By Aaron Agius
There was a time when marketers used blogging as a way to manipulate search engines and artificially inflate rankings. By churning out subpar content and accumulating dubiously sourced backlinks, you could make your site more visible than your competitors—regardless of whether or not this visibility was warranted.
Fortunately, Google has been clamping down on SERP gamesmanship in recent years and is now only rewarding sites that put out high-quality content. If your articles don’t genuinely help and educate people, don’t expect to use blog writing as a way to successfully market your business. It’s impossible to be effective with blogging if you don’t have a genuine desire to help people.
When I read my favorite blogs, I can get lost for hours in the content. When articles are written with the intention of helping and educating, I’m left with a warm impression of the brand and this often leads to a financial transaction somewhere down the road.
Here are three examples of businesses that prioritize blogging, yet still make a great profit:
Quick Sprout
As a successful entrepreneur and investor, Neil Patel was already making a great living before he founded Quick Sprout. Ironically, he set up his blog to impart his marketing knowledge rather than to make money—yet this endeavor proved to be extremely lucrative too.
Neil’s primary method for monetizing Quick Sprout is to generate leads for his SEO consulting business. Because Neil charges premium rates for consulting, his services aren’t accessible to the average Quick Sprout reader. However, because Neil’s articles are incredibly actionable and help both solopreneurs and multinational corporations, his content gets shared far and wide. This results in massive brand exposure and instead of having to pitch to high-end clients that Neil likes to work with, they find him first.
Neil explains his client acquisition strategy succinctly: “A lot of my best customers come from my blog. They’re reading a blog post, like: ‘This guy seems smart. Let’s hire him!’”
The lesson here is if you relentlessly publish and promote high-value content that changes people’s lives for the better, customers will come out of the woodwork looking to hire you. And because of Neil’s status as a marketing expert, huge brands like AirBnB and Intuit seek him out and hire him.
RELATED: Blogging: If I Knew Then What I Know Now
Smashing Magazine
Smashing Magazine exemplifies the ethos of educate first, monetize second.
Designers and web developers can browse Smashing Magazine’s free content for hours and gain plenty of actionable insights. In addition to technical tips, there are plenty of articles which pertain to winning jobs and marketing yourself, which is an under-discussed element of this industry.
Because designers and web developers view this magazine as a source of high-quality educational content, they’re happy to opt into the mailing list and check back whenever new articles are posted.
Since Smashing Magazine has a precisely defined core reader (designers and developers), it’s easy for it to offer products that this audience will resonate with. The pain points are common, as are the ambitions, goals, and values.
The business offers educational books, e-books, and tutorials on a range of subjects like sketching, illustrating and front end development. Smashing Magazine’s other monetization strategies include a job board for designers and third-party banner advertisements.
Steve Pavlina
I’m hesitant to mention personal development blogger Steve Pavlina in this article since he’s so disdainful about branding. However, whether he likes it or not, Steve has created a personal brand with his writing that represents conscious growth, authenticity, strength, love, and self-awareness.
Steve implores people to communicate authentically and avoid smoothing out their rough edges. He states: “Even if we only connect via the internet, I want to maintain a human-style relationship with you, not one that involves fake corporate branding and a sanitized approval seeking message.”
This ethos is firmly conveyed through his content. Steve doesn’t mind risking rejection in order to get his point across.
While some may label his articles as controversial, he’s merely expressing his views authentically when he criticizes factory farming, organized religion, and traditional career paths. These kind of articles rub some people the wrong way, but they resonate significantly with others. His willingness to take a stand, express himself authentically, and face rejection is exactly why he has such a dedicated readership. If he took a neutral stance and tried to appeal to everyone, his articles wouldn’t have the same power.
As a testament to his integrity, he removed third-party ads from his site because they were creating a cluttered experience for his users, despite the fact they were a lucrative income stream. However, he’s able to make a good living by promoting affiliate products (that he truly believes in), and he’s also started an online membership club for personal growth enthusiasts.
Given that StevePavlina.com is well past 100 million visits, he only needs a small percentage of his readership to convert into paying customers in order to turn a significant profit. While he admits that his site is under-monetized, he’s not willing to sacrifice user experience for some extra cash, which is commendable.
RELATED: 7 Tips for Starting a Company Blog That Brings Results
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