A 27-Day Online Marketing Plan For Your Small Business

Small business owners are exceptional at what they do.

From creating amazing products and services to delivering unrivaled customer experience, small business owners know how to thrive in their community.

There is however, one downfall of some business owners in my experience.

They fail to recognize the importance of online marketing for their small business.

This simple oversight can be the difference between hundreds or thousands of visitors coming to their store and website each week.

By missing out on the opportunity to capitalize on online opportunities, their online and offline business is suffering.

One of the biggest lessons I learned early in business was to consider the lifetime value of customers and not look at customers as a one time only deal.

This may sound obvious, but by failing to deliver an effective online marketing experience, you could be slicing your customer lifetime value down by thousands of dollars.

So how do you find ways to promote your business online with no real knowledge of marketing strategies for small business?Follow our 27-day small business marketing plan to help build your business presence online.

This simple 27-day process can then be developed to take your business to the next level – helping to generate thousands of dollars worth of extra business, month after month after month.

Days 1-7: Getting Started

The chances are you have dabbled in bits of online marketing.

Perhaps you have tried to implement a Facebook Ad campaign?

Maybe you have spent some hard earned money learning how to master Google Adwords?

While these are all effective marketing tools for businesses, they can be costly and are not always simple to implement.

And that brings us to this point… simplicity is often the key to success when implementing an online marketing plan for your small business.

Create Your Online Space

Many small business owners neglect their online space as they see it as an unnecessary cost or an indulgence.

This is simply not the case.

Recommended for You Webcast, August 17th: The Secrets of Deep Networking

In fact, a company website, LinkedIn profile, Facebook page, or Twitter profile will create an online space for customers to interact with your brand, share their stories and ultimately share your business with their friends – thus doing the marketing for you.

For the first seven days of this plan you need to spend it bringing your website up to par with your competition.

Focus on creating the same online experience as you would provide offline – an amazing one.

Once you have your website up and running you should focus on one or two social media profiles.

Consider what is best for your brand.

LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest are some of the main options to consider, but all have slightly different benefits.

Make sure you link your social profiles back to your website and brand them in the style of your business.

Spend this time following local people, interacting with them and other small businesses and get your online name out there.

Day 7-14: Create Something Meaningful

Content marketing is a buzzword that many people have caught on to – and there is a reason for this – it is relevant and effective.

You should spend week 2 creating great content that your customers will value.

You might even enjoy writing.

If not, you can always hire a content writer to help you out.

A little tip is to make several articles of content relevant to your area – Google loves content that makes it obvious where it applies to – so help Google out by discussing your local area or expertise.

When you are creating this content though, always keep the end user in mind.

If you don’t think your customers will enjoy reading it, then don’t write it.

Create engaging content and then promote it on your social media channels – hopefully others will then share it for you and you will see the beauty of internet marketing emerge.

Grow Your Email List

An email list of previous customers is like pure gold in the hands of a savvy local marketer and is one of the best marketing ideas for small business.

If you are looking for ways to promote your business, then you will be hard pressed for something more effective than a highly targeted and engaged email list.

The key to growing your list is simple – remember simple is the key.

You can give your customers something they will value in exchange for their email address.

Perhaps an ebook, checklist, or coupon.

Remember – lifetime value is key so offering 20% off is nothing in the grand scheme of your customer life cycle.

Days 14-27: Develop Your Technical SEO and Analytics

When looking at how to market a small business online you must consider search engine optimization (SEO).

Weeks 3 and 4 (and beyond) should be spent mastering simple SEO strategies.

Name, Address, and Phone Number (NAP):

It is key you achieve consistency with these across any business directories you are listed in and on other websites.

These are known as citations and you should spend a day using a tool such as Whitespark or Bright Local to ensure your NAP is as consistent as possible.

Onsite Optimization:

You should spend time to optimize your meta descriptions and title tags.

As long as your city and keywords are not in your domain name, you should try to include these in your meta descriptions and in your meta titles.

One or two occurrences of the keyword and location in your content is also going to help.

Google Analytics and Search Console:

Setting up these tools is a must.

Analytics will provide you with all the data you need to assess how your website is performing with visitors and Search Console also features options to look at data but also allows you to give Google some information about your site.

The ‘fetch’ tool in Google Search Console is useful to help with indexing your web pages on newer sites too.

