Originally posted 2015-03-13 09:00:16.
This week, Musings welcomes back Mark Buckshon of the Construction Marketing Ideas blog to Guest Post Friday. Mark publishes several regional construction industry newspapers and websites. He can be reached at 888-627-8717 ext 224 or by email at buckshon@cnrgp.com.
Some projects are labors of love, with surprisingly important and valuable results. However, I could never have anticipated the success when I decided to start a daily construction marketing blog in 2006, continuing it through every season for 8.5 years.
Sometimes, when I took vacations and needed to be off-line for several days or even weeks, I generated dozens of blog postings in advance, saving them for release day-by-day in my absence. I blogged on public holidays, through critical stress periods, and when the work backlog seemingly stretched to eternity.
Allowing for 30 minutes a day, the project has consumed 64 days of my life over the years.
The reward for all the work and time: Several wonderful relationships and about a $500,000 in revenue.
Of course, none of the money arrived easily – and I attribute a large percentage of the revenue to the spin-off and repeat business from a single response to one blog posting. However, the yield of about $325 an hour has been worthwhile, in retrospect.
Blogging’s effective foundation — generating worthy content to build your reputation and, as an important-spin off, enhancing your search engine results – has become increasingly relevant as potential clients research and learn about businesses online long before they let you know they are interested.
(Four years ago, “search engine relevance” took on a whole new meaning when Google invited me to become a forum moderator, or Top Contributor, on one of the company’s help forums. This has resulted in annual expense-paid travel to meet-ups and summits and the opportunity to develop an entirely new level of relationships.)
Certainly, while I was one of only a few architectural, engineering or construction-industry bloggers at the launch of the constructionmarketingideas.com, there are many now. In fact, close to 30 have entered the 2015 Best Construction Blog competition, which I started as an annual event five years ago.
The competing blogs focus on consumer, professional and business-to-business markets. The competition combines popular voting and independent judging. This prevents large businesses with massive mailing lists from swamping the results, but still sets up a race, because the judges will still focus most of their energy in reviewing the top five to seven finalists.
Should you blog? I think so, if you can maintain consistency (generally posting at least once a week) and have the patience needed for the blog to deliver results (I didn’t see any benefits for a least two years.)
Your rewards will arrive through patience, reliability and reputation-building quality.
You can view (and vote for your favorite) the 2015 Best Construction Blog entries at http://constructionmarketingideas.com/construction-blogs-and-resources/best-construction-blog-2015-voting-booth.
If you have a blog you would like included in the free construction blog directory and an invitation to enter the 2016 competition, please email me at buckshon@constructionmarketingideas.com.
As always, please join the conversation with a comment below and contact Mark for more. If you enjoy what you’re reading, please subscribe to keep up with the latest Construction Law Musings and check out the other Guest Post Fridays here at Musings.
