5 Ways to Get Traffic to Your Blog

Go Blogwild Series 001 – 5 Ways to Get Traffic to Your Blog (v0.91)

Go Blogwild Series 001

Intro

Andy Wibbels: This is our first of our series of calls to help do some outreach for my upcoming book Blogwild! A Guide for Small Business Blogging. This is a globe blog series tonight we’ve got Yvonne Divita. Say hi Yvonne.

Andy: From Lipsticking blog. And Yvonne focuses on marketing to women and also how blogs can be inserted into that mix. Yvonne thank you so much for joining us tonight.

Yvonne: Andy it’s my pleasure. I don’t often get to talk about such interesting subject. I often talk about marketing to women who shop online by the way. I focus on the online internet world. I really like talking about blogs.

Andy: Ok. So, something that we’ve talked about for topic for our call tonight, is something that everybody emails me everyday about is : Getting traffic to your blog. I’ve got a guy emailed me 3 days ago, and he emailed me and said “How can I get hundreds of hits to my blog to buy my e-book for free?” He wanted to know basically how he can get tons of traffic for free. And I’m well like oh, it doesn’t really just happens.

Yvonne: Exactly! Isn’t it interesting? I hear the same thing quite a bit. And it goes hand in hand with another question that I hear a lot of. When I talk to people about blog, especially small business owners, they’ll say how can anyone find me? How does? How does the general public find a blog?

Yvonne: You and I both know that silly, they find you they same way they find anything else. And probably don’t even realize that they’re at a blog. But I wrote down five (5) things that I think are very easy to do and can help people pull in traffic to their blog. Because we both know that blogs are pull marketing, right?

Yvonne: So, let me go one by one and just give you a round about idea on how to do these. I could write a whole book on these and I’m sure you could also.

Yvonne: Exactly, and I can’t wait for it now, we’re going to talk about it on Lipsticking.

#1. Have a Focus

Yvonne: Number 1. First of all if you have a blog that you’ve expect other people to come to. You must have a focus. You can’t ramble. What I do on my blog is focus on women who shop online. And that in another topic is a fairly big topic. So I said to myself way back in the early days of my blog, “how can I make life it easy?” “How can I write something everyday?” And I’m not saying you have to write everyday, you ought to write 2 to 3x a week. But I was writing everyday and I wanted to make life easy.

Create a Topic Calendar

So, the first thing I did was fall back on my writing experience and develop an editorial focus. I said on Mondays I’m going to write about these. On Tuesdays I’m going to have something called about a “fit by five”. On Wednesdays I’m going to try record “I have” live. On Thursday I’m going to interview someone. And then Fridays I’m going to invite other bloggers to come in and talk.

Andy: Great ideas. So that way you know on Sunday night what you’re going to be writing about each day of the week.

Andy: That’s such a good idea. It takes so much pressure off when you know that you only have either 1 type of thing to write about or 1 source of things to look out.

Yvonne: It also, really gives your readers a focus and they know what I know if I go to Lipsticking on Tuesday Yvonne is going to have the “fit by five.” It might be five pieces of advice, on how to get women to buy from you. It might be 5 jokes I found that I thought were funny and you can use on your website or blog. But it would be 5 pieces of advice that deal with marketing to women. And now of course people know that on Thursdays I normally do interview. And those are high traffic days for me, because people like them.

Andy: Great. So people could use that either you and do what you’re doing where it’s not just a topic but also sort of medium where you can make, Thursday is the day that I do a list. Wednesday is the day that I grab something that had nothing to do with my field and try and see what we can learn from it.

Yvonne: Absolutely, and that’s the reason I say focus. I use an editorial calendar the way a magazine would use one and I develop a focus. And I tried to relate just what I’ve write everything to marketing to woman. So when you have a focus, and you look at it as if it were a magazine or newspaper then you know that you’re going to have certain topics you write about all the time. It just helps.

