Recently, I had a great opportunity to chat with blogger Ryan Robinson. This was the third interview in EngageBay’s ongoing series, where we seek to provide insights for our audience from real sales and marketing experts.
Robinson, as I said, is a writer first and foremost, but he also works in content consulting and entrepreneurialism. A California native who now lives in the Denver area, Ryan has 400,000 readers on his blog every month. You can check out his blog right here. Ryan likes to teach others how to create their own successful blogs, both through his writing and his consulting.
His work has seen him partner with the likes of Oracle, Zendesk, CreativeLive, Intuit, Adobe, Google, LinkedIn, and many other Fortune 500 companies. Somehow, he manages to find the time for a podcast known as The Side Hustle Project. As of this writing, he has recorded more than 120 episodes. His podcasts currently accrue more than 250,000 listeners.
Now, I’m happy to share some key takeaways from my insightful conversation with Ryan.
Niche Down
For those who are thinking of starting a general blog that covers a blanket topic, Ryan says don’t. It’s much better to niche down, in his own words. He says doing so gives you the opportunity to show your expertise on a particular topic or area, which promotes your authenticity and trustworthiness. This, in turn, can drive up traffic and help you retain readers.
It’s better to be an expert in one or two topics than slightly conversant in a dozen, then. Think of about that from the perspective of your own readers. They want information from a knowledgeable, trustworthy source. If that’s not you, they will move on to whoever fits that mold better.
Top Rank on the First Page on Google, Use Natural, High-Quality Backlinks
Do you want your article to appear front and center when a user types in a query on Google? Of course, you do. That’s the goal of every company, to rank number one with their content. While the methods you might use to go about this can vary, Robinson has one great suggestion.
He advocates for backlinks, but they have to be both natural and high quality. For instance, you might do a podcast interview, start a video tour with a handful of YouTubers, write guest posts, or even make an infographic.
Content Marketing Can Take “a Long Time to Pay off”
Describing what he wished more businesses knew about content marketing, Ryan stated the above, that it takes a while to see results. He says to expect at least a six-month wait for sites to get pushed to the front page of Google search results through his consulting or similar services. He says getting to even that point takes a lot of time and work.
Thus, if you’re a company that doesn’t specialize in content and you’re thinking of working with a consultant or a firm for content marketing, understand that it won’t be an overnight process. You cannot necessarily give up on content marketing just because it doesn’t deliver those quick results you want. With time, patience, and lots of tweaking and improvements, you can eventually have a content marketing strategy that does pay off.
Do remember what Ryan and countless other marketers have said: content is king. Foregoing a content marketing strategy will only hurt your business in the end.
Those are all the takeaways I have to share from my informative conversation with Ryan Robinson. We spoke for over 30 minutes and he had lots of other great nuggets of advice to provide. To hear those, I recommend watching the full interview on EngageBay.
Checkout Our Interviews with Top Influencers:
- Our Takeaways from Our Interview with Ryan Biddulph
- Our Takeaways from Our Interview with Neal Schaffer
- Our Takeaways from Our Interview with Deirdre Breakenridge
- Our Takeaways from Our Interview with Laurie McCabe
- Our Takeaways from Our Interview with Ted Rubin
- Our Takeaways from Our Interview with Douglas Karr
- Our Takeaways from Our Interview with Shane Barker
