Mia Fileman 0:05
This is Got Marketing? – a fud-free, fluff-free, no-nonsense podcast for marketers looking to work smarter.
I’m your host, Mia Fileman – a marketing strategist with over two decades of experience, and an entrepreneur.
I’m tired of marketers telling you what you want to hear. Instead, I tell you what you need to hear. During the show, I chat with creatives and strategists about all the aspects of marketing, but especially marketing campaigns. Unpacking and dissecting marketing campaigns is what I do for fun.
Got Marketing? is brought to you by Campaign Del Mar – the marketing education platform where marketers and entrepreneurs go to upskill.
Let’s dive in, shall we?
The question for you now that we’re talking about SEO and blogs is does anyone read blogs anymore?
Marcus Dunn 1:05
Do you read blogs?
Mia Fileman 1:07
Yes, I do – heaps of blogs.
Marcus Dunn 1:09
Do you read them from top to bottom?
Mia Fileman 1:10
Yes, I do.
Marcus Dunn 1:11
Do you?
Mia Fileman 1:12
I do.
Marcus Dunn 1:13
In one sitting?
Mia Fileman 1:14
In one sitting? Absolutely, yes, I do.
Marcus Dunn 1:16
You’re probably one of the only ones.
Mia Fileman 1:18
Oh, really?
Marcus Dunn 1:19
We’re in this era of no attention span. I’m as guilty of it as anyone else. We skim. Everything we read, we skim. It’s kind of sad because I get really fazed when people tell me they read novels but they’re scanning it.
I like to read every line meticulously. If I haven’t understood the sentence, I’m rereading it to the point that it’s getting anal. But we don’t skim content. We’ve got these little attention spans and we just don’t have time because something else is vying for our attention.
If we’re reading an article on the newspaper website, we’re thinking, “I’m going to check Instagram. I’m going to check my email. Go to the article. Back to Instagram again.” We’re not reading anything.
I try and read stuff. I try and read stuff from top to bottom knowing that we don’t do it, but I don’t. I still skim it. What I generally do – and this is one of the core principles of on-page optimisation with SEO – is I’ll skim the headings. I’ll look at the title if it interests me. That’s what’s grabbed me. I’ll look at the image. I’ll read the first heading, second heading, third heading. If I like it, I’ll have a little look at their summary, and then I’ll read from the top and I’ll start to read down the interesting sections then I’m out of there. That’s probably about 15 seconds.
Mia Fileman 2:42
Wow!
Marcus Dunn 2:44
But, yes, I think we are reading blogs, but we’re not reading them from top to bottom. We’re just skimming them.
Mia Fileman 2:52
Yes, and I think this is me showing my age, and also my degree coming to play here which is I was made to read freaking whitepapers that were 90 pages long. It’s a bit of a fitness that I think younger people today have lost – longform reading.
But I do have a top tip for this that I love. I’ve discovered this app called Instapaper. You can pick any blog or article off the internet, and you use an extension with Instapaper. You open the Instapaper app, and you can read it in a distraction-free environment. No ads. You can have really good contrast between the text and the background so that you’re reading it almost like off a Kindle. As a result, I find that I can actually get through an entire blog post and read it properly.
Marcus Dunn 3:44
That’s exactly why I use a Kindle. For the same reason. It’s a device designed to be a book. You’re not looking at the internet on it. You’re not looking at anything else. You’re just reading a book. I think that’s really important.
Mia Fileman 3:58
Why are we still writing blogs if people aren’t reading blogs, Marcus?
Marcus Dunn 4:02
This is the thing. Blogs are a really intricate part of the website. They’re really important. We’re definitely reading them. Otherwise, the internet wouldn’t be awash with search traffic attached to every conceivable keyword.
We’re doing research on blogs. We’re getting information from them. We’re getting navigational advice from them. More often than not, we’re looking to answer a question with the blog. We’re doing a search, end up on a blog page, reading a paragraph that covers it, then leaving. That’s pretty much it in a nutshell.
The thing with blogs though is there are a lot of different ways that they benefit you and your website. I don’t believe anyone is actually coming to your website – yours included – and then clicking on Blog. That’s a reason why it’s a common design principle to put the blog down in the footer. You are not wanting people to enter those articles. People are coming to those directly from Google.
People are not necessarily clicking on your blog to read it. What they are generally doing is they are finding it via search traffic. They are searching for “what is campaign marketing?” and then they are ending up on your page. They like what they see. They will go and enrol in your course. Mission success.
Blogs are a fantastic source of traffic for your website – every single blog page. A lot of people don’t realise this, but every single page on your website is running its own race from an SEO point of view – your home page, your blog articles, your service pages – all of them, when properly optimised – can rank independently for different search terms.
One, it’s bringing in a heap of traffic. Two, from a Google point of view, you’re establishing expertise, authority, and trustworthiness through things like your blog. That acronym – EAT – is something that’s really important from an SEO point of view.
It’s basically Google assessing your site for a whole range of different reasons – everything from the quality of the content, the quality of the design, whether there are author profiles, whether you’ve got addresses on the site. It’s assessing whether or not you’re legitimate.
If you’ve got a whole lot of blog posts about campaign marketing or marketing-related topics, Google is going to associating campaign marketing or marketing with your site, and you’re going to have a lot easier time ranking for it.
If you go and write a really good article on fishing and put it on your blog now, it might rank in the short term, if it’s properly optimised, but it’s not going to hold ranking in the long term because it’s just not relevant to your website. In Google’s eyes, establishing yourself as an authority in an area is really advantageous.
The final thing is that it’s a signal that you’ve got an active up-to-date website. If I come to your site and I look at your blog section, your service pages and your home page, there’s a lot of content on there, but it’s limited.
If I want to see if you’re legitimate, I’m going to go and look at your blog to see if it’s updated and see the last time that blog was actually updated. It’s the same concept between what happens if you go look at an Instagram profile with a hundred followers or one that’s got 4,000. Who are you probably more likely to do business with? Probably the 4,000. It establishes trust with potential customers.
There are all these different bonuses to actually having it. Whether people are actually reading it or not, who cares? As long as they’re going and buying your product in the end.
We’ve changed a lot over the years. Blogging used to be an interest. I used to actively blog for years before I knew SEO. I really regret the amount of traffic that ‘ve let go of because of that, but blogging used to be more of an interest – like an online journal. Then, it became a genuine source of income where people are profiting.
The other way people are profiting from really high traffic is they are putting ads on their sites. You’re getting really good revenue from ads when you’re getting high volume on your website.
Or you’re actually getting affiliate income. People might be clicking on your actual links and you’re getting a small commission. I do that on the side. It can be a really good source of passive income once all the hard work for a long time has been put into place.
There are a lot of benefits to it, but whether or not people are actually reading the content from top to bottom? I don’t think so.
Mia Fileman 8:19
See, ladies and gentlemen? Do you see why he is my SEO consultant? Because he makes it sound achievable and logical. You’re honestly the first person I’ve ever met who has been able to explain this to me in a way that I can wrap my head around. That was incredible. That was so, so, so good!
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Can you tell me what the acronym stands for – EAT?
Marcus Dunn 9:23
EAT – expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.
Mia Fileman 9:27
Awesome.
What I’m hearing there – tell me if I’m wrong – is that while humans don’t necessarily read blogs, Google reads blogs.
Marcus Dunn 9:36
Yes, humans do read blogs. A really good example of this is the quality of the writing. Anywhere you read SEO advice tells you to optimise for user experience, so you want to create really good articles – genuinely informative – for the user.
Case in point is some of the articles you’ve written for Medium, for example. They are legitimate, really well-written articles. Good writing. But then, you’ve got the internet full of content that’s written. It’s not written for good-quality content. It’s written for the backlink, and it’s written to get traffic.
I know this is something you’re really passionate about – the quality of writing. I really think that there has to come a turning point where we come back towards crafting good words rather than just using them to get traffic. It has to get to a breaking point somewhere.
Mia Fileman 10:30
I don’t know, mate. I think we’re fighting a losing battle.
Neil Patel that I just mentioned who became famous for his blogs has 2,000 podcast episodes – all ten minutes or less! I’m sorry. What topic can we explore in ten minutes and do it justice? Having read quite a few of his blogs, I know that this is purely a ranking move.
Marcus Dunn 10:56
He’s got a grand master plan. Neil Patel certainly knows what he’s talking about, but he’s one of these bait-and-switch marketers, I reckon. He’s come out with a competing SEO tool called Ubersuggest. I’m not sure if you’ve used that before.
Initially, it was completely free. He said, “It’s going to be free forever.” Then – surprise, surprise! – high cost from popularity, suddenly it’s got a subscription.
Suddenly, you can’t get any data from it without signing in with your Google account which then also wants access to your Google search console data from your website. You get about maybe ten results which are wildly different from other tools that I’ve seen as well.
His podcast episodes are informative. He certainly gives a lot of good information, but everything is selling his business – NP Digital or whatever it’s called and one of his sub-businesses. He knows what he’s doing. He’s very well-established, but the whole Ubersuggest thing left a real bitter taste in my mouth.
Mia Fileman 11:59
I saw straight through the 2,000 ten-minute episodes which is almost gaming the podcast charts.
Marcus Dunn 12:06
That’s a lot of episodes.
Mia Fileman 12:07
It’s a lot of episodes, but when you subscribe – you’ve subscribed to this podcast – any new episode, you automatically download, right? The more episodes I publish, the more downloads I get. It’s a really simple numbers game. For him, having 2,000 episodes, he’s actually got the top marketing podcast in Australia.
Marcus Dunn 12:30
Absolutely gaming the system.
Mia Fileman 12:31
Yes, I would argue that there are better marketing podcasts in Australia. Hint, hint. Nudge, nudge. It’s very much “I want to chart on Apple Charts, and this is the way to do it.” Anyway, we digress.
Marcus Dunn 12:46
Yes.
Mia Fileman 12:47
I shared this little mini rant on LinkedIn – only a few days ago – about how I actually think that content marketing today is more about quantity than it is about quality.
I wrote a Medium article last week that was published by a leading Medium publication – Entrepreneur’s Handbook. It was a 1,000-word article. It took me a week to write. I had it proofed by an editor. It’s done well, I guess.
I look at people who are absolutely killing it on Medium and their best advice is to publish five Medium articles a week. It’s a 1,000-word article. I can’t pump out five in a week. What am I going to talk about?
It’s really sad that this is where we’ve gotten to. Social media platforms almost epect that you post daily – even LinkedIn, but definitely Instagram. Podcast episodes now are weekly. It used to be that you could launch a podcast episode each month and you were fine, but now? No. Neil Patels of the world. It’s every single week, a new podcast episode. Five Medium articles a week.
The thing that I have taken out of this as a marketer is that it’s never been more important to choose wisely and to limit the amount of channels that you are on because, to a certain degree, you can play your own game and run your own race, but you are going to have to work in with some of the algorithms that exist.
Where I’ve gotten to is you pick one primary social media channel, one secondary social media channel because you should never put all your eggs in one basket, and that’s it!
Marcus Dunn 14:34
But create a profile on all of the other ones and have a link back to your website.
Mia Fileman 14:38
Yes, exactly.
Marcus Dunn 14:40
If you can cross-purpose your content easily on different channels, that’s good, but everything should be pointing back to your website – your own owned channel.
Mia Fileman 14:50
Totally. However, cross-posting now is no longer a thing, really.
LinkedIn has its own image size. If you share an image that’s not optimised for LinkedIn, then it’s going to get downgraded by the algorithm. Instagram Reels are that 16x9 format now.
Marcus Dunn 15:12
It’s probably more like, if you write a really good blog post, take a chunk from it, and put it on LinkedIn.
Mia Fileman 15:18
Definitely.
Marcus Dunn 15:19
Condense it and put it on Instagram.
It’s much easier to repurpose your own content than it is to actually just craft it from scratch. If you do this, it’s getting more mileage out of your content rather than actually creating a brand-new one for Instagram and a brand-new one for LinkedIn on the same topic.
Mia Fileman 15:3
Yes.
To do that, don’t write posts. Write blogs. Write articles. Write meaty.
Marcus Dunn 15:43
Start with a blog.
Mia Fileman 15:44
Yes, start with the hero content and break that down into Instagram posts because it’s very hard to take a post that performed well on Instagram and repurpose it for LinkedIn.
Marcus Dunn 15:54
One explanation behind the quantity of content is – getting back to fishing again – it’s like putting fishing lines out. You never know which ones are actually going to get a bite. The more lines you’ve got out there, the more opportunity you’ve got for getting a bite.
Blog posts – you never know which ones are going to rank and for how much because a typical blog post will rank for a whole range of search terms. You never know which ones are actually going to really hit it off and get a traffic spike.
It’s the same with Reels. You could create ten Reels in a week. One of them will go through the roof. The other ones, mediocre. You just don’t know until you create them.
With blog posts, when you’re monitoring the traffic, if you’ve created 20 blog posts, there’s far more opportunity to rank highly on them than if you’ve done five.
It is important, but if you’re doing 2,000 ten-minute episodes, that’s next level. That is actually gaming the system, as you say.
Mia Fileman 16:51
Yes, maybe it’s a Goldilocks – to not try to get it perfect. Get it to the 80 percent solution and move on so that you have, like you said, more lines in the water.
The blog about fishing, that might not be the most ridiculous suggestion ever for me because one of my favourite sayings in the whole world is “teach a woman to fish and she’ll eat for a lifetime; give her a fish and she’ll eat for a day.” That’s my entire philosophy to marketing education.
Let’s end on that. When do you think brands should upskill and when do you think brands should outsource?
Marcus Dunn 17:27
I think you need to upskill enough, so you have an understanding of what you need and what the resources are. If you can afford it, start to outsource because every aspect of every channel is complicated.
None of them are really rocket science. SEO is not rocket science, but it’s complicated and it’s constantly changing – just like social media is constantly changing. Email marketing is constantly changing.
Are you going to go out and actually spend a couple of months to really upskill on SEO? Or are you going to get some outside advice? But, before you go and get some outside advice, get some knowledge.
It’s like me taking the car to the mechanic. I don’t know what the hell they’re saying. I’m just trying to suss them out based on the urgency in what they’re saying, but I don’t have any mechanic skills. I need to pay a mechanical consultant. Everyone’s got their family member that’s a mechanic that offers advice.
Go out and get your own knowledge so you know what you need, then determine.
Mia Fileman 18:27
I completely agree.
I say this all the time – know enough to be dangerous.
Marcus Dunn 18:33
Absolutely.
Mia Fileman 18:33
Also, know enough to be a really good client.
What I find these days is that a lot of small businesses almost want to outsource the thinking to the third-party supplier. They’re like, “Look, I don’t actually know what I want. I just need you to go away and do it.” They’re like, “Okay. What do you mean?”
They’re like, “Well, I don’t know how Facebook Ads work, so you just go run some Facebook Ads for me.” Of course, they come back and they’re like, “What are these? These are terrible. This is not what I wanted.” It’s like, “Well, you didn’t tell me what you wanted.”
We need to understand basic principles so that we can steer the strategy and so that we can say, “Actually, this is what we want, and this is what we don’t want. We’re expecting this, but we’re not expecting this,” and to understand how long things take.
I used to run a marketing agency for seven years. The amount of clients that would say to me, “I don’t want to know how it’s done. I just want it done. Go and do it.” The invoice would get sent.
They’d be like, “Why did you spend 2.5 hours writing an e-newsletter? That’s ridiculous! That’s a waste of time.” I’m like, “Are you kidding? 2.5 hours to write an e-newsletter is a phenomenal really good return on investment for me at Campaign Del Mar – a huge return on investment!” But they don’t understand that because they don’t understand the basic fundamentals of marketing.
Marcus Dunn 19:51
I think this is why SEO agencies have got such a bad name for ripping people off – high retainers for no actual work. They’re doing work, but no one understands what they’re actually doing, and they can easily take advantage of that because people are like, “Just do my SEO. Here’s $2,000 a month.”
You have to understand what the fundamentals are. It’s critical
Mia Fileman 20:11
Totally. So true.
Well, it has been an absolute pleasure, Marcus. I’m going to put your social media handles in the show notes.
Are there any final thoughts you wanted to leave people with today?
Marcus Dunn 20:26
Look, it’s just a case of don’t be scared of SEO. Don’t be scared of blogging. Don’t be fazed thinking no one’s reading your blogging. There are lots of benefits to it – lots and lots of benefits.
Get some basic on-page optimisation on it. Put some keywords in your headings. That’s another story going down the optimisation path. But keep blogging and focus on turning it around and writing good content.
Mia Fileman 20:49
That’s great advice.
Do you know what we’ve done? We like to take big problems and break them into smaller problems. This is the way that we’ve tackled everything at Campaign Del Mar.
What we did was we wrote one really good blog post. We got you to check it. You helped us optimise it. Now, it is the template for all the other blog posts. It’s like, “All right. Great! Do you see what we there? This is what we need to do every other time.” At least we have one now – learning by doing – that we go, “Great. This is the benchmark.”
Marcus Dunn 21:19
I wouldn’t do that for every blog post, but I would certainly be writing your very important ones and putting a lot more effort into them – making them longer, better quality – because that will pay off.
I actually linked you a really good example from Brian Dean who ran Backlinko before it recently sold. He writes really good, really in-depth blog posts, and they pay off in spades. The only way he promotes them – funnily enough – that I’ve seen is email marketing.
It’s a really good example of a really high-quality blog post. It is worth spending the time – not on all of them, but – on some of them because they will be like the cornerstone content on your website.
Mia Fileman 21:58
Amazing. I’m going to put that link and promote that blog article from Backlinko into the show notes.
Marcus Dunn 22:05
I love his post, yes.
Mia Fileman 22:06
Great. It was such a pleasure!
Marcus Dunn 22:09
Thank you!
Mia Fileman 22:10
I wish you the best of luck with your new job.
Marcus Dunn 22:12
Yes, thank you!
Mia Fileman 22:14
I’m super annoyed that you will not be helping us with our search engine optimisation anymore.
Marcus Dunn 22:19
I’m still around.
Mia Fileman 22:20
Yes, at least we’re friends.
Marcus Dunn 22:22
Absolutely.
Mia Fileman 22:23
That friendship doesn’t have to end.
Marcus Dunn 22:27
Absolutely!
Mia Fileman 22:29
Thank you so much, Marcus!
Marcus Dunn 22:31
Thanks, Mia!
Mia Fileman 22:34
Thank you!
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Podcast reviews are like warm hugs. They’re also the best way to support a small business. You can also connect with me, Mia Fileman, on Instagram or LinkedIn. Feel free to send me a message! I’m super friendly.
