business blogging

Yesterday I offered 449 entrepreneurs in the Saint Louis area an opportunity to promote their business, show off their subject-matter-expertness and even get a free link back to their business website.  I offered all of this for free, in exchange for a simple article (in which they could also promote their business).

The offer went straight to all 449 InBoxes, so I can safety assume that at least 85% of them were delivered successfully.  In fact, meetup.com probably has bounce measures in place to weed out the false members, so it’s possible that 100% of the members received my offer.

Yet not one took me up on it.

Not one of 449 entrepreneurs took advantage of a great marketing opportunity.  Why?  Could it be because they thought they’d be helping my client and not themselves? Perhaps.  Could it be because they didn’t understand what I was asking for? Perhaps.

But I think the answer is quite simple.  Small business owners still don’t understand the power of marketing on the Internet.  Not even close.

Two years ago I was hired by a local retail mattress store.  They had a website that wasn’t the greatest, and they were paying AT&T an outageous amount of money for traffic and marketing.  Yet their website wasn’t selling a damn thing.  It wasn’t generating leads, it wasn’t producing revenue, it was simply a train wreck.

It wasn’t necessarily their fault.  As with most SMB owners, when a big company like AT&T comes in, they may be overwhelmed with the statistics that are thrown at them.  They are promised ‘online marketing’ and ‘traffic’ with great generality and glazing over of details.  What kind of marketing? What kind of traffic?  They don’t know to ask, and they don’t even know what answer is the correct one.

On top of this, SMB owners aren’t web designers.  They are given archaic tools and expected to produce a customer-friendly website.  They aren’t given guidance, they aren’t even told how to create a simple contact form.  So it’s no wonder the money goes down the drain.  And most SMBs don’t exactly have money to just throw down the marketing drain.

Shortly after I was hired, we started rebuilding their entire website.  They weened off the phone book ads one at a time, canceled AT&T’s “marketing” and put all their efforts into the web.  It’s a good thing, too, as the business was slowly going downhill.  Downhill to the point that had they not made this bold move, they’d probably be out of business today.  (And this isn’t just me bragging, you can ask Doug yourself)

Once we launched the newly designed site, a (not so) amazing thing happened.  They started ranking.  They started getting quality traffic.  People started calling.  Customers started asking for prices and delivery.  Their website was actually generating a decent ROI.

Over time, you’ll learn that one of the best things you can do for a website is to provide new and relevant content often.  Search engines love the content, and if it’s on target with your industry, you’ll start to see rankings for long tail searches you never thought would bring you traffic (and sales!).  Providing this content gets more and more difficult over time, as you start to run out of things to say.

Now, my client still has plenty of content ammunition.  But he also knows that there are things that he doesn’t know, that are related to his industry, but he doesn’t know.  And these things are just what I was asking other SMB owners to write about.  But they didn’t.  Why?

The other huge part of getting more traffic to your website is links.  And in particular, links from industry-related websites are great ways to improve your over SERP rankings.  So writing an article for another website, that is willing to link back to yours, is an awesome opportunity.  One that 449 St. Louis entrepreneurs missed.