For the right type of business owner it should work. They should be able to find communities on owning a small business, their niche, whatever and build links naturally; And at the same get better at what they do through the learning. That’s essentially what you and I’ve done, right?

I’ve also considered doing the writing on the blog. That I’m a little weary of.

Me writing a blog on home improvement is laughable… I’ve almost taken down a wall hanging a clock. The lesson?: you don’t need a molly bolt to hang a clock; and you definitely don’t pull the molly out of the wall with sheer force.

I’ll have to focus on real link bait for that and come up with something catchy and clever.

For me at least it’ll be a work in progress. I’m in the process of reading everything I can on link bait, social media, yadda, yadda, yadda.

I may have to put lots more thought into each blog entry to move them into a more commercial capacity and/or get link bait.

Dave

A little update. So far no conversions have come from the blog. They are all coming from search, or close alternatives to search.

Its sort of the YP mentality. Searchers who key in on the most commercial phrases have a potential sale in mind already.

The blog posts are more informational.

May need to change the character of blog posts to reflect that.

Couple of issues.

The blog is picking up traffic. Its tricky, though. I’ve got to focus the blog/service/product topics on the region to get relevant traffic.

I submitted some stuff to stumble that I knew might attract traffic and it did; about 3500 visits over a couple of days–but I doubt that few of the visits were for my region…and it didn’t do any good. It was general stuff that was funny.

Now I’m trying to build the sites strength for competitive phrases in the region and generate local blog posts that will resonate within the region…and getting them to stick.

frankly I’m working my way through potential web interest groups in the region to possibly attract attention. It will take some time.

Over the past few weeks though the blog is attracting traffic. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look to me like a single visitor who converted with a contact did so, during a visit where they started on the site via a blog post.

Many of the conversions occur during 2nd and 3 visits…but to date I haven’t tried to account for that to see if the blog visitors turn into conversions.

To date the conversions are coming primarily from targeted keyword searches that are on target. That is no surprise

It does attract traffic, though, and expands keywords, so we’ll keep doing this.

Dave

Its so hard to get any business owner to do anything…geez…never asked that of one. I know one guy that rebuilt his marketing from old school print ads to pure email ….and email list building.

Most owners don’t think about this stuff too much. Or have someone else do everything for them. Have you tried that or gotten someone to do that for them?

When I read your comment on redirect, no follow and look there’s a bird (ok you didn’t say that) you know now why all my google ads were offline in 2 weeks.

You really seem to have something here. Target businesses who need to advertise locally, get them found organically and through optz, get some sales made. When can I refer my clients to you to start making them some money?

I think link-building is the toughest job for local sites, white hat, hard hat or otherwise.

Any luck asking busy business owners to start a blog?