Rinse and Repeat

Following the steps above is a great way to start online marketing for your local business.

As your social profiles and web presence grow, so will the interaction.

If you are getting great feedback then leverage the social proof by displaying it on your website, or even print it and display at your premises.

The online building of your business will reap massive dividends so just continue to work through the steps in this guide and watch your business grow by leaps and bounds.

SEOs Don't Need a Replacement for Google PageRank

We know Google has officially shut down toolbar PageRank. The PageRank algorithm, written by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, is still part of Google’s core algorithm, but you’d think the world was ending with the way SEOs are scrambling without toolbar PageRank. SEOs are searching for a replacement and my question to them is, why?

The last update to the toolbar PageRank was in December 2013 and even then it was a mistake. PageRank was never even added to Chrome, Google’s own browser. Google already removed PageRank from Webmaster Tools back in 2009. Even prior to that, in 2008, Udi Manber, Google’s VP of Engineering at the time, wrote:

The most famous part of our ranking algorithm is PageRank, an algorithm developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who founded Google. PageRank is still in use today, but it is now a part of a much larger system.

With Google becoming more and more complex, it’s safe to assume you can never rely on just one metric. Other parts of this larger system are likely to include signals related to brands, topical relevance, location of links on a page, credibility, topical coverage, context, searcher intent, and more. Several of these items are covered in updated patents such as this one.

With all of this evidence, and even Google telling us not to focus on PageRank, why are SEOs so obsessed? Simply, the idea of PageRank was easy to show as a metric to businesses and became ingrained in the minds of business owners. Even though PageRank could be spoofed and manipulated, and even though spam could easily have a high PageRank without being quality or relevant, the metric took hold because it was an easy, simple rank of zero through 10 that could be improved.

PageRank has been a common metric used in the buying and selling of domains and was one of the most used metrics in the buying and selling of links. I’ve personally received a few dozen emails trying to sell me high PR links since Google killed off toolbar PageRank, which amuses me greatly.

What are PageRank Alternatives?

While Moz is known more for Domain Authority and Page Authority, they also have MozTrust and MozRank with the latter being similar to PageRank. Moz doesn’t prominently feature MozRank because it’s likely not the most accurate measure of the strength of a website.

Ahrefs used to have AR but has replaced this with Domain Rating and URL Rating metrics.

Majestic used to have ACRank but has replaced this with Trust Flow, Citation Flow, and even Topical Trust Flow metrics.

I want you to notice a common trend here. Even the companies that had measures similar to PageRank don’t make the numbers prominent or have phased them out in favor of better overall metrics. Each of these companies have their own crawlers and limitations (see differences, for instance, in referring domain). They likely use metrics for calculations that are similar to, but not the same as, those Google uses.

You can always use one or more of the metrics from these companies, just know that you don’t have a complete picture of the landscape. The metrics need to be used as a guide, not as gospel.

Stop Trying to Replace PageRank

A better metric to look at—without looking at a ton of different metrics—to judge the authority of a website might be overall site traffic. There are many tools that can do this including, Alexa, Compete, Quantcast, SimilarWeb, SEMrush, and Ahrefs. You’ll find a wide variety of numbers here as well, with SEJ showing everything from 54.4K visitors a month on SEMrush to 1.4M visitors a month on SimilarWeb.

I spot checked a few sites I have access to and, in most cases, Ahrefs seems to be the most accurate. However, this wasn’t the most well-structured test so I encourage you to check your own website. For SEJ, Ahrefs shows 125K visitors a month from organic. I would say again, take each with a grain of salt and maybe use them to compare yourself vs. competitors on each of the platforms while knowing the data is not 100% accurate.

In Conclusion

Consider PageRank only one part of the bigger picture and start looking at other signals. If you are going to do a comparison using existing metrics, then compare apples to apples. Use the metrics as a guide but not an absolute truth. Use them to inform, but not make, your decisions.

5 Reasons Why SEO Has a Bad Reputation

Search engine optimization has something of a bad reputation, in part, because it is sometimes associated with unethical, black hat practices. Thus, some of the most popular searches on Google are unflattering.

If you start to type “seo is” into Google, the king of search engines is likely to autosuggest that “seo is dead” or that “seo is bullsh**,” leaving you to wonder how one of the most prominent forms of online marketing has, apparently, earned a bad reputation.

