I have a good friend who decided on a new career path 4 years ago at the age of 63. He went into a specific legal support vocation. He was at a slight disadvantage online. He had no Internet history. Being a self employed contractor, he was essentially a start-up business in a very competitive field.
To help jump start his online presence, I built him a new website in WordPress. I set up his business social network. I placed him in 50 online business directories. I taught him how to blog.
My friend had a blogging advantage. Three masters degrees. Many years working for the government. He had his hand on the pulse of the types of cases he was advising on. He is a great writer and always has something to say.
Per my training, he was writing commentary on breaking news on a weekly basis. His blog posts were being picked up by local and national media, creating high page-rank linkbacks. In some cases, page one of Google contained links for 9 media organizations and him or 9 legal organizations/courts and his posts.
He was linking back to the posts from his website to his social media accounts.
Within 90 days, he was on page one of the Google, Bing and Yahoo search results for his profession in the city he is based in. Not only was he in the top ten organically for the service he provided, but he was in the third position in what was called, the Google 7 Pack.
The bounce rate on his posts were very low and I tracked that his audience spent an average of 10 minutes on his site for each visit. His organic leads were going through the roof, which I could monitor because they all passed through me.
About 1 year into a system that was working well, keeping him busy with a profitable caseload, I noticed his leads slowed down quite a bit. I checked his search engine positioning. He had dropped to the bottom of page 2. He was no longer in the Google 7 pack. It turns out, he had stopped blogging and his activity within his business social media circles had stopped.
I asked him if he was retiring or if his caseload was so busy that he did not need any new business. His answer was that he was just too busy with "stuff". I had a hunch and went to his personal Facebook page. Just as I had thought, he had plenty of time to post at least 30 to 40 times a day on Facebook about religion, politics, environmental issues and music videos. He was not only killing his productivity in business but was actually losing friends.
The take aways from this story:
1) Blogging works. Blog about breaking news and stay consistent.
2) When you are presented with blogging as a tool to build your business and increase your online activity, don't let it become the health club membership you purchased in January. Stay with it.
3) STEP AWAY FROM PERSONAL NON-BUSINESS SOCIAL DURING BUSINESS HOURS.
4) Unless you are making enough money or are approaching retirement, stay true to the marketing systems that are working for you.
Comments(28)