Using your blog to attract new clients

Hi Paul! Thanks for you note and I’m happy to see you actually take the challenge, this is exactly the type of thing I was expecting you to do! Write about something you’re passionate about and engage in a dialog with folks by including your article as a relevant example!

Nicely done, haha!

1. You had a question about the advice I gave to find topic which is going to rank really well on Google and write something about it. The trick here is to first find a topic which you are passionate to write about and only after try to find what has already been covered and written about extensively and what hasn’t? All I am trying to tell you, write something unique which hasn’t been said before which you think is valuable to people. Don’t just write about something which has been talked to death already on every single blog. Make sense?

2. You had a question about the advice I gave about promotion of your article. These tactics are meant to help you think of ways to gain traction for your article. I 100% agree with you that you should not do anything which seems disingenuous or fishy or spammy, the ideas I share are just tactics to inspire you to promote your article once you write it.

   What you are doing here is perfect, comment on relevant articles with your response, great way to get traffic back to your site and promote your blog.

   The thing is, most people write an article on a topic they feel very passionate about and forget about it. They don’t have any promotion strategy for the article and they think that the more articles they write the better traffic they’ll get on their blog.

   It’s actually quite the opposite. The more thought you put into writing the article and promoting it the more exposure you’ll get on your blog.

   So all I’m trying to say here is you need to think of a plan of how you will promote your article.

3. You had a question on the “finding someone who tweeted a similar article and contacting them” advice. Again – you are not emailing them to ask for a backlink, what you’re doing is you’re starting up a discussion with them on Twitter or on their blog by reacting to their tweet with something complementary and possibly better which you have written. The idea is to get them to possibly promote your article by tweeting as well. And again, only do this if it feels genuine and makes sense. If you are actually referencing someone in your article it makes perfect sense to let them know and reach out to them.

   Much like yourself, I hate the crazy amount of cold email I get asking me to comment or promote someone’s articles. I’m not suggesting you spam a bunch of people with your article. I’m just suggesting you do what feels natural in terms of promotion, starting up conversations with relevant people who you mentioned in the article is a good way to do so.

Sorry for such a long comment. Does this make sense?

Thanks for taking the time to reply to my post.

In many respects, you could say that in writing my response, I was following the spirit of what you are suggesting, if not the exact techniques!

Ultimately, I guess it’s a question of personal ethics.

The thing is, you happened to touch on a trend that I assume is considered best practice for getting inbound links. It used to be the case that people would be encouraged to write comments on blog posts, feigning interest and then linking to an article on your own site.

Because people like me got tired of all this behaviour – in amongst the lower grade spam – and turned off comments, the advice now appears to engage with site authors over email, i.e. “I noticed a typo on one of your articles”, or “I just shared an article you wrote” and after a few messages, ask for a link to be added. It’s actually hilarious the lengths people will go to now to get a link added!! It seemed like your article was basically offering the same advice. If that’s not the case, regardless, I’m afraid it will soon become ineffective because people will again get tired of entertaining these methods. Make sense?

Anyway, as I said, some useful tidbits in here. For the rest of the advice, I’d just edge closer to being less interested in looking for Google-juice as an outcome, and more focused on building lasting relationships based on shared interests. That way, the links will flow naturally.