Mike Agerbo: Well, you probably heard a lot about blogging. How it can help your business? To understand that, we’ve got Darren Barefoot, blogging extraordinary and author, as well, Friends with Benefits.
Darren: That’s right.
Mike Agerbo: Doesn’t sound like a blogging book.
Darren: No, it’s a cheeky title the publisher came up with actually, but yeah. It’s a book about kind of social media marketing, a big part of that is about marketing too and with bloggers.
Mike Agerbo: So, I've got a business, you know, and I talked to a lot of business owners, why should one blog for their business, what are the advantages?
Darren: Sure, there's lot of advantages. I think the key, like most basic advantage and then everybody can understand is search engine optimization or SCO, alright people talk about that, they’ve talked about it for years.
The idea here is in summary, right, you got a business, say, your competitor has a business, you both got flower shops, and say each of your website has 20 pages on it, you start a blog and a blog, every blog post you write becomes a page in that website, right? So, if you write two posts a week for a year, all of a sudden your site goes from having 20 pages to 125, right? So it’s a much bigger bucket than your competitor for Google—and people are using Google to find you, right? And those people are going to find your site through search, right? Not through your other kinds of advertising, other sources.
Mike Agerbo: So it’s about increasing the quantity of content you have on your website.
Darren: Well, that’s like the most basic tactical reason. That’s like the example everybody like, you know, our media responds and understands. I mean there are lots of other reasons, right? Lots of people want to use it to establish their expertise, right? Real estate agency, there is a lot, people use it for recruiting, right, big organizations’ blog about the culture inside their organization so that people can get to know them better.
One other example might be like tech support, right? It’s another channel for helping people get answers to questions and responding to those questions in a public way. Only the advantage there is you can answer the question once instead of privately through email or phone calls a thousand times.
Mike Agerbo: So obviously more contents, you get higher rankings in the search engines. What about the content of those blog post, like obviously you have to be saying something relevant?
Darren: Yeah, I mean we always talk about delivering value and we also talk about the cocktail party rule, right. So, if I meet you at a cocktail party and I immediately start talking for a half hour about how awesome I am, you're going to get bored very quickly.
Mike Agerbo: Yeah, you wouldn’t last five minutes.
Darren: No, exactly. So we recommend like talk 80% about other stuff, deliver 80% time, deliver value to your customers, your constituents that you want and 20% of time talk about your organization, like for example real estate agent might like link to map of local schools or something like that right? So that’s the way you deliver value, that’s kind of tangential to your organization, but people still see you as an expert and someone they want to continue to read.
Mike Agerbo: Well, I want to thank you so much for this great info, Darren. Where can people find out more information about your new book?
Darren: Amazon is the best actually right now, I just go—just search for Friends with Benefits on Amazon.
Mike Agerbo: And by 10 copies each.
Darren: 10 copies each. One for the whole——like every member of the family.
Mike Agerbo: Thanks a lot, Darren, cheers.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services