Are You Making The Three Biggest Mistakes Content Marketers Make and Why 2014 Is The Perfect Year To Finally Start a Blog.

I still remember the first blog I started. It was back in 2003. That blog lasted about three weeks. In 2006 my friends encouraged me to start blogging again, and I had a pretty successful blog for almost four years. It seems like blogging is almost obsolete. Despite being an SEO for the better part of a decade, I didn’t take the leap into creating high quality content about marketing on a blog. I ran blogs for clients, I believed in the value, but I never took the leap.

I remember when I was thinking about starting blogging on DavidMelamed.com .

My first thought was blogging is so 2005. Why bother?!

My second thought was, there is so much great content already being published in the search space that I shouldn’t bother even trying to compete.

Somehow though, I managed to talk myself into starting a marketing blog. Better late than never. Why? we’ll cover that in a few moments, but first, lets see how much value blogging has created for me.

Now, a year and a half later, over 30,000 unique visitors have been exposed to my content and expertise directly on my blog, and tens of thousands of others to my guest posts. I might add that my blog drives direct clients to my business, with consulting requests coming from as far as Australia. All this, to a blog that was started long after blogging stopped being cool.

I should also note that while I have close to 140 blog posts, I failed to follow through on several bedrocks of successful blogging and I would certainly be exponentially more successful if I had followed through with creating content consistently. By consistently, I mean something like Moz.com’s Whiteboard Friday, or SearchEngineLand’s SearchCap. Giving readers a consistent schedule to come back to your blog is one of the best ways to keep them coming back. Had I created features, or stuck to a consistent blogging schedule my traffic would have easily been double or triple what is today.

You see, Successful content marketing is an accumulative effort. Its about maintaining forward movement consistently until one day you break through the ceiling. I don’t need to have blind faith. I just look at two examples online of blogs that did this perfectly and how amazing;t successful they became.

I am referring to Moz.com and Copyblogger.com . I remember reading these blogs back in 2005 or so and watching them consistently crank out content you couldn’t find anywhere else, and I watched as they broke through the ceiling and turned into Massive powerhouses, with Moz.com raising a fortune in VC money and Copyblogger owning a series of products, many of which I currently use today like Synthesis web hosting, the Genesis framework, Scribe content, and a studiopress theme. All this probably because they taught me how to write headlines 7 years ago.

There are countless other examples out there, but those two sites serve as my inspiration to keep on trucking.

The Biggest Mistake Marketers Make With Their Content Marketing is Giving Up Before The Big Breakthrough.

I had a prolific writer consult with me about his insurance business and literally tell me, “I’ll try any marketing except content creation, because I tried that and it doesn’t work.” He tried it, but he didn’t see it through long enough. By my estimates you need about two years of creating content consistently, and becoming part of a blogging community where you leave meaningful comments and interact on a one on one basis. This builds on itself, and once the machine is chugging along, eventually It breaks through and you become a powerhouse.

So, what got me started. How did I recognize starting a blog in 2012 was going to help grow my business, sure, looking at Moz.com and Copyblogger is a constant reminder about how well content marketing works when you stick to it, but the reason is actually along the lines of why I got started in SEO in the first place.

When I first started in SEO I was overwhelmed by how much people like Aaron Wall, Barry Schwartz, Eric Ward, Danny Sullivan and Rand Fishkin knew (and many others of course), and I was convinced there was no room to rise to the top. I’ve always been a perfectionist, and unfortunately have a history of not trying things I don’t think I can excel at. Yet, somehow I managed to talk myself into pursuing SEO. Here was my thought process. At the time there were close to a billion internet users worldwide. I figured, even if 100,000 people know SEO which was a high estimate at the time, I would still be a step ahead of 99.999% of internet users. There were billions of webpages at the time, all of them I figured would need Search Engine traffic. So, sure, I might be behind a ton of folks, but why let myself fall behind any further.

The Second Biggest Mistake Content Marketers Make is Assuming They Have To Be The Best or Better Than The Experts To Grow an Audience Online.

The truth is, all you need to be is genuine, and want to help your readers, and know more than they do to succeed.

So, why is 2014 the perfect time to start your blog? Let’s do some math.

Currently, There are roughly 2 billion people using the internet worldwide. That leaves 5 billion, or 2.5x the amount of people who haven’t even adopted the internet yet. Do you realize what that means? Your biggest competitor, your smartest industry thought leader has barely grazed the surface. They haven’t reached a fraction of a fraction of the pie. So, Why not have your cake and eat it too.

I know you might think, well most of the United States is online, but I assure you, most are still not savvy.

It’s almost 2014 and I still have clients come to me and not know the difference between paid and organic placement in search engines. They look at a Search Results Page as a single results page. 

These guys aren’t idiots, some are extremely smart. They just haven’t been exposed yet. Which leads the third biggest mistake marketers make.

The Biggest Enemy of Growth Online is The Filter Bubble. People Get So Caught Up In Their Little World of 10, 20, or even 50 websites, and fail to see the rest of the world.

This problem is so significant that I have had massive success with SEO strategies that focused just on keywords that keyword research tools won’t surface. When a company has a keyword list, and has seen it drive the bulk of their business, it’s hard to imagine that there could be countless other universes online that they never got exposed to. This was the biggest criticism to Googles Personalized search results. It limits you to the world you and your friends know. How many times have you seen a story on the homepage of reddit from three years ago and wonder how you never heard about it til today? We are stuck in our filter bubbles and fail to see the other ecosystems that exist online. The internet is made of lots of micro networks, many of which never overlap. Just look at a linkedin connection that has no friends in common with you, even 3 degrees removed. Yet, I bet most of their users are outside your world.

So, with the internet poised to grow 2.5x bigger. With your competitors and their experts stuck in their own filter bubbles, with the fact that atleast 80% of your market never heard of the biggest expert online in your field, and possibly as much as 99.99%, how can you not start a blog today.

Why wait, Better late than never. The market is hardly tapped out, more likely your own filter bubble is tapped out. Expand your horizons and realize… The internet is still very much the wild wild west, and 2014 is the perfect year to get started with content marketing, establishing yourself as an authoritative brand, a thought leader, and watch the readership flow and the profits grow.