Where to Blog / Publish Articles

[Excel-Expert]

Has anyone marketed themselves by publishing regularly on LinkedIn? How did it go and do you have any tips?

Here is my thinking so far;

I have put together a long list of article ideas to help market myself. There is enough on the list to allow me to put together 2 or 3 articles a week for several years to come. Most of the articles are "how to" type guides for Excel and VBA. My website is Wordpress based so publishing articles on there will be a breeze, but wont get much traffic until I am much more established.

In the meantime, as all my business is B2B, I am thinking of publishing my articles on LinkedIn as well as my own blog. Although I can link the LinkedIn article back to my blog version, I suspect LinkedIn will use "no follow" links, and I wont gain anything on the SEO front. However, I am hoping if my articles are good enough they will get shared around with likes and shares.

 

[fisicx]

Doesn’t work like that anymore with LinkedIn as everyone is blogging.

Put the articles on your own site. If properly structured you will get visitors and from there new leads.

I’ve got a page on one of my sites where I explain the different types of interest calculation. It gets loads of visitors some of whom then become clients.

 

[Excel-Expert]

Thanks Fisicx.

The focus was always going to be my own blog first, and everything I create will be created with the needs of my website coming first.

In your opinion, would copying the content from my website to a LinkedIn post have any benefits (other than a few extra eyeballs on it), make zero difference or be harmful?

What I am trying to do is make the most out of the content I produce, but it obviously has to be worth the effort of a re-editing it to be LinkedIn layout friendly and uploading it.

Do you have a link to that page on your site please? It sounds like it maybe really useful for my planning

 

[fisicx]

I've never bothered pushing content on other sites. In your case unless linkedin members are looking for help with excel they aren't likely to ever see your articles.

I was doing some excel work the other day and couldn't remember how to do a function. So I googled for the answer. Someone had an easy to read tutorial which gave me the answer. I have no idea who they were or what else was on their site. It's quite likely you will get the same: people searching for answers then leaving your site.

That's what happens on this page:

Interest Calculations | Loan Payment Plugin

Fixed, simple, compound and amortization interest calculations for loans and mortgages

loanpaymentplugin.com

People get the answer and then leave.

 

[fisicx]

What might work better is writing case studies. You tell the story about the problem the client was having and what you did. If there were some complex functions you could link out to a second article explaining how the function works. But don't give away all your secrets. Tell the reader that you can't just copy and paste as each solution is bespoke. It's what I do here:

Home | Calculator Variants

Just some