After seeing my work, local programmers and small business owners often ask me for advice. They inspired me to write this article.
Blogs are a great way to drive up web traffic! "Marketing experts", the kind who wear suits and call for status meetings, will implement "SEO best practices". The best practices they implement are usually advantageous, but also easily Google-able.
Google's algorithm is designed to return content that engages the user. Content quality, as discussed in my
Grammarly Article is a lot more important than how many times you used what keyword. And so is your site speed.
Developers have a cornucopia of frameworks, plugins, and tools at their fingertips. It is easy to get caught up in the shiny and new. But it is important to only include outside code when it makes sense.
If your blog is heavy with WordPress plugins, outside libraries or database calls, it will slow down your app, provide a poor user experience and negatively impact your SEO.
Programmers and Tech organizations often fail at social media because of the person/team's disconnection. To be successful at social media marketing, you have to appeal to the common man (common relative to who you are trying to reach).
When you, or your team, create content, it is essential to consider the people you are targeting. What are their life experiences? What are their values? What engages them? You have to use EQ skills.
April Wensel of
Compassionate Coding is a great resource for tech EQ.
Why do you love my Twitter posts?
1. I'm fun?
2. I'm genuine?
3. I'm unique?
I don't hold back my personality! If your posts look like everyone else's, the people will scroll past. Don't water yourself down! It is our differences that make us interesting.
Before Coding Commanders, I did cosplay modeling for a bit. I went from 0 to 25,000 Facebook followers in about one year. I have had my Coding Commanders Facebook for over one year, and it has just over 3,000 followers.
Part of the reason why it is harder to grow in tech is just that it takes more to produce the content. The other part has to do with the introverted techies.
Tech people don't network and promote together the way models do. I will give a simple example. When I was a model, if I had lunch with another model friend we would take selfies to post on each other's page. The more I saw my friends, the more we posted selfies. It creates an engaging public relationship. You will share followers and appear more human to your audience.
However, models don't have as many local meetups as programmers! That makes the lack of networking an even bigger loss.
Just about every month I attend
BocaJS. Imagine if I took pictures with four other members each month. Each of us spread the pictures out, posting approximately one meetup picture a week. And each post is shared by everyone. Now imagine if I attended multiple meetups a month, doing the same at each. We would all grow exponentially.
The biggest problem I see with tech's digital marketing is the faith they put in businessmen. There is no degree, blog article or workshop that will make you good at digital marketing.
The only way to achieve solid branding is to roll up your sleeves and get in there. Unfortunately, real social media experts get undervalued. Especially by small to medium-sized organizations.
I often see setups similar to this:
Director of Marketing
Salary: 100,000+/year
Tasks: Status meeting, secretary runs reports, present pretty graphs in meetings
Social Media Person
Salary: $15/hour
Tasks: Create daily engaging quality content
Blogger
Salary: $15-$25/blog
Tasks: Create daily engaging quality content
You trust that the marketing director's MBA and corporate work experience make him the most valuable member of the team. But he is not the one speaking to your audience. You could probably hire a new grad to do just as good a job for significantly less money.
Because the algorithms and people are continuously changing, for best results the content creators should have access to the analytics. The creator should post quality content, observe post interaction and perform analytical research. Hard work, analytical thinking skills, and EQ can combine to create digital marketing magic! But magic costs more than $15 an hour.
Proper digital marketing is kind of like hacking without the source code. You have to figure out the changes in the algorithms before bloggers talk about it. You also have to observe and predict how the audience will interact to a post.
I am going to give you an example. A few years ago I realized most of my Facebook posts had about the same rate of likes and comments, but shares and post clicks were very volatile. Post clicks varied the most. And my posts with really high post click rates were shown to a lot more people.
I started thinking of posts that would inspire my followers to click on the picture. The implementation of this strategy was on a Facebook page with 2,000 followers. The post got over 10,000 views. And I did not spend a penny on ads!
Now about the blog articles... Maybe you can't afford to pay for the above, but you should at least hire good writers. Fiverr is a great way to find contract bloggers! Just remember, you get what you pay for...
If you are looking for a quality technical blog, don't expect to pay less than $100. Once your site blows up, some writers will give you a break on the cost in exchange for promotion (backlinks, social media posts, etc.).
