← Small Business Quick WINS w/ Jay Schwedelson l Presented By Thryv
Small Business Quick WINS w/ Jay Schwedelson l Presented By Thryv
BLOGGING SECRETS REVEALED! 🔥 From HUBSPOT to THRYV 🚀 Clint Fontanella Shares PRO Tips for Small Businesses & SEO Success
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome to Small Business Quick Wins, presented by Thrive. This podcast is exclusively designed for small business leaders like you. Prepare to get invaluable insights from every episode, equipped with actionable tips made for immediate implementation in your business. Tune in as we teach our firsthand lessons from fellow small business owners and thought leaders. I'm your host, Jay Schwedelson. Over the last 25 years, I've grown multiple small businesses that have generated over $300 million in revenue. Along the way, I've learned pitfalls to avoid and quick wins that can transform your business immediately. I'm excited to share it all, so if you're ready to win on Main street, let's dig into this episode. Welcome back to Small Business Quick Wins, presented by Thrive. And we got a great episode today. We're going to be talking about blogging and we got the king of all blogs. We got Clint Fontanella here. Now, Clint is, he runs the blogs over at Thrive. He also used to run blogs over at HubSpot. The guy blogs while he sleeps. Clint, welcome to the show.
- [01:20]
B
Thanks, Jay. I appreciate you having me here.
- [01:23]
A
So is that a fair statement? Like, while you're sleeping, you just got blogs in your brain?
- [01:28]
B
I do. Wake up some nights, you're just like, whoa, I've. I gotta plan the format for next, for next week. But I do, I do do a lot of blogging. I, I, you know, kind of grew up, actually. Kind of, funny enough, I swore as a kid I would never get into writing. And then funny enough, look at where I am now, managing blogs, writing every day. But to your point, I mean, I've, I've got to the point where I even do, like, personal blogs. I, I wrote an awesome blog. You know what? I bike packed from Canada to Mexico, which is a whole other story. So I'm fully immersed in kind of like the blog world.
- [01:56]
A
So for those of the small business owners that are out there listening, what is a blog exactly?
- [02:04]
B
It's not nearly as complicated as like or as involved as you think. It's basically like a section of your website where you can just kind of talk about your industry, your company, pretty much whatever your goal is that you have around, you know, that area of your website you want to do is create that space on your website to kind of accomplish specific things that you're hoping to do.
- [02:24]
A
Okay, so now I'm a small business owner. I barely have time to make a cup of coffee, to put my shoes on, whatever. I'm sitting here listening to say, I don't have Time for a blog. What's the point of the blog? Like, what is the value of the blog? So give me the elevator pitch. Why should small businesses even have a blog?
- [02:43]
B
So again, the elevator pitch is you can do anything you need to do online with a blog. You can have people discover your business from search engines. Great. You can do that with organic traffic things. If you want to have people just learn about the latest products that you have. You can share product updates on your blog. If you want to just talk about events that you're launching, you can talk about it there. It just creates a space where you can just kind of point people to and say, hey, you want to learn more about this? Come learn about, you know, come learn about it here on this area of our website. And the case of saying like, hey, it's involved. It takes a lot of work. It doesn't. You can do it from your phone, you can do it like on the go, you said you can do it in your sleep. You wake up, come up with a quick three or four paragraphs. There you go, there's your blog. And the best part is it's becoming way more personable now, where it's like Google and people are looking for that personal touch. They're looking for maybe some mistakes, just that genuity that comes with writing a blog.
- [03:36]
A
So does it help your website in terms of getting the algorithm to pick up you in searches, your company in searches? Is there besides for just putting thought leadership out there, is there a technical benefit to blogging?
- [03:54]
B
Oh, definitely. I mean, if you want to go the SEO route and, you know, kind of optimize, be discovered on search engines like Google, you can definitely do that. And you can do that not even as, like a big business. You can do it as a local business, as someone's kind of just operating in their area, trying to win traffic, you know, from searches in their area, there's definitely a way to, you know, format your blog post and kind of signal to these search engines to say, hey, you know, look at me. I am the solution to this person's search.
- [04:20]
A
I want to ask you a horrible question now. Here I am, small business owner. I don't have time to do anything. And there's this thing called Chat GPT. And if I go to Chat GPT and say, hey, write me 10 blog posts about these 10 different topics and then I can copy and paste them onto my blog, is that the, like, worst possible thing I could do?
- [04:41]
B
I would say, short answer, yes. We've seen some really fascinating studies of you Might see some bumps in the short. You know, in the short term. You know, you're kind of. You're tricking Google almost to say, like, hey, this is real content, but it's smart. Google's a smart company. They are picking up on that now. And they're not only just saying, like, hey, we're gonna stop, you know, giving traffic to these. These. These ChatGPT posts. They're actually penalizing websites for that. So you can hurt your traffic, take a step backwards by using ChatGPT to write all your content.
- [05:09]
A
All right, I won't do it. Another thing that's a little bit off script, but I'm curious about your opinion of this. I've always felt that there's, like, a possibility of having a negative signal when blogging. What I mean by that is a lot of people start blogs and they put the date on there of the latest thing, and then you go on somebody's blog today, and they'll say, okay, this post is from August 2022, and that was their last blog post. And you look at it, you're like, well, this. Everything here is out of date. They're not really paying attention. They're not on top of their game. And to me, it's a negative signal. How important do you think it is to stay up to date, to stay consistent, to not let there be kind of legacy information just sitting there?