Search engine optimization, at its most pure, is the act of ensuring search engine spiders (bots) can find a web page, discover the page’s purpose or meaning, and catalog (index) the page’s content for future reference. It focuses on users first, organizing pages so that they are easy for people to read and understand, knowing that when a page is well organized for a person, a search engine can understand it too.

The idea is that if a search engine can know what a page has to offer, it can show that page in response to a relevant search query.

Any business owner or manager who wants to attract new customers can understand the value of optimizing for search and any developer who has ever written a search bot understands how much easier it is to scrape a well-structured page.

So what’s gone wrong for SEO?

1. Unscrupulous, Unsolicited SEO Emails

Many pitches from self-proclaimed SEO experts are, in fact, unscrupulous, deceptive, and fraudulent. Here is an example. It is similar to a couple dozen that arrive in my email each week.

Dear Team,

Hope you are doing well.

My name is Arnold Kross, SEO expert of a Leading SEO service provider company. As per my analysis, your website is not performing well in the Google organic search as well as your traffic / visitor is poor from the last couple of months due to some of the reasons.

You might know about the frequent Google updates and as per the latest update, Google has completely dropped all authorship functionality from the search results and webmaster tools. So be careful with it and take the help of an SEO company to fix it.

The irony here is that Arnold Kross, which we suppose is a pseudonym, is sending email spam, but the reader is likely to blame the SEO industry.

Finding: The notion that only an SEO company can “fix” problems is is a misconception, but it may still be hurting SEO’s reputation. Crooks will be crooks.

2. Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is the practice of repeating keywords on a page in an attempt to manipulate search engine results. Here is an example, directly from Google’s search console (emphasis added).

We sell custom cigar humidors. Our custom cigar humidors are handmade. If you’re thinking of buying a custom cigar humidor, please contact our custom cigar humidor specialists at custom.cigar.humidors@example.com.

Closely related to the myth of keyword density, keyword stuffing was once a common SEO practice. It is no longer effective and, now, is likely to get your website penalized.

Most legitimate SEO practitioners discourage keyword stuffing and discussions of keyword density, but it still happens. In fact, a quick Twitter search on June 16, 2016 discovered a post from Justina Logozzo, search engine marketing manager at KoMarketing, a B2B marketing firm, “Just had to correct my Grad Professor when he told the class that keyword stuffing was good SEO.”

Justina Logozzo’s tweet from June 16 shows that keyword stuffing is still taught.

Finding: Keyword stuffing was a common SEO practice. It has mostly stopped because search engines are combatting it.

3. Buying or Trading Links

Some SEO practitioners or website owners will buy links with the intent of manipulating search engine rankings. This is different than buying an advertisement, which should be clearly identified as a promotion and include a nofollow link. Rather, paid or traded links are specifically aimed at generating fake page authority and tricking search engines.

The practice is deceptive at its core, since a person reading the source page and the search engine bot indexing it do not understand that there is a material relationship between the two sites.

Google, Bing, and, presumably, all legitimate search engines will penalize a site for paid or traded links, so experts now discourage the practice.

“We no longer recommend paid links, link ads, like buying or selling to any of our active clients,” wrote Rand Fishkin of Moz in a September 2009 post.

Finding: The SEO industry is turning away from paid links because of the consequences, not the ethics — thus the impact on reputation.

4. Doorway Pages and Cloaking

Good SEO should provide content and features for people first, then structure that content in a way that spiders from Google, Bing, and the like can understand.

Doorway pages and cloaking are the antitheses of good SEO.

A doorway page is an HTML page loaded with content and keywords intended to rank the page for one topic. When a search spider visits, the page shows this content, hoping to get indexed and ranked. But when a person visits the page, it redirects them a different, possibly, unrelated website. Search engines see much different content than humans do.

The doorway pages’ purpose is to funnel traffic. It depends on tricking search engines, and it can be very bad for the folks searching Google. It is a web page created specifically for search engines and never intended for people. It doesn’t want to be read. It just wants to trick you.

Google addressed doorway pages as recently as March of 2015.

Cloaking is similar. The search engine’s spider is shown different content than what a user — a person — would see. Doorway pages use a meta refresh or a bit of JavaScript to redirect the user, while cloaking is likely to use the server to show different content. In 2011, Matt Cutts, the former head of web spam at Google, posted a video describing cloaking.

