2.3 Looking Deeper into Inbound

Welcome back to Chapter 2 of this course on blogging for business. 

So far we’ve talked about the importance of understanding blogging as a marketing function and the division of Inbound and Outbound marketing. 

Now, let's take some time to explore Inbound marketing and its relevance to blogging in more depth. Last episode, we talked a bit about SEO and how certain websites show up before others when you search for something. 

While the world of SEO is big, complicated and something we’re not planning on delving into, we do want to explain search engines a bit to show you how important a role this plays in blogging.

Leaving  all the tech stuff behind, what is the most obvious reason that google will show one website over another? It believes that this website will provide the best possible answer to your search. 

When it comes to Google, or any other search engine for that matter, the user is king or queen.

What does that mean? It means that the search engine has ONE job which is to show you the best results for what you’re trying to find. So when we search for fishing gear, Google has reason to believe that Amazon, Decathlon and Flipkart might do a better job at serving us than the 4 billion other pages that are also related to fishing gear.

Why is this important? Because as a blogger, you need to know what your audience is searching for. If Google doesn't feel your blog is going to be the best answer for someone searching for something, it's never going to show your website 

If your website doesn’t show up in search results, what happens? -- nobody comes to your website! And if nobody comes to your website, nobody’s buying anything. 

And if nobody’s buying anything, your business shuts down. 

If your business shuts down, you have to sell everything you own and move to the hills. 

This is not a joke, people. 

Okay, maybe there’s a bit of an escalation here but our point still stands –searchability is important for any business. 

The biggest reason blogs fail is because they’re talking about stuff that NOBODY is searching for. Let’s repeat that because it’s one of the main takeaways of this course. 

The biggest reasons blogs fail, is because they are talking about stuff that NOBODY is searching for.

Which also means that in order for you to be a successful blogger, you need to know how to figure out what people are searching for. We’ll dive into how you can do that in the next couple of episodes but for now, we’re going to come back to the fundamentals.

Let's begin weaving together what we've learnt so far. We've understood what Inbound marketing is, how SEO works and why Google shows certain websites when you search for something. 

We’ve also talked about the importance of knowing what your audience is searching for in order to build a successful blog.

So what does this mean for you as a blogger? 

It means, if you write a blog about stuff your audience is searching for, Google will – over time – begin showing your blog in relevant search results. 

This will result in people visiting your blog which in turn will lead to people exploring your website, and that will lead to sales! Which is pretty much always the goal. Sales.

In the next few episodes, we’ll touch upon some important concepts like how do you even know what people are searching for and how do you know if a blog will ever drive sales. 

Well, you’re gonna have to keep binge watching these episodes to find out.