This past week I have had four emails for my latest articles that have been shared on LinkedIn. This is actually good news as on Twitter we get an email every blue moon (less than monthly). They saw I also posted on our company page the same article. Each person inquired why I wasn't including some "sales pitch" for our companies' services? This question took me back that it was from four different people who don't directly know each other according to LinkedIn. One of the people we had some emails back and forth and then an hour-long phone call about the subject of not having a sales pitch. In the end we both realized that not having a sales pitch of "buy my stuff" or "use our services" at the end was actually more of a sales pitch then just stating so and the person said by not doing so actually made me sound like more of an industry insider and expert. Yeah! That is what we have been shooting for with all of our 200+ articles over the past three years.
I know I was intentionally leaving off any tag to buy or use our services as I'm tasking our new content writer to write the blog posts with team members. Those are to be more informing with that magical sales pitch at the end (maybe – we'll see). My articles are my thoughts that actually get business owners and marketers thinking and asking questions which is what I intend them to be. I know this based on that since changing my personal style I am getting contacted by more businesses and marketers within business to help. As a result of this change we now have more clients than we did using the sales pitch technique.
In my talks and email exchanges we've come up with a reason for this. By not having a sales pitch and pushing a product or service they have been more inclined to dig into what we are offering, who we are, what our company culture is, and ultimately why are you doing what you are doing. We all have agreed that based on our company being focused on honesty, transparency, and our goal for keeping costs down for small business that we are actually having more of a sales pitch than we could ever have hoped.
What I write is quick and dirty which is both a blessing and a curse. I know if I spent a few extra hours beyond my 1-2 hours I allocate daily I could massage my article which would make it longer, more correct in a writing style, and be more optimized for the search engines.
Well, maybe the first two, but not the last. We have seen based on our increase in blogging that our organic reach has gone up over 23% in the past two months according to our Google Analytics. That may not seem like a large amount but we were only increasing 2-3% before. That is a 20% boost in organic traffic. This means the change is working with Google and Bing (our top two search engines) and that the more organic and non-tweaked content the better our results have been. We believe in editing as that creates the higher quality content that is more evergreen, etc.
To give an indication on time this entire article took 15 minutes to write (before I went and re-read) and another 20 to do a read-over and adjust certain paragraphs. I have been averaging about 600 words per 30 minutes time when I don't have to research and quote specific authors.