Blogging can a tremendous personal branding and self development tool for those who want to grow in their marketing career. When I was a new business graduate, I reached out to alumni from my school to ask them for advice on being successful in a marketing career (a great idea if you are a new grad). One of the best pieces of advice I received was to start a blog. My blog started slowly, attracting very little traffic. But after years of adding helpful content, my blog started to snowball until it reached a point of attracting thousands of visitors each month. I sell about one book on Amazon a day which helps fund by affinity for marketing and business books. Additionally, my blog has helped me build relationships with several amazing marketers and learn a ton about the marketing field. Here are a few of my tips for building a marketing blog and how it can help your marketing career.
Interviewing Leaders in the Marketing Field
There are many marketing professionals who would be thrilled to be interviewed, even if you have a small audience. It is a great compliment to tell someone that you respect them enough to want to interview them. You may even be able to get high profile marketers if you approach it the right way. Use the Dale Carnegie advice of thinking in terms of what other people want. For instance they might want to promote a book they recently launched, promote their marketing business, or get a valuable link from your site that can help their search rankings.
Some recent marketing interviews:
Danny Dover, Author of Search Engine Optimization Secrets
Anika Lehde, Founder of Projectline
Blogging Encourages You to Learn More About Marketing
When you write about a topic it tends to be helpful if you have a lot of knowledge about the topic or have conducted some research. Sometimes the act of putting your thoughts into an article helps you find gaps in your knowledge that you can usually fill by reading some good articles. Not wanting to look bad can be a strong motivator for studying areas of marketing that you have not yet mastered.
Serendipitous Networking
When you have a lot of high quality blog articles, you tend to attract a lot of visitors who are interested in marketing. Some of these visitors will be curious about you and follow your Twitter account or read your about page. These serendipitous meetings could potentially lead to your next job or client.
Blogging Showcases Your Marketing Skills to Potential Employers
Writing intelligent and thoughtful marketing articles is one of the best ways to demonstrate your marketing acumen and how you think about marketing. I have heard some say that blogs are the new resume. A strong marketing blog can be like a agent who is constantly selling your talents to prospective employers.
Dominate the First Page of Google for Your Name
Companies constantly Google the name of prospective employees to learn more about them. The first position in Google for your name is valuable real estate that helps you control how people experience your personal brand online. One tactic that can work well is using your name as the domain name of your blog like ChrisBrogan.com because Google still favors sites that have the keyword in their domain name. Having great content on your blog that people link to will help you get the number one position which gets a high percentage of clicks (roughly 30%-40%).
Charles Sipe is the Director of Search at Sparkplug Digital, an online marketing agency providing tech and startup SEO, PPC, and social media. Follow him on Twitter @charlessipe