Finding: Doorway pages and cloaking are common, albeit black hat, SEO practices. Any SEO practitioner using doorway pages or cloaking deserves a bad reputation.

5. Hidden Text or Links

Hiding text or links on a page are sort of like cloaking, but less sophisticated. The idea is, again, to show search engine spiders different content than a user sees.

Google describes, in its Search Console, five ways folks try to hide text or links.

Using white text on a white background.

Locating text behind an image.

Using CSS to position text off-screen.

Setting the font size to 0.

Hiding a link by only linking one small character — for example, a hyphen in the middle of a paragraph.

Finding: While this almost certainly is not an SEO technique that reputable SEO firms or practitioners would recommend, it is still associated with SEO and may be impacting the industry’s reputation.

SEO for Your Business 

In spite of its reputation, white hat SEO does still matter. The bottom line lesson is nothing new: simply focus on customers first.

It turns out that SEO has something of a bad reputation because it has been associated with some bad, unethical, and deceptive practices. Industry practitioners recognize this and have developed three terms to categorize SEO practices.

White hat SEO. Focuses on the human audience first and applies optimization techniques that provide a better user experience while also organizing information in a way that search engines can easily comprehend. The key here is people first.

Gray hat SEO. Employs “legal” SEO techniques that might not be what’s best for human users. For example, even before search engines penalized folks for paid links, it was still unethical.

Black hat SEO. Uses techniques focused on search engines, not people. The intent is to trick or manipulate search engine spiders.

For your business, use white hat SEO only. Search engine optimization should be a part of your marketing mix, and it works best when you focus on your customers and prospects.

How Do Content Marketing & Inbound Marketing Fit in to SEO?

Content marketing and inbound marketing are not separate from SEO at all. Content marketing has become an integral part of today’s SEO.

Its umbrella offers the widest, most effective reach for online visibility and real ROI. And SEO is just one part of what’s under that umbrella: the fragment of “optimizing for search,” which is the meaning of SEO by itself.

Content Marketing vs. SEO: One and the Same?

Businesses simply can’t ignore the big picture of content and inbound marketing, with SEO as a part of the whole, if they want an effective online presence today.

Yes, you should be optimizing your content for Google if you want Google to find your content. But, it’s not just about keywords–or SEO as a single concept–anymore. For all marketers, content marketing should be the focus of their investment for online exposure that will provide real results.

So how and why has SEO become an integrated part of content and inbound marketing, as a whole? Let’s delve in.

Reason #1: The Big Picture

The best way to start discovering how SEO is an integrated piece of the overall puzzle of content and inbound marketing is to actually look at the definitions of these three things (content marketing, inbound marketing, and SEO).

Hubspot: “Inbound marketing is about creating and sharing content with the world. By creating content specifically designed to appeal to your dream customers, inbound attracts qualified prospects to your business and keeps them coming back for more.”

Search Engine Land: “SEO stands for ‘search engine optimization.’ It is the process of getting traffic from the ‘free,’ ‘organic,’ ‘editorial’ or ‘natural’ search results on search engines.”

Content Marketing Institute: “Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

Content marketing and inbound marketing are synonymous: they include the approach of creating the best content tailored to your audience, consistently, which then drives ROI and brings customers from your audience.

SEO is the process of getting traffic from Google.

Reason #2: Optimize for More Channels

Here’s a simple fact: your readers aren’t just coming in from Google anymore. With the rise of more social platforms, content types and channels, and the growth of existing social platforms, you can’t afford to overlook your presence there. Here are some other channels besides Google where you could be earning qualified targeted, conversion-oriented traffic:

Email

Referral

Social media

Direct

Sponsored ads

Live video platforms (Periscope, Blab, etc.)

Even Matt Cutts said it: “Don’t just rely on Google anymore: rely on a wide variety of avenues where you can reach people that will want to know about you.”

Reason #3: The Mindset Shift

Let’s go back in time to see how content and inbound marketing has become the new mindset of SEO.

Pre-2011, when I started out in online marketing as a freelance copywriter, there was a totally different mindset about SEO. Consumers who wanted a web presence would just fork over money to SEO guys for results. It was an industry that very often gamed Google.