Andy: Yeah, I think the focus. Just starting with the focus, its so key for a blog’s success. And I think because there are so many personal blogs that have such varied interest often times the first blog that business people read are personal blogs which often don’t have a really tight focus or tight niche. A kind of transition to make so and to say, this is for business so I should probably hone down sharpen what my topic areas going to be.

Yvonne: Yes, and here’s an interesting thing. When you’re writing a business blog and I don’t know how many people about this, but it kind came home to me in the last few months. When you are writing a business blog, often other business people, are the people you want to come in and read your blog and what I’ve discovered in the last 6 months is the home-based business owner. The home based business owner is often writing a blog as you described which is a journal. But they have a business blog either folded in or separately. And I’ve discovered that I get a lot more traffic when I appeal to those people.

Yvonne: Yeah, people with a personal blog we often call the mommy bloggers or daddy bloggers. To be honest with you one of the interviews I did not too long ago with a daddy blogger brought in more traffic and more attention than anything that I ever done.

Exactly. I said wait a minute what am I missing here. And then I realized, the mommy bloggers and the daddy bloggers are the people that buy all the things that everybody else talks about.

Andy: Right. And if you have both a personal and professional blog you will be surprised at what a crossover is. I was at a conference and some one says, “Oh, yeah, I read your blog”, and the person next to her said “Oh, you should read the personal one, wow, that’s crazy!” You never know what the crossover is going to be, if a client and prospect are going to read the professional as well as personal or not, so, it does a present a fuller picture of you as a person which if you’re a home-based business person or an entrepreneur or consultant that’s so important to have that facing to a prospect.

Yvonne: Well, let’s remember that blog is a personal voice. There you go, you can have a business focus and both but that personal voice really is why people come back.

Andy: Right. There was the guy on Boing Boing, I think had written a post about Amazon adding blogs to their bookstore where you can read an author’s blog post next to their book sales page with that particular book. And he was talking about that’s really bringing the idea of charisma back into marketing which has been so central to artist, for musicians and writers and artist in general, but that’s also filtering back in a business that people are tired of this - a brand that they can’t touch but it’s the idea of charisma that the blog can really communicate to people.

Yvonne: Absolutely. And I think we’re seeing it in some of the big companies that are blogging. We are see it with Robert Scoble from Microsoft and we see with Sun Microsystems. And we see it in across the blogosphere. Recently I went to a conference, I don’t know if you were aware of this Andy, but I was invited to blog at the Innovation Forum for Fortune Magazine!

Yvonne: Well, that all came about because they found my blog. They have discovered that I was writing about women. They probably have the fact that I have a number of women coming in as speakers and they have contacted me and asked me if I would be interested and writing something about it on my blog. I said sure. And I interviewed one of the women at Fortune and then they have invited me to come as guest blog. Well, that happened precisely because my blog is frankly open, it reaches out to the people. It’s a business blog but what it does it tries to bring business into the everyday world. And I think blogs in general, do that.

Andy: Right, and just for folks who want to check Yvonne’s blog, [it is at www.lipsticking.com.] And so what’s number 2?

#2. Visit and Comment on Other Blogs

Yvonne: Number 2. Visit and comment on other blogs. Doesn’t that say pretty self explanatory but you know people don’t do it.

Andy: I knew a guy who was into real estate or something, mortgage something and said “I made a blog but nothing happened.” I said well, “did you post?” “Yeah post six times.” And he thought he was done, and I said, “well…not really!”

Yvonne: You know Andy, I’m sure you deal with the same thing. We train people and teach people do blogs. And we teach them how to actually make it work for them. And one of the first thing we say is: Here are lists of blogs that are relevant to you. That’s one of the things we offer to people, when we teach them to build blog, is we offer them a piece of our network.

