertisements so people can keep up with new things they offer. It’s a great way to show off your personality, unless you don’t have one; I’m just sharing… lol

What about those of us who offer services, who don’t have offices outside of our homes or even if we do, we don’t own the space and thus are more limited with some of our banner advertising, if you will? Is there a way we can target our blogs so that it attracts local traffic and thus local business?

What about our friends and family members? One’s best advocates are always those close to us, but if we can’t get them engaged then can we legitimately hope to engage our community, no matter what we do? Truth be told, I have a page on Facebook called Mitch Mitchell’s Writings And Videos that’s been live for around 4 years, with only 55 subscribers, few of them local people. I have to own up to the fact that I haven’t advertised it as much as I did when I created it, but it gives me the opportunity to share some of my older articles here and there; in case you didn’t know, I’ve been writing online and off since 2001… whew!

I put the question out to all of you… at least I hope there’s an “all” instead of one or two readers; what do you do to help increase your online footprint? Do you blog, and if so how often? Do you create videos on YouTube and advertise them? Or, and this can work, do you comment on other people’s blogs or videos, making sure you link back to your blogs of videos or other online sources?

Let me know if you can; meanwhile, check out this video from over a decade ago (Google Hangouts could be wonky, so I apologize up front if there are glitches lol):


 

Can I help your business or blog with some of the services I offer?

© May
I’m Just Sharing

Getting Positive Publicity Through Interviews

Here’s a truth; I want to be famous. I want to be well known. And I want to make money from it. I don’t want to be infamous; I don’t want to have to do something illegal or be outed for something bad to get that fame; I’d like to think my integrity is higher than that. 😀

Yeah, I was a wedding singer!

I’ve given this a lot of thought and come to this conclusion. The best way to get positive publicity is through doing interviews. This, of course, presupposes that you’ve done something that’s worth getting interviewed about. However, if you have this part covered, it’s the best way to go.
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Are You Marketing Your Business Properly?

Marketing and services; let’s talk about it.

This is interesting. Back in December 2007, I wrote my first article on this blog, which was only one paragraph. I said I was going to talk about marketing, and I actually did just that, along with other things.

I can handle it!

I actually did that very thing. At the time, I was marketing affiliate programs via a company called Commission Junction, which is actually still around today. I was making nice money, though I wasn’t getting rich off of it. I wrote about many of those product sites, because I was also buying from those sites. I also talked a lot about the process of marketing and affiliate marketing, I shared what other marketers were saying, and I even had a couple of interviews about the subject at the time; those were the days when I was writing around 300 articles a year… whew!

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I Know Nothing About Affiliate Marketing

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about affiliate marketing, something I’ve been a part of for at least 15 years by now, and wondering “what the heck am I doing wrong?” I’ve made few affiliate sales over the years, but at least I can say I’ve made some. I guess that puts me ahead of a few people, but so many others are really rocking the industry. Then, after thinking about it some more, I realized one very interesting fact; I know nothing about affiliate marketing!

crazy affiliate marketing

Going Crazy by Frédéric Dupont

That’s a very disconcerting thing to come to, and though it’s probably over the top, truth be told I’ve been looking for answers for a long time. I’ve read a lot of stuff; I’ve tried a lot of stuff. All you need to do is look over there to the right and you’ll see I’ve been doing something for all these years, but with only one sale in all of 2021 I think we can all say I’m an affiliate marketing failure.
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Yosemite Sam Marketing

Because many people don’t believe I can write a short post… this one is short… for me. Let’s see what happens…

If you don’t know who Yosemite Sam is, you’ve been living under a rock or on a volcanic island. Yosemite Sam was the 20th century’s greatest marketer.

Not Yosemite Sam lol
Photo by Julia Solovey on Unsplash

I say that because he always knew how to get a new job (when he wasn’t trying to take your money forcefully), always knew how to promote himself, was loyal to whatever organization he happened to be shilling for at the time (even if it was just him), had ultimate self confidence, and by being loud and obnoxious he was able to promote others by extension, even when that might not have been his ultimate goal.
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