Their tactics included dark link schemes, mass forum posting, comment back linking, multiple interlinking domains, and having content written stuffed with keywords. It was all about how to one-up Google.

Things drastically changed after Google Panda came out (the Panda/Farmer update in late February of 2011). That’s when Google started looking at content from a truly human perspective. I saw marketers completely change how they approached Google. Stuffing keywords throughout every page of copy was no more. Recycling duplicate copy from someone else’s site was now a huge no-no. And no one used the keyword density formula any longer. Marketers started investing in content that would match up to and interest their target audience. Content marketing began happening.

And since then, Google has continued to get smarter and smarter. Today, they use real people to evaluate websites. Their Search Evaluator Quality Guidelines, a 145-page document explaining what their human reviewers look for in websites Google subsequently ranks well, was released in November 2015. The acronyms notated there, E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) and Y-M-Y-L (Your Money or Your Life), are guidelines on what Google looks for in solid web content, and great foundations to go by for us creators.

This mindset shift has been tremendous in creating a better web for all of us.

A low-quality web became a high-quality web simply because Google shifted towards what works best for their users, the real people on mobile or desktop doing quick searches to find results to give them the best answers to their problems. They needed to access solid information quickly. What was the best pizza store nearby, or what guide offered the most insightful advice on how to promote their latest blog post?

Algorithm gaming isn’t the way to go today, creating real content that matters is.

SEO as a Part of the Content Creator’s Strategy

Since Google looks at content from the user’s perspective today, you can’t go wrong if you go by this one guideline for creating great content: Write engaging content your target readers will be most interested in. Google will appreciate it too.

So, creating content, from blogs to web pages and videos, should be centric to what your audience wants and needs if you want to do well in the SERPs. And if the usefulness, engagement, and quality factor is truly there, Google will appreciate and love it, too.

However, optimizing your content with your best keywords, discovering and researching what keywords offer the best opportunities, and publishing well-optimized content is in your best interests. Google certainly appreciates websites that publish content that is easy to read and optimized correctly: it saves their crawling time and shows up effectively, ready to rank immediately.

Let’s talk about two key fundamentals that will help you optimize your online content for SEO. 

Two SEO Practices You Should be Using Consistently to Publish Rank-Worthy Online Content

Here are two key basic SEO skills you should be consistently doing to optimize your online content.

1. Perform Keyword Research

Tools are a must if you want to find your best keyword opportunities. I like SEMrush for powerful overall keyword research, and KWFinder for hardcore niche-ing down to find your long-tail keywords.

Once you have the tools, how do you select the best keywords? Let’s explore briefly.

How to do your best keyword research:

Look for low competition numbers (easy wins), a presence in CPC (that values your keyword at what the going bid for it is in the Adwords area, $0 usually means a non-valuable keyword), and relevancy in the key term itself to what you offer as a service or product.

Think long tail in terms of keywords. They are usually more relevant and can bring in more visitors with buying intent.

Traffic amount metrics matter last when evaluating your best keywords. Why? Well, if you have a high traffic keyword, but it’s not relevant enough, or you have very little opportunity with it at a high competition, you’re probably going nowhere. So it’s better to have 140 people potentially visiting you per month than 5,000 if the keyword with 140 searches has a legitimate opportunity (it matches your service in relevancy, and it offers low competition in ranking opportunity).

2. Optimize Every Piece of Web Content

Never, ever let a blog post or web page go un-optimized. (One of my biggest online pet peeves.) That typically means leaving the “Yoast” section of your post blank—the most commonly used SEO plugin for WordPress sites.

Here’s a rundown of key areas you’ll need to optimize for a post you’re publishing (my visual above shows these areas in the Yoast plugin):

Your focus keyword: This is the key term of your post. Tip: Don’t force it; pick one that’s relevant.

Your meta title: Make this slightly different from your post title itself. Making it unique means you add a boost of additional content power to the optimization.

Your meta description: These are 160 characters (roughly 20-30 words) long. You want to stay within the just-right length on this—Yoast will turn green when you’ve hit it. Don’t be too long, and don’t be too short.

Your URL for the page: Ideally, this should be a) short and succinct and b) include the focus keyword.

These are the two consistent practices you should be doing for ongoing content publication that meets Google’s standards. There are more things you should be doing for your overall presence, especially if you’re launching a new site or need to update current sites.

