From Zero Clients to Booked Out—With a Blog

of your amazing Itty Bitty Visibility book, 15 Chapters to Marketing Made Easy. And Chapter 9 is one of my favorites, and it is all about blogging. I'm sure at some point in the past you've had a business coach or someone tell you that you need to be blogging, and you're like, why? Why on earth do I need to do that? It's a lot of work. It's hard to be consistent. And I'm not a writer and I just don't know what I would say. And I hear all of that. However, I want to tell you today why you really do need to be blogging. And the first thing is Blogs keep your website fresh and current. And you're thinking, hmm, why do I care? The reason you care is that search engines like new content. I'll get into a little, into that a little bit more in a second. Articles show the depth of your knowledge. They show that you are the expert in whatever it is that you're talking about. And the content shows potential clients that you're the person for their answers, which is what you want to be. So a lot of people will search out information first, read up on whatever it is, and then if they decide to hire that out instead of doing it themselves, you want to be the one that they call. Blogging will greatly help with that. Now there's another term that you'll hear and it's called vlogging with a V instead of blogging with a B. And all vlogging is, it just simply means there's a video attached. That's it. The V is for video. So you can do a video and put that up and call it your vlog. Now what I like to do is I write my article. I oftentimes will create a video that goes with it because what I might say in the video will be slightly different— well, actually, it'll be greatly different from what I actually put in the written material for that. However, they're both valid. It's all information. It's just that I talk very different than I write, and so I like to include both. Now, a lot of times I will write my article first, and it might sit there for months, literally months, before I create the video. And there's actually a strategy to that. What Google is looking for is new content. They constantly comb the internet for new content, and when they find it, they will index that content under whatever keywords they feel relevant for whatever was written there. A lot of times, if I don't want to write a new article, I will create a video for one of my past articles and and put that onto that page, which now that page has new content. So instead of writing the whole, another whole article, I'll just add a video and that counts for adding new content. And you're thinking, Dotty, why does this even matter? Here's the reality of how a search engine works. And I'm going to assume this is the same for AI answer engines, um, but I'm not 100% positive on that one yet. So a search engine, when you put your website up, a search engine will come to your website, they'll go through every page, and they'll index what they want, and they won't index what they don't want. Now, on any website Rarely are all of the pages indexed. Now, if you've got a 5-page website, your odds are good they're all going to be indexed. But as time goes on, especially when you have a blog, things get added. Not everything gets indexed, and that's for a reason. It's only the important stuff, and the search engine is who decides what's important and what isn't, that gets indexed. Now after they do that, they never re-index the exact same page. Why? It's already there. So they'll come back in a month and see if there's anything new. And if there's nothing new, they're not re-indexing your website. It's already in the index. So then they'll come back in like 2 months. And if there's nothing new, again, they're not re-indexing anything, it's already indexed. So now they might wait and come back for 6 months. And in 6 months when they come back, if there's nothing new, now they might put you on a schedule for a year. You see what the problem is here? It keeps getting pushed out as to when they come to look for new content. And if your website is site on a cycle for— I'm not coming back for a year— and stuff isn't getting indexed because it hasn't come back to index it. Now, there are ways around this and things that we can do to get that content indexed way quicker, but that's the reality, is search engines are looking for new content. If you're not offering anything new, why on earth do they need to even come to your website? This is what blogging does. It keeps them coming back looking for the new content. That is so, so important to understand. One huge reason to blog is to satisfy a search engine's need for new content. Now blogging is beneficial for you and your SEO. Search engines are constantly looking for new information. Okay, we just covered that. Um, the content on your website is mostly static, especially if you're a service provider. You don't change your services very often. You may add something and delete something, but it's not very often. You might have a team page that has people on there that come and go that you update periodically, but really the source of new information is a blog. That's, that's the bottom line. That's where your new information comes from. Adding articles to your website provides what the search engines need. Again, that's the bottom line. Blogging is a long-haul strategy. This is not instant gratification. Just putting that out there, it is for the long haul, and it's one of the best tactics you can do for search engine optimization. And I say, I stress that you can do. You don't need to hire this out. You don't need to pay an optimization company some, you know, monthly fee of $1,000+ to optimize your site. When you're adding blog posts. Now I will say there's a method to writing blog posts that is an optimized method, and I've created a custom GPT for that. If you want that GPT, mention it in the comments under this video and I will get it to you. But it's, it's simply using a custom GPT that I've programmed with all of my SEO knowledge to write blog posts for service providers. That's really, that's the one thing it does, and it does it really, really well. So there's, there is that, and that is how I blog these days, by the way, for myself, for my customers, is I'm using CustomGPT for all of that information. Well, that about covers blogging. I will say there is one more thing I want to say about this. I've been blogging for probably 18 years, something like that. And when I started my business, I had zero customers, like all of us when we first start. So I had more time than I had anything else. I started blogging as soon as blogging became a thing with WordPress. I don't remember what year that was, but I was on it like that. I could see a direct correlation between posting frequently and my phone ringing. And why do I bring this up? One of the big questions people ask is, how often do I need to blog? Well, once a month is a minimum to meet search engines, uh, as far as what we talked about with new content. However, if you want your phone to ring, you blog as often as you need. And why do I say that? When I was sitting at home with no clients, nothing to do, I was putting out information. And I wasn't even doing this as a strategy at that point. I was just doing it to have something to do. I would simply answer questions that potential customers had. I was going to in-person networking events. If someone asked me a question, I'd go home and I'd write a blog about it. And what that did was it made my phone ring to the point where I was now busy, and I was too busy to blog. So that stopped. And as I cycled through and did the, the projects. I all of a sudden, my phone wasn't ringing and I decided to go back to what worked before and I blogged. And then my phone started ringing and I got on new clients, brought on new clients, and again didn't have time. I was doing client work and it was this cycle that went like this and I could see a direct correlation to frequency of blogging, to my telephone ringing. So if your phone is not ringing, one thing you might try is writing an article every single day. That's what I was doing. And then when I got too busy, I would go months without writing anything. And then again, it would just start over. Writing every day. So you can see that history on my blog if you want. I have removed a few things that are completely irrelevant now. However, if you're not getting the results you need, your phone's not ringing, get some articles out there. There's more that you can do with these articles, but it starts with getting the article out there. If you need help with that, put in the comments that you would love to look at my custom GPT, and I will be sure to get that information over to you. If you want your own copy of 15 Chapters to Marketing Made Easy, that link will be either in the comments or the YouTube description for this video. And tomorrow we are going to be chatting about social media. I look forward to it. See you tomorrow.