- [05:51]
B
I think it's very important, and I think it really depends on your blog strategy. Right? I think you have to be honest about how much you can kind of produce in a given time period and say, hey, do we even want to have those dates out there for people to look at and just kind of do our best to kind of clean the content, keep it fresh? You should always be kind of making sure your content's fresh, not, you know, pointing to broken links or pointing to inaccurate information. But ultimately, you know, if you're somebody who is able to, you know, churn out blog content every single week, be proud of that, have that, you know, those dates on your website. But if you're kind of playing, like, maintenance mode and you're really just kind of making sure that, hey, I don't have time to maybe produce as much as I like, but I want. Like you said, I want to have make sure I'm not presenting the right, you know, front to people who are reading this, then maybe you consider, you know, how is my blog structured? What information am I presenting in terms of those, you know, published dates that I may be able to. Not, you Know, hi, but like kind of just not put in the forefront. So you're not really always looking at when it's published, but you're mostly focusing on the copy that's on the blog post.
- [06:49]
A
So, okay, you sold me. I should have a blog. Now I want to start a blog. I have no idea what I'm doing. How do I start? What do I do to get going?
- [07:01]
B
I would say the easiest way to do it is one determine your goal. If your goal is, hey, I want Google to find me and people to find me through Google, then you're going to start looking at competitors. You want to look at what is people in your industry, not just people in your specific industry, but people who are competing for the same type of blog post that you want to compete for. And for the example I can give here, it's like if I'm a landscaping company and I want to write about lawn care, I might not just, you know, immediately jump to John Deere and look at their blog. I might look to other companies who are talking about lawn care, who are ranking for those topics on Google and seeing, hey, what are they doing? What does these posts have? What are the subsections of that content that I either need to have in my post or I can stand out by offering that in my content?
- [07:44]
A
That makes sense. Are there tools that you kind of rely on that you're like, these are the, these are the key tools you need to be aware of.
- [07:50]
B
Definitely. There's plenty of like free tools if you're looking for brand names. Like Semrush is the classic kind of go to free tool that you can use. There's tons of paid tools that you can use. But if you're really just looking for small business owner looking for some light, you know, keyword research is what these kind of tools do. I would go looking for a free option, a built in Chrome extension. You can kind of find these kind of spread out and really kind of find the data that you need to pretty much identify those topics that you want to go after.
- [08:17]
A
Is it important? How do you get the word out? Now you put a new blog post up. So how important is it to like tie a newsletter to your blog or what is the mechanism to let people know, hey, we got some new content over here.
- [08:30]
B
I would say that's becoming way more increasingly important, the delivery mechanisms. Right. So you have, like you said, I think email newsletter is probably one of the best ways of doing it. Gets people hooked on it. And you can also add a little more personality to Your email newsletter to get people really interested in your, you know, your topics in general. Now those are folks who, you know are really interested in your blog, but you can also share it, you know, strategically on social media. You can post it around your website to kind of point people to it. You can use an interlinking strategy, which is a fancier way of just saying like, hey, link to it around your website where you can, where it makes sense to. Those are probably like becoming more important. As you know, search engines are now starting to use AI to kind of serve results to people. So the more you can kind of point to, you know, they have these great distribution channels to rely on. The way you, the more you'll be able to supplement some of the traffic you might lose from an AI, you know, summary.
- [09:21]
A
That makes sense. Yeah, it is hard. You got to get people to come out and check it all out for sure. All right, so before we wrap up here, I want to know, do you go out there and read blogs like every day you wake up, okay, I'm starting my day, I'm going to read these seven blogs or you blogged out?
- [09:40]
B
Absolutely not. I, I definitely don't do that. I, I'm in the point where I think again, I use those research tools. I use the tools to kind of figure out what do I need to look at here. Like, and then a lot of times you, it gets to the point you don't have to read it top to bottom. You kind of scan it. You see, that's the sections and that's the beauty of it. You kind of, if you know what you're talking about with a topic, like, you just need to be like, hey, where do you need to point me to? And I can talk about that for, you know, three, three, four paragraphs. So that's really like, play into your strength as a business owner. If you know a lot about your industry, talk about that and just usually use that research tool to be like, okay, what should I talk about? I already know what, what goes into that. But what should I actually talk about per each post?
- [10:18]
A
Totally. All right, now you, you, I want everyone to be able to check out your blog, the one that you work on all the time. So tell everybody. How do they follow you? How do they check out the blog? We'll put it all in the show notes. But what do they do?
- [10:29]
B
Yeah, definitely. So, I mean you can, if you're looking for business related content, you can check us out at, you know, the Thrive blog, thrive.com blog. If you're looking for again, just check out some more personal stuff. I manage my own blog called blog.peddlingforpups.com It's a small website that we use to kind of raise some money for animal shelters that, you know, save animals in war torn areas. So that's just kind of my personal passion project. I used it when I bike packed again from Canada, Mexico. That's my my pitch for people who say I don't have time to do make a blog. If I did it, you know, in the mountains on my phone, huddling next to a fire, you can do this on a computer, you know, 20 minutes in a week and kind of churn out a blog post.
- [11:08]
A
Love that. I got to check that out. We're going to put this all in the show notes everyone. Check out the Thrive blog for sure. That's T h r y v.com their blog there. And thanks for being here for Small Business Quick Wins.
- [11:21]
B
Thanks Jay. I really appreciate it. It was awesome.
- [11:23]
A
All right man, take care.
- [11:24]
B
You too.
- [11:27]
A
Well, that was fun and great news. You got way more where that came from. Subscribe make get the latest episode each week for more actionable tips from today's top small business leaders. And hook us up with a five star review if you've got at least one new idea you may consider using. Lastly, if you want to ensure you never miss a message from your customers Again, check out thrive.com wins to get your free account with Command center today.