Last week, someone from Romania subscribed to my blog. I sent her a quick note to thank her for subscribing and asked how she found me. It’s not like I get subscribers from Romania every day.
She said she saw me in a video on user onboarding created by the Product-Led Institute. The Product-Led Institute, according to their website, is a global community of leading SaaS operators that produces some of the world’s top training on how to build a product-led business.
This new subscriber was nice enough to send me a link to the video. I skimmed through it and my jaw dropped when I saw the reference to me. Jump ahead to 1:50 to see the full context.
How cool is that? They even included a visual of my website!
Here’s the kicker. I published the blog article referenced in the video in February of 2015. More than five years later, that article is exposing me to a whole new audience.
Not to pat myself on the back too hard, but the line quoted in the video is pretty damn good:
“Flowery adjectives and adverbs are the enemies of content clarity and credibility.”
I started to wonder where else this little nugget of wisdom might have been quoted. A little digging revealed the quote or a variation was used in about eight articles and a few social media posts on Twitter and Pinterest.
Not too shabby, as Adam Sandler used to say.
Will I get business from this exposure? We’ll see. But now I’m on the radar of an extended, growing network of people, thanks to one line from an article I wrote five years ago.
The Reach and Value of Every Blog Article Extend Far Beyond the People You Know
In 2012, I wrote a blog article for Web.Search.Social. titled Why That Whole “People Don’t Want a Drill, They Want a Hole” Thing Doesn’t Go Far Enough.
The core message of the article was based on this often-cited statement from Harvard marketing professor Theodore Levitt: “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.”
The idea is that you should focus on selling the results of your product or service, not the product or service itself. I argued that Dr. Levitt’s statement doesn’t go far enough. In other words, the hole isn’t the end result. The end result is the project you complete with the drill and how that project makes your life better.
In early 2014, David Sorkin of New Frontier, a marketing agency here in New Jersey, was searching for that drill quote on Google. He wasn’t looking for a content writer.
But his search led him to my blog article. He liked my writing, contacted me, and hired me to write some content for his clients.
We’ve worked together on a bunch of projects over the years, and he referred a client to me as recently as May of this year.
I’ve also had clients from different parts of the country and even Europe contact me after a Google search with a somewhat random string of keywords led them to one of my blog articles.
I’m not sure how the folks from Product-Led Institute found my article, but each new view of their video introduces me to a new person.
To be clear, most business leads generated organically will come through people you know. The people on your email list. Your LinkedIn connections. Your social media followers.
These are people who already see you as a trusted expert and information resource.
My point is that a blog article with a permanent online home on your website has virtually unlimited reach. It’s not just the people you know and the people they know. Each article can be found in a lot of different ways for a lot of different reasons.
Someone’s intent might not be to hire you. They might not even be interested in what you do at first. But each article creates more opportunities for people to find you. That’s the first step to engagement and building a relationship that could help you grow your business.
If you want to go beyond your network and get on the radar of people you’ve never met – people who could turn into solid business leads and relationships – consider using a blog to consistently publish valuable, relevant content.
You could be introduced to people and places you never imagined.
If you’d like to discuss ideas for your blogging strategy and how to get started, let’s talk.
Leave a Reply