The first time Jeff Siegel set his sights on blogging about good cheap wine, he had one thought. And it wasn’t exactly favorable.
“I thought this was going to be a really stupid idea,” says the Dallas-based writer who’d enjoyed a successful freelance writing career up until that point through the traditional “pitch and place” approach.
Fast-forward nearly three years, and that initial idea has paid off big time: Recently, Siegel’s blog, The Wine Curmudgeon, was named one of the 100 Top Wine Blogs.
Not bad for a guy who started blogging less than three years ago, and forks over $90 a year for a blog subscription to keep his brand empire going.
(Oh, and for all you wine lovers out there: Siegel’s blog is based on the premise that the wine business does more to intimidate wine drinkers than to educate them, so he focuses on education — and on writing in English, not winespeak.)
So, what does Siegel’s blog success have to do with your own business brand?
Everything.
No matter what your industry, just about everyone and their mother wants to grow traffic to their blog. Meanwhile, SEO firms keep on spouting 10-dollar words like “algorithm” to let you think there’s some mystical formula to it all. But maybe — just maybe — all you need to know comes from the likes of Siegel — a self-described “cranky old newspaper guy” — who got his start in journalism back in the late 1970s.
Yes, for all the bad rap traditional print media types get, many of their best practices, shaped by the deadline-driven environment of newsrooms of old, hold relevance in growing blog traffic — and in creating your own brand. Recently, Siegel shared his own tips — here’s a rundown from The Wine Curmudgeon himself:
1. Generate consistent and quality content. “No one wants to believe it, but the only way to drive traffic is through consistent and quality content,” says Siegel. For his part, Siegel blogs five days a week — he’s done so from the start. He’s not advising you do the same. “But it has to be regularly,” he says. As for quality: “You have to give people a reason to come to the blog,” he says. “If all you’re going to do is copy something that somebody else has, that’s not going to do it.”
2. Find other online venues to share your expertise. “You have to make an effort to drive traffic to your site … it takes time,” says Siegel. His first month, Siegel averaged 40 visitors a day. “And that’s me who did have a bit of a following and reputation [in the wine industry],” he says. Today, his blog has grown “hundreds of percent.” That growth has occurred, in part, through spotlight appearances in other online venues. A year ago, over the summer, Siegel started appearing two to three times a month on Blog Talk Radio. Those appearances gradually translated into a larger blog audience of his own. “After about three months, I noticed a real upsurge — 10 to 15 percent,” says Siegel. “It took [up to] six months for my appearances to winnow through the internet and for people to find my blog.”
3. Create participatory online opportunities. “If you want to get people to do something on the internet, you have to tell them on the internet,” says Siegel. It’s a lesson he learned early on. A few months after he started his blog, he was teaching a wine class at Le Cordon Bleu in Dallas when he told his students to visit his blog. No bites. “No one has a pen to write down a URL,” says Siegel. These days, Siegel has gone for more creative approaches to drive traffic to his blog. This past year, he hosted a virtual wine tasting on Blog Talk Radio. The response was strong — precisely because it was participatory and it occurred online.
4. Lose the fear — and get started. “Don’t be intimidated, or think you need to call in 27 experts to do it,” says Siegel. “The mindset of some older people is that we’re visitors in this country of new technology,” he says. “Try to think differently,” he adds, “find someone who didn’t grow up with traditional media and ask them [what grabs their attention].”
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