Yvonne: If we don’t have a network or a group of blog that are relevant to them we’ll go find some. And we say to them, now you have to communicate with these people because if you don’t fill a community your blog is not going to get attention. You need to connect with people, you need to show them that you’ve been there by commenting on something and it has to be something a relevant comment. You can’t just go and say “Jesus was nice” or “I agree”—you have to say something.

Andy: You’re right, yeah. You can’t do “Atta-boy! Hey that’s really cool! Here’s my url.”

Yvonne: Because intelligent bloggers are going to look at that and say “Is that spam? What should I do with that comment?” But anyway, yes, visit and comment on other blogs. It’s like my partner and fiancé Tom likes to tell people, if you go to a networking event and stand in a corner, what do you accomplish? You have to actually circulate, talk to people, shake hands and exchange business cards. That’s how easy it is.

Andy: And with blogging you don’t even have to touch people you know. It’s built for agoraphobics!

Yvonne: Right, you don’t have to leave the house. But what I really like about the blog seriously is I’ve met a lot of people without ever living my house than I ever thought I would. And that’s number 2.

#3. Join Blog Carnivals

Yvonne: Number 3 is going take some explanations and I hope you can help me with it. Number 3 is join carnivals.

Yvonne: Carnivals, let me see if I can explain it in simple way. Carnivals are – what…I heard someone explained it today and they gave such good description I wished I had written it down. But they’re new, Andy help me out here. One particular blogger hosts a carnival. And carnivals have all sorts of different names. I usually contribute to a business carnival. And what happens is, let say I am the host. Other people, other bloggers would send me a blog link to a particular post that is relevant to the carnival topic or the carnival scene. And I would post them all on my blog and everyone who came in to my blog out of particular day that I did this will see all of these link with my explanations about them and they would have the opportunity to be introduced to all sorts of new people and new blog. And everyone whose link in there is now being introduced to all sorts of people they wouldn’t have met otherwise by being hosted on the other blogger’s blog. Does that makes sense, Andy?

Andy: Yeah, I also talk about it as if it’s a traveling Reader’s Digest. Where everybody submits their best for that week or that month. And whoever host for that week or month writes it all up into a digest form, where it will say here’s Yvonne’s week’s post or here’s Yvonne’s summary, and then each week or each month that Reader Digest is then hosted at a different blog. So you are not just getting - if you are the host a bunch of people coming to your blog and reading everybody else’s stuff but you’re on somebody else’s carnival it’s being hosted elsewhere they are also coming to you from where it’s being hosted. If you Google a Carnival of the Capitalists - is pretty popular one, you’ll see what we are talking about. I’ve included some links on the notes too.

Yvonne: That’s the one I contributed to most often. But there are quite few – and if you just Google blog carnival you will find couple of pages where some kind people have put together links to all different carnivals that are out there. And there are all carnivals on all sources—science, food, medical, joke, etc.

Yvonne: Well, I think that is really a great way to sharp building traffic to your blog.

Andy: Oh, yeah definitely. Alright, let’s open for some quick questions. If you’ve just join the call we’ve been talking to Yvonne Divita of lipsticking blog and we’ve covered 3 out of 5, I don’t want to say pillars of blogging, but traffic tips.

Caller: Hi Andy, this is Lea. And Yvonne. This whole blog carnival thing is a new idea. Do you just send somebody an email say I’d like to be part of the carnival. Is there sort of carnival etiquette to follow?

Andy: Usually there’s a submit form where it will say you know this is a weekly or this is a monthly carnival—here’s the topic, and then you put in your name, email address and then the link you to that particular post that you want to highlight.

Yvonne: Well, yeah. The Carnival of the Capitalists is the easiest one. But like I said if you Google “blog carnival” I know that right there on the first page, there are a couple of places where they list the carnival and the people who support the carnival are very nice about having their right forms to fill out. And one of the really great things is they usually also have a list of the upcoming hosts. So you can see for the next 6 months sometime where the blog carnival is going to be hosted. That gives you the opportunity to put it in your calendar so you know you want to send them something.

