Back in 2010 when I was teaching small business owners about Facebook Pages and creating blog content, a lot of folks were still pretty cautious about spending any time building a presence online. Even after I turned my boss at the time into a mini-celebrity in a particular expertise he had - he still questioned if blogging worked. And that was just after about a year of consistent weekly blogging.
Blogging is pretty amazing! At the time we had several people on the phone every day all week, working to fill a weekend class on digital filmmaking. A year later, we didn't need to make any outbound calls, we had people just signing up online, for the most part, finding us through Google. I just checked today and that class continued on from 2010 til it's final run in 2018, after which the producer retired. It took a few years, and he still didn't fully understand why blogging worked, but he did acknowledg how crucial blogging had been to the success of the class, the last time I saw him in person.
"A year of blogging" sounds a lot easier than the reality of the situation. I wrote several articles a week (not just on the class) to build up our online presence and make sure our content was in high enough volume to garner attention from search engines. That is not easy to do, if you're writing from scratch. Of course, I was being paid to write the content, so that kept me going. But if writing all that content had just been a "labor of love" I doubt I would have spent so many hours a week creating all that content from nothing. Gotta pay the rent!
Good, quality writing is important when it comes to blogging. Have you ever ended up on a blog page that was poorly edited, contained misspellings and was obviously created just for the purposes of showing up online? Poor value is poor value. It's easy to recognize poor quality in writing. Well-written content providing real value (all you have to do is answer a question!) is the kind of writing that's more likely to be shared and bookmarked. That's called social credit.
The Challenge
I'm willing to bet creating great content is the main reason novice bloggers (and even experienced bloggers) fall off the wagon and stop writing. I'm no different! Life happens, it's easy to forget to write. The ease with which bloggers fail to create content is also an advantage for those who start to take blogging seriously! Only 20% of your online competition is blogging with any consistency. I'd estimate that only about 20% of that 20% is actually doing a really, really great job at their blogging.
A few businesses are paying third parties to create a bunch of content and do a "good job" that way. Not everyone can afford to pay for quality writing though. Probably many business owners manage to get out a post a few times per month, and that's better than nothing. This past year I discovered a way to create content without a lot of time spent, in addition to creating my own articles from scratch. Time to share!
TW3
TW3 is short for Terry Wilson 3, the owner of a marketing and advertising company that specializes in training and tested/proved strategies for business lead generation. It's a membership program and provides weekly training from the owner directly, along with a substantial support system of trainers, ticket support and a huge archive of past training videos.
One of the main features that makes this membership so valuable is the fact that it comes with a mobile-optimized website and blog. But a real shining gem is here it that the blog comes with a content curation tool.
What is Curation?
Dictionary.com defines curation as follows:
to pull together, sift through, and select for presentation, as music or website content.
The curation tool allows you to set up sources, topics and keywords with which to locate, grab, post and automatically credit blog articles from other websites! We aren't talking about pretending you wrote the content, as the articles specifically are sourced back to the original creator.
So in addition to your own content (you should still write your own blogs!), you can easily fill your blog with relevant content your audience would enjoy. The curation tool saves a fantastic amount of time as many articles can be found and posted in a few minutes.
This comprehensive tool is fully documented and easy to use. If you're a novice to blogging, having a tool like this in your arsenal will make you look like a pro, once you've gotten your sea legs and have it up and running.
This is a huge boon for me personally, as I have two companies and two industries to write content about. On one side I have music education, and on the other I have marketing and advertising. Essentially, it's the same because the advertising and marketing company is the advertising arm of my music education business. But it's two distinct topics, so different articles are needed for both areas.
Believe me, a blog looks way better having lots of articles on it (recently) than a having a few posts a year! To find out more contact me at www.tw3marketmakers.com and I'll show you how to get your own blog content game into high gear!
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