Blogging Tips With Ian Cleary And Sue B Zimmerman

SUE: Today I’m here with my good friend, Ian Cleary, who is the founder of, actually, one of my favorite blogs, Razor Social. And he’s here to talk about blogs. And just so that you know, we at the Sue B. Zimmerman team do have a blog, and we are finally getting traction.

IAN: Great.

SUE: So I’d like for you to share, what do people need to do to set their business up for success, blogging.

IAN: OK, perfect.

Well first of all, thanks very much for having me, Sue. So yeah, I’m going to go through a few tips about blogging. I suppose one of the most important things is, you have to write good content on a consistent basis. Blogging is about consistency. It’s not necessary writing every single day.
It’s writing good quality articles on a regular, consistent basis. So you have to have the good content as a starting point.

SUE: We blog about, on average, two to three times a month. Is that consistent enough?

IAN: Yeah, once you’re a regular, as long as you don’t go two or three times a month, and you give up for a month or two. You need to regularly – so you are producing good content on a regular basis.

SUE: Gotcha.

IAN: So that’d be the first one. The second one is promotion of the content. You have to promote the content. You could write amazing content, but if your audience doesn’t get to see that content, it’s no good.

Now, you’re very good at promotion, Sue, so I don’t think you’ll have a problem with that. Promoting across all the Instagram channels, promoting across all social media channels, and then do email outreach to other people.

SUE: Where are you, in your business, seeing the most bang for your buck when you’re promoting? What channel, or when you say promoting across multiple platforms – I mean, I see taking the image in the blog and using that on Instagram to drive traffic back to the blog. That’s what you’re talking about?

IAN: Yeah. Now, I mean, one of the tactics we find is really good for promoting content is, if you involve other influencers within your content. Because when you share that content out, they’re more likely to share it, because they’re in the article. So that works very well.

SUE: I love it when you feature us.

IAN: Yeah, and you always share it, you see, so I get in front of Sue’s audience by sharing stuff about Sue.

SUE: So it works.

IAN: Yes, yes.

SUE: So consistency – Promotion and content.

IAN: Yes. And the third one is relationships, building relationships. So you know, when I’m promoting a piece of content, if I really want to get that content out, I’d reach out to Sue and say, hey, Sue, would you mind sharing this? You’ve got no problem sharing.

When you have an article, you’d come to me, and we’d share it. So you have to work together. Build the relationships with relevant people in your industry so that when you do need to get that article or that new product out…

SUE: …And get traction and comments. So I’m going to give a little ninja tip about what I do, when I want to get people to comment and share a blog. Because we’re just starting to get some movement on our blogs, and some comments on our blogs, finally. Is I do reach out in Facebook.

I directly copy the blog link and I put it in a message to my friends like Ian and other influencers who I know will share it, and obviously I would do the same for Ian, and I ask, can you please share this and write a comment on the blog?

And when you get – I find, like for us – eight to 20 comments is good, just to get things moving. But it takes a while to get even to that point. So I use Facebook outreach. What’s a tip that you do?

IAN: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s perfect. It’s whichever channel you can reach those people. And I do get some messages from you on Facebook, and I go straight to the blog and comment.

One thing I say about commenting – people go, oh, I’m not getting any comments. Well, that’s your fault. You’re not doing the necessary promotion, like what Sue is doing is reaching out to her friends and people she has built relationships with, and asking for a comment. And you will get comments if you ask for them.

SUE: And I only ask people who actually would do – like, I would do the same for them. I’m never asking a stranger or spamming somebody. Like, I get messages all the time from people that are asking me to do things, and I’m like, I don’t even know who you are.

So you need to have that relationship. That piece is so important, and that connection. And the law of reciprocity. If you do it for me, I’ll…

IAN: Robert Cialdini, yeah, absolutely. Right. It works. The relationships, you need patience with relationships, because you need to build the relationship first. And you focus on helping the other person initially, way more than they’re helping you.

Yeah. So then when you want to reach out to them, you know they’ll go, no problem. You’ve been sharing my content, and so that’s how it works.

SUE: Perfect. So to summarize, it is posting consistently, it is – promotion of your content. Promotion of the content, and it’s really all about building those relationships.

I teach this every day on Instagram. It’s so vitally important to build relationships first, and then think of it more as doing it on their behalf more than your own when you’re doing your outreach.

IAN: Absolutely.

SUE: These are great tips.

IAN: Good, good. Thanks so much.