Here are a few resources to look at:

How to do a content audit (effective for ongoing, up-to-date SEO optimization of your entire site)

Moz’s on-page ranking factors discuss how to do links in your content and overall SEO best practices

Benefits of Having a Set Content Marketing Strategy: My Content Success Story

76% of marketers say they’ll produce more content in 2016: yet only 42% of marketers say their content marketing is effective. And even worse: only 32% of marketers have a documented content strategy. (Stats: CMI)

In a world where customers are flooded by content, having a documented content strategy can spell the difference between making content that converts and counts, or disappearing into the online abyss of “just like everything else.”

Don’t be the one left behind in the pile of 68 percent of marketers who don’t know how to do effective content marketing. Be the smart marketer: have a set content marketing strategy in place where you can succeed.

The benefits of a set content marketing strategy are huge. Content marketing has long been argued as one of the best long-term winning strategies for online presence today. I wholeheartedly agree.

The best evidence I can present is how it’s actually worked for me and my copywriting agency startup. I’ve been 100% personally invested, with no outside investors for my business’ lifetime (and we’re working in an industry where competitors have millions in outside funding).

Content marketing is the fuel of how I exist.

Here’s a brief rundown of how I grew my online presence 100% through content marketing:

Blogging on my site: Since 2011, I’ve published over 700 blogs on the Write Blog, at the rate of three per week consistently. We’ve seen some of them convert tremendously because of the presence many of these blog posts have now achieved in Google. It’s taken a lot of a) hard work and b) patience. We vary our content with infographics, gifographics, and long-form blog posts, and have even hired a custom artist to draw illustrations for some of our blogs. And the rankings have taken time. It took over eight months for us to hit #1 for “what does a copywriter do” in Google with our infographic on that keyword, posted as a blog. 94-95% of our conversions, income, and entire company clientele base is built off of the leads and traffic that come in from Google.

Guest blogs: I see real ROI happen off many of the guest blogs I’ve published. For example, last year I saw a $5000 client walk in from a guest blog I published on SiteProNews. He was so impressed with my current, up-to-date knowledge in SEO and content marketing showcased in the guest piece, that he hired my writing team on the spot to do all his online content. He was already convinced when he walked in, and needed very little convincing to sell (a few minutes in a phone call was all it took).

Podcast: I created a podcast with bi-weekly, 30-minute episodes of audio content, myself hosting and a guest speaker with a few solo episodes. I posted these and 6,000+ word transcriptions on my site. I hit New & Noteworthy in iTunes soon after launch and saw a 10-15% jump in overall monthly traffic to expresswriters.com.

Twitter chat: I created a weekly Twitter chat, #ContentWritingChat this January, announcing to my email list (blog subscribers and clients) that it was coming out. I hired a social media manager to help me run it, schedule guests, and create questions/answers and a blog recap of the weekly live chat. Inside just six months we hit the trending sidebar on Twitter and were the #11th most talked about hashtag on Twitter during its live hour.

Published book: I self-published a book on Amazon this April, without an ounce of advertisement money and solely reliant on my existing audience built through content marketing. I had a list that I groomed for a year: I worked on the book for more than 12 months and talked about it online in my groups the whole time, building anticipation. Without a publishing firm to help me, I sold over 100 copies in the first month, and it continues to sell on its own at two to three copies per day. It hit bestseller on Amazon the second day after launching and has stayed in the #3-#4 spot in its category since launch.

The Verdict? SEO and Content Marketing Go Together

Content marketing is your best route for online marketing that works: there’s no other way to put it. And SEO is just a part that makes it a whole.

Whether you’re looking for more conversions, reputation building, brand faith, revenue streams, or low-cost advertising that will outperform traditional advertising methods: if you work within the right parameters, content marketing is your key to online success.

I believe it, and have seen inbound and content marketing work so effectively for me that it has become the primary channel of my entire business. And, I’ve seen an audience (like my Twitter chat) sprout up out of nowhere, all because I simply created a topic and conversation that was needed in the internet universe.

If you go the route of content marketing, just don’t go at it superficially.

Put a whole-hearted passion into it, bring in your expertise, focus on solving a real need, and stay consistent in what you create online: and you’ll come out on top.