I’ll show you mine if you show me yours…
July 29, 2008
Did that grab your attention?
Are you blogging or optimizing for fun? or for profit?
If it is for profit, the keep reading otherwise, this is a waste of time for you. If you took more than 5 seconds to decide, don’t read the rest of this either. Go back to the first sentence and DECIDE if you TRULY are building your blog or website for PROFIT.
Once you build some relationships within an industry or among some blogging counterparts, the next step is to take the trust that you have built up and kick it up a notch. One of the highest leverage activities that you can do with friends is comparing notes among non-competitors in a similar industry. Seriously, BENCHMARKING WORKS. If you truly want to win in this world of online marketing, you have to be willing to give in order to get.
Here are some things that I am shared with trusted friends in the last few months:
My Analytics. When this Blog dropped off the face of Google. How many visitors I was turning into leads,given my traffic. Tons of different strategies that I was testing SEO wise. Which blogs I was working on. More WordPress plugins than I care to count. Sources of links. Tons of on page SEO stuff…Etc. Etc. Etc . The list could literally go on forever.
Do you know what I got in return. Much of the same thing! By being willing to share and opening up what I don’t know to others, I LEARNED and GAINED EXPERIENCE. Here’s the bottom line:
In a business like online marketing, you HAVE to stay on the cutting edge. To stay there, you MUST be able to evaluate quickly and have a neural network of many friends watching your six o’clock while you watch theirs. It is also CRUCIAL to know what works and what does not. Wasted time on misinformation and disinformation is death rattle. Don’t be too prideful or too vain about your site stats or analytics data. Trust me…being humble enough to show yours in exchange for a peek at someone else’s can be an enlightening process. (grin) Usually you BOTH learn something.
Good points, Eric.
All too often, people decide they want to do a blog because………….
EVERYONE ELSE IS.
And they figure they better give it a go. They don’t have a clear expectation or goal that they are wanting to achieve, so they end up with exactly what you’d expect: a half hearted attempt that really ends up going nowhere.
Developing a clear expectation/goal – and working with others to achieve the goal is really is what its about. Its as simple as that.
Is it a “silver bullet”? Nope. It takes work. But the payoffs can be HUGE.
Yes, that is a provocative statement. I have had the constant feeling that my back is against the wall for the past 7 months now. At the present time I find myself losing ground again in the Google rankings battle, So I have turned for now to the only thing I know will help. Are there things I could be doing that I am not doing, I am sure there are, but some of them I may be in the dark about.
The metrics for conversion are becoming more reliable as more companies report their stats. We have processed over 10,000 leads through a call center that responded within 3 minutes and 4 times within 24 hours. The stats: For a real estate site registration, 10% indicate that they want to speak to an agent, are free to work with them and want to purchase withing 6 months. After that, the conversion rate runs between 10%-30% because of the quality of the agent, the ability of the consumer to qualify and find what they want that meets their criteria.