6 Years Later, The Shocking Truth of Blogging Has Not Changed

6 Years Lat­er, The Short Sto­ry Version I start­ed my first paint­ing blog for my dad’s paint com­pa­ny in May of 2006. We’ve dab­bled with a lit­tle SEO work in the past, but the thing that has kept him at the top of search engines in Amer­i­ca’s finest city, San Diego, was good ​‘ol blog­ging. In six years of writ­ing blogs, it still works. My dad’s com­pa­ny spends next to noth­ing on con­sis­tent blog writ­ing. The fruit of those labors have only pro­duced more traf­fic, more leads and lots of copy cats! Hey, can’t be upset about peo­ple want­i­ng to copy you, as the say­ing goes, ​“Imi­ta­tion is the sin­cer­est form of flat­tery.” My dad’s Painter For a Day pro­gram also spread to hun­dreds of painters across the coun­try. How did peo­ple find out about it? Blog­ging and the web! Google Still Likes Blogs Google is chang­ing their search cri­te­ria again soon. They will active­ly and aggres­sive­ly be fil­ter­ing web­sites that try too hard to be ranked well. Instead, they will be look­ing for sites that pro­vide qual­i­ty and help­ful infor­ma­tion to their audi­ence. So for­get about key­word stuff­ing and just write, and write blogs your cus­tomers will want to read. Don’t wor­ry about not get­ting lots of com­ments and sub­scrip­tions. Focus on qual­i­ty con­tent and you will see your web­site traf­fic increase. If Noth­ing Else, Read This Article So for the past few years, I’ve been on a soap box telling con­trac­tors they must be writ­ing con­sis­tent and qual­i­ty blog post. Instead of me con­tin­u­ing this mes­sage, I’ll turn it over to my friends at Social­Tract who explain the ben­e­fits of ​“Con­tent Mar­ket­ing” using blogs. Take a moment and read their lat­est blog: ​“How Con­sis­tent Blog­ging Can Grow Your HVAC Busi­ness.” The take­away is sim­ple, remove the words ​“HVAC” and insert your busi­ness ​“Paint­ing” ​“Remod­el­ing” etc. If you need help writ­ing con­sis­tent blog­ging, let me know. I’ll point you in the right direction.