man and dog in bed sleeping about Columbus web design

We have a dream. It's not a big dream. Not a dream of people learning to accept others not like them, to find a cure for hunger, or hairy knuckle syndrome. It's a simple dream. It's the dream of a boutique Columbus web design firm, to help ourselves, and our clients, be found in Google.

Granted, we would LOVE if people learned to accept others not like them, find a cure for hunger, or hairy knuckle syndrome, but we're realists. So we're starting small.

How we went about realizing our dream, was to focus on "content marketing" for our own company to show it could be done. Because if we could show it works for us, people would believe it would work for them.

We write 1000+ word articles every week

Yep, this is the big one: creating content that people want to read, and hopefully, share. While our articles live on our website, we also post them on social media sites like LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter and Facebook.

It took six months, from people not seeing our posts, to people reading and sharing our posts. Over that time, we've slowly graduated to reaching dozens of people on LinkedIn with our articles, as you can see from the screen shot below.

Linkedin readership stats of a Columbus web design irm

The key to writing articles considered "Content Marketing"

The key to writing an article people want to share, isn't to write from a sales perspective. No one wants to be sold, but everybody wants to learn. (That's a take off of the well-known phrase: "No one wants to be sold, but everyone wants to buy.")

Another hurdle is to find subjects to write about. As we've mentioned in our other blogs, it's easy: subscribe to blogs from other people in your industry who are smarter than you (there's got to be just a few of those folks around!). When you have a constant source of ideas coming into your email's Inbox every week, deciding what to write about becomes dramatically easier.

The benefit of writing articles

Not only are you educating your clients and prospects, in the process of researching and writing, you're also educating yourself. Assuming you're writing about topics that interest you, as you research them, you learn more, remember more, and become more of an expert in that subject.

The benefits of writing blogs has been well-documented:

  1. You share what interests you, and by association, what interests those who follow you
  2. You hone your writing skills, and learn how to become more concise in your explanations
  3. It humanizes your company
  4. It helps you to become more of an authority within your industry
  5. It helps other people who might be researching that topic and who finds your article
  6. It helps you market your business, because it help with search engine optimization (assuming you know how to blog correctly using keywords)
  7. It gives you more confidence in your communication skills
  8. You can write blogs for other companies, a skill that certainly generates income
  9.  It helps people find your company, and
  10.  When people find you through your website, it allows you to spend more time with friends and family because you don't have to go to as many networking meetings

Some examples of articles we've written people have liked

Some recent articles that have gotten some traction are below. Granted, they're not huge numbers, but they're more than we had six months ago. (That number, by the way, was "zero"!)

Read the first article about "What to look for in an SEO plan" here.

screen shot of two of Columbus web design firm's LinkedIn articlesTo see the website for the Wendy's franchisees, click here.

The two biggest benefits of content marketing (for us)

1. The first benefit of our content marketing effort, is the fact it helps us with our SEO. Regular blogging, using keywords the right way, and in the right places, has gotten us to page one of Google for two of our keywords:

  • Columbus website design, and
  • Columbus web design

Google either one of those phrases and see where our website shows up.

Now, when we tell people we can help them, they know it's true because we've done it for ourselves. We can point to our success through this one simple, yet time-consuming effort. And it is time-consuming. Every article can take 3 or 4 hours. See the blog post we wrote about our content marketing efforts getting us to page one in Google it here.

2. The second biggest benefit of this effort is, it's cut down on the time we have to spend going to networking events.

When people find you, instead of you finding them, it really frees up your time. So we've not gone to as many after hours, or early morning networking events. We get to spend more time with our family and friends in the evenings, and less time with groups of people we don't know all that well.

Not that we're knocking networking: It's certainly helped us as well.

If you want us to help you get your website to page one of Google, lets talk.