Caller: Andy? Oh good. This is Marcia. How do you become the host to carnival?

Andy: Right. Usually you just email the organizer. And say you know I want to be on the host list. And if you have a certain date you want to shoot for you certainly suggest it under that time. Yvonne?

Yvonne: Yes. They make it very easy. The email or contact information is always available. Again the list is there. If there is a break in the list that’s an opportunity for you to be a host, you know, something that you want to look into as far as the focus your blog is going and what you’re doing. And sometimes I try to participate in more than 1 carnival per week. But it’s not easy because you have to go back and look at what you’ve been posting about and see if it’s relevant. It doesn’t do you or anybody any good if you send an irrelevant post with content that has nothing to do with the carnival topic. So just be aware of that.

Using a Separate Email Address for Comments

Caller: Hi Andy, Yvonne. This is Maryam. I’m wondering is do all blogs on all platforms protect your email address. And if not, do you recommend commenting with a perhaps pre-email account or something like that?

Yvonne: I don’t know exactly, I’ve never had a problem with that issue. I always put my email. To be honest with you, the issue of whether or not to put an email… in my line of work, my blog brings me business by the way. It brings me business not because I ask for it or I even tell people what I do, but just because in the overall act of blogging and providing good useful content for people, they will email me and we will have a discussion on what I do, what they do, etc. So when I visit other blog, I leave a comment. Someone else who said something about etiquette. And carnival and etiquette and things like that. There is a certain etiquette in it. One of the major tenets is to be polite. So in an effort to be polite you need to leave your email address and URL address but active. I don’t have a problem with that. I’ve never had a problem with it, it doesn’t attract any more spams that I normally get. So I don’t know how to answer that as far as you sound like you are worried leaving your email address and having it end up somewhere you don’t want it to be.

Andy: I will say that not every tool is going to scramble an email address so it should not as visible to email address harvester. The newer tools are doing that, but the older might not or somebody might forget to set something when they install their blog and that can expose email address. I do use an email address just for blog comments so that way I can see if gets a lot of [spam] traffic I can simply turn that off. My rationale is that I have my email address there, that’s not my real email so I can access it. But what most important is that I have my url is there which has my contact form.

Yvonne: So, Andy let me ask you. I wasn’t aware of that anybody was scrambling email address because that’s news to me.

Andy: I don’t know what exactly you call it. But it’s a way to put it the email address in the HTML and its all Javascript, so a search engine or a spammer will not be able to find it. But I’m sure they’re going to hack it soon and figure it out.

#4. Be Provocative

Yvonne: Say something that’s going to attract people. Say something, write about something, get involved in something that people can talk about. That’s how the traffic comes to you. Depending on what your focus is, let’s look at Lipsticking. Lipsticking focuses on marketing to women. I wrote a book. I wrote a book about marketing to women who shop online and I gave it a very provocative title. Do you remember the title, Andy?

Yvonne: That would be it—Dickless Marketing. Ok, I got into more trouble for that that title but really it’s about marketing to Jane instead of Dick. Because Jane does more shopping online. Now, I purposely did it. I did it to get more attention. Guess what, it worked. And that’s the kind of thing that I’m saying if you are going to write a blog that you want to get traffic. You want people to come in and read what your writing—don’t be afraid to be provocative. You don’t have to be rude, you don’t have to be outrageous. You don’t have to go into politics, if that’s not your game. You don’t certainly have to contribute to porn, although, let me tell you when Dickless Marketing came out of, course, everyone thought it has something to do with porn. And of course it doesn’t. And I lived through it to tell the tale. But I still write things that are provocative. That’s why I was invited to the Fortune conference. I specifically said to my blog what is wrong with the people who are organizing conferences today, where are the women speakers. We don’t want to go to conferences as business women when you don’t have women speakers—got me attention. So “Be provocative”.

Andy: And along with being provocative sometimes people sort of freak out that they think that we are saying that scream obscenities. Instead provocative people might also think about being passionate because online you said it’s a cool medium, it’s very cool when you are being on the computer by yourself. If you are being provocative or passionate it’s that warmth that can reach through and touch somebody else across miles, across the world.

Yvonne: Yes and I think you’ll find, you’ll be very surprised just how many passionate people who agree with you will find you and then a whole lot of people who don’t agree with you will find you. Some of them will be very friendly about it and be willing to disagree with you in a nice way, others won’t. And you have to deal with it, there’s nothing wrong with that. I’ve had several go-between- back and forth, between other bloggers. First of all my blog talks in a third person. When I write my blog, I am Jane. Jane says this and I usually use a lot of we and I got a lot complains. I got people writing and say this is not a real blog because you are not a real person. Well, I am a real person. I tell people in my about page who I am. But my focus is in women in general and Jane encompasses that whole thing. I don’t mind, it doesn’t bother me. I’m more than willing to get into a discussion, if it gets out of hand, guess what, it’s my blog I can turn it off.

Andy: And I think that’s a very powerful thing people forget. It’s your blog, you can turn it off, you can erase the comment, you can take the post down.

Yvonne: You can do that. And that’s the other thing. That isn’t one of my 5 focuses. We recently put up rules or etiquette or rules of use, and I really like that statement I can’t remember whose blog I saw it on, but somebody said “this is my blog, I run things if I don’t like what you’re saying I’m going to delete it.”. Basically just explaining the rules for posting and commenting on my blog and I think it works.

#5. Conduct Inteviews

Yvonne: Okay, number 5, sounds easier than it really is. Number 5 is to conduct interviews. I started conducting interviews shortly after I set my blog up. And again I did so because it’s part of my editorial focus. It can be very easy to do and yet ineffective if you don’t ask questions that the readers want to hear the answers to. You can have a very good interview that is chatty but boring, or you can have an interview that is passionate and provocative. So you want to really do a little bit of both. You want to have something that is friendly and you want to be personable. You want to be open to the readers but you want to provide them with information they can use that is relevant to the focus of your blog. And today, I’m sure Andy you would agree. Today doing an interview is easier than ever with things like podcasts.

Andy: Exactly. All the technology is there. If you want record stuff you can use recording tools. If you want to outsource for a transcript, you can have the transcript back in a day and a half. You can podcast it, host it, have a press release. I think interviews are such a big part of content creation, because not only are you adding content to your blog, adding content for your readers but you are also solidifying relationship with a colleague or possible collaborator.

Yvonne: Absolutely, another part of interviews is you can actually ask people that you think are out of reach. And they’ll say sure because you know what, everybody likes to be interviewed. I really can not find any problem whatsoever. I interviewed Guy Kawasaki. And he just started a blog. I have to write him a note, because on my interview he said he was never starting a blog. I think the other thing is to interview people who are knowledgeable and have expertise but may not be as well known as some of the big names. Because I found a lot of people who have unbelievable focus and experience to share in the marketing world, whether marketing to women or just marketing in general. And they were just average people like myself, but they’ve gone out there, they’ve been doing it and they had something that would be useful not only to my readers but to me. So interviews are really a great way to build traffic to your blog. One of the things that happens when you interview another bloggers, is that they usually announce it on their blog. So you get immediate cross traffic. And I will tell you another secret, one of the reason I decided and continued to interview and my interviews have become pretty popular is because a lot of the bloggers that I am connected to they treat my interview like a post. Kind of flattering, but, I looked at it and I think I should do that too. I go to someone else’s blog and say don’t forget to go over Lipsticking today Yvonne has an interview with so and so. It is an easy post. You know it is relevant to your audience why not do it.

Andy: Thank you. Yeah, I think also if people are freaked out about the whole phone thing. You can always do an email interview. Because often if you worry about doing a transcript or if things can get really chatty. Send the person questions or do it in IM over the day just shoot them a question through IM once an hour and so see what they pop back.

Yvonne: And I also think, as far as interviews go. I also let the interviewee write a couple of questions.

Yvonne: They have also come up with something that is really relevant that I did not think of. And a couple of times, I had a couple interviews where they were not comfortable with something I asked them and I did not want to press the issue. And so we took that question out and they replaced it with something else. It’s really a friendly way like to you said to get connected to a lot of sometimes important people but certainly people that can help build traffic to your blog if that is what you would like to get. And then you can turn around and do the same for them.

Review and Conclusion

Andy: We had number 2 – which was to visit and comment on other blogs and participate in what’s going on.

Andy: Three we had the carnivals. And I’ll include some of these in the notes once I post the recording of these.

And number five we have conduct interviews which I think is kind of a secret weapon. Again you are not just making contact but you are also being able to create a relationship to another person that maybe considered that totally out of reach, you can never tell.

Yvonne: And that interview will help move things forward again and again and again. It really helps build traffic down the road. Here is something that I do. When I interview or when I do a carnival. And let’s say when I’m interviewed as I am tonight, I try to get a post up on my blog about it. Sometimes I set the post up the day after because that way the interviewee has posted the interview that is going to happen and the people tune in. And that if I post after the interview has happened, people tune in again. So I like to get that double hit so to speak. I do that with the carnival too because everyone else who is participating in the carnival from what I’ve noticed they all post “oh, the carnival is up today”. And I used to do the same thing. And then I start thinking I’m going to post to the carnival the day after and see how many people I can send back to the carnival host, and that way it just keeps things going.

Andy: Right for example for this interview we are doing right now. I had the initial post, about here’s the topic, here’s the number. And then you did your post, I think a day or so later. And then I should do a reminder post of along with it’s on my ezine that goes out with once a week. And then this will be posted again probably once I get the recording and transcript together. And then probably you’re going to post it to your folks “oh it’s up you can go and get it now.”

Yvonne: And then what happens is some of the people who listen to it or the people that we’ve sent will also post on it. So it builds the conversation and that is exactly what we are trying to do. All of these 5 points build the conversation and if you can build the conversation then you can bring traffic to your blog.

Andy: Fantastic. Let’s take a couple more questions, if you have any questions, go ahead.

Are Blog Directories a Good Source of Traffic?

Caller: You didn’t mention listing and directories. And I’m curious what your take is on that is it helpful to drive traffic or is it just a no-brainer, you need to do it, or don’t bother.

Yvonne: Well, I do actually go out and list myself in a number of directories. But, to be honest with you I didn’t do it in the beginning, I only did it recently and I did it because I had time. Previously I’ve been too busy to worry about the directory. Blogs are so search engine friendly if you write relevant updated content and you have links back and forth to other websites and blogs that you’ll be listed in directories anyway. But for new bloggers, I would recommend that we try to do it for our blog clients and customers. We have a list of directories that we will submit their blogs to so yes, I think directories are good things to be part of.

Andy: And I think one way to think about it is when someone goes to yellow pages or go to a directory. They don’t know anywhere else to look for what they are looking for. Whereas, as if they are going to a blog, your link on somebody else’s blog is going to have more meaning and context than just your blog being found on the directory. So it’s going to be stronger click in to your salescycle or your own blog. So I think it’s useful but there’s a difference between the context of somebody saying “check out Yvonne’s blog” or “Lipsticking - marketing women in the women’s business category.”

Yvonne: Right. And then it’s interesting also, we at my office are always just amazed by the number of times Lipsticking comes off in the Google search on arbitrary term. And the reason that it does is again because I write on a regular basis, I have focus, and my content is relevant to my subject matter. I routinely by the way, say marketing to women on-line in my blog post. I use to do it 2 to 3 times in every blog post because I wanted my blog to come up when people search for marketing to women on-line in Google. Well, I have achieved that now, so I’m not as strict with myself about saying it. But I do try to mention it on a regular basis to remind the readers that is why they came and that is what I’m writing about. And that it is a good way for the search engine to know when someone is searching on marketing to women or women issues or any of the other frequently used key word phrases that I have on my blog, that my blog should be on the first page. And that works a lot better for me than whether or not I am in a directory.

What Blog Platform to Use?

Caller: Hi Yvonne, Andy. This is just great. This is Marcia from Maryland. I have a question. First of all, linking your blog to website is a good idea to have it on your website and do you use Blogger or Typepad or what?

Yvonne: I’ll answer first. I use Typepad and it works very well for me. It’s very user friendly and it is just really solid tool that functions on a user friendly way. As far as attaching your blog to your website absolutely, you want to get that RSS feed on the home page of your website. So that every time you write in a blog it will update your website. That’s one of the very first thing we do for our clients, is make sure, now some of our clients don’t have a website. But all of our clients that have a website the first thing we advise them to do is set up the RSS feed that connects the blog to the website because it literary drives traffic back and forth.

Andy: Right. You can have your blog on one service or one provider and your website over here at this other provider. You can have your blog actually on the same physical computer at the same server as your website. There are few real rules when this all comes together. Some people feel like their blog is in a different writing voice than the traditional website. So they may have the templates similar but a little different, so people register that’s a blog versus a website. There’s many different ways to sort of slice this argument. The tools that I use, I teach on TypePad and I use WordPress for most of my blogs, actually for I think for all of my blogs. But I’ve also have clients that use Movable Type, Expression Engine, Blogger, there are so many tools out there.

Yvonne: Yes, there are. And we are learning WordPress. We are very, very good with TypePad and we dipped our toes in Movable Type. As far as whether the blog and the website should be together in a sense you can’t tell one from the other, I agree. It depends on what your focus is and it depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. I get a lot of traffic to my blog from my Smart Marketing to Women Online website, which does not look anything like my blog. Yet I do know people whose blogs look so much like their website. If you are not an experienced blogger you would not know that you have left the website and gone to a blog. So it just depends on what your goal is and what your overall focus is. And as we said in the very beginning that focus that you’re going to have for your blog and the goals that you list or desire are going to drive how your blog looks and how you continue to build it and market it and get traffic and then just proceed, making a success of it. It’s all going to come down to that focus.

Just Get Started!

Andy: And I think don’t let all these details stop you from getting started. A lot of people will hear about blogging and sit on it for a year and a half. Where that could be the year and a half they were building the blog as a platform for a certain topic or key word phrase and they could have been in top of their industry. So it’s important to get started.

Yvonne: I agree, I agree completely. And I think you and I see that quite a bit. It always gives me a lot of pleasure to work with people who come and say I need to build a blog and I don’t know how and then I can help them. But I get as much pleasure working with people who build the blog and then came and said well it’s not doing what I want to do, can you help me? You know, there’s a lot to be said, especially in getting a website. I can remember when people build website. And people would say I got it late because I’ve got to have this and I’ve got to have that. And really same thing was true then, get it up. You can always perfect it afterwards, get it up and start blogging. Start the conversation.

Andy: Yvonne Divita, thank you so much for joining us from Lipsticking blog. Thank you for sharing the past 45 minutes with us.

Yvonne: Well, thank you, Andy. I can’t wait to tell everybody about this, and I can’t wait for your book!

Andy: I can’t wait for the book either. And we are going to have a column next week at the exact same time with Dave Taylor from Intuitive blog on blogs and search engine strategy and if there’s no further questions we’ll go ahead and sign off, a reminder the covered recording should be up in 4 days. I’ll give myself 4 days to get everything processed. If you want a notification when it’s up you can subscribe to my RSS feed, on the website or through my newsletter. Again Yvonne thank you so much, everybody have a fantastic night!

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