Resist The Urge to Sell

Of course, you want to sell — we all do. Google wants to sell too, but when it comes to its powerful search engine, it favors educational, high-quality content over promotional content.

So when it comes to your marketing efforts, make sure that a big part of them is educational, content-rich, and high quality. While your website can focus on presenting your products or services, it’s important to add a blog that focuses on establishing yourself as a leader in your industry. Don’t use your blog to sell! It’s fine to include links in your blog posts to your website, but keep the blog as pure as possible.

For example, if you sell homemade soap, your blog posts should include information on soap making; maybe a few recipes for readers to try at home; tips on cleanliness and hygiene; addressing issues such as allergies to fragrance; around the holidays, it’s fine to write a blog post with gift ideas and include a couple of links to your gift baskets. But you get a general idea — your blog should never sell. Your blog should include a wealth of information that adds value to the Web and to your readers.

As you work to fill the blog with content, you may sometimes feel that you’re drifting away from your own products too much — what’s the use of all this general knowledge? But over time, it works. Here’s another example — I have a client that sells student loans. Their website sells the loans, but the blog I write and manage for them never sells. It is filled with tons of tips, info, and thoughts on college — including topics that have nothing to do with financing college, such as dating in college, picking the best college major, and learning to cook for yourself.

Are we wasting our time writing about topics that have nothing to do with financing college, let alone with student loans? On the contrary. Patiently built over 3 years, the blog is now so rich in great content that it’s responsible for 50% of the website’s overall traffic. Sure, not all of this traffic translates into sales — but part of it does, and I expect that to keep growing as we continue to invest in being interesting, educational, and non-spammy.

Why Akismet Spam Protection is a Must-Have in Blogging

comment soam Just take a look at the screenshot on the left — this is from one of my client’s blogs, after they deactivated the Askimet plugin by accident. It took a mere couple of days for over 2,000 spam comments to appear on the blog’s dashboard.

Luckily, the blog is set up so that each comment must be approved before it gets published, but we still had to delete those comments from the blog’s dashboard, which was also a pain.

Akismet is an affordable WordPress plugin that filters spam comments and deletes them automatically. It’s free for personal websites and costs just $5 per month for a single professional website. I am in no way affiliated with Akismet — I am just in awe at how much comment spam there is out there, and how a blog absolutely must get spam protection.

So get yourself Akismet, and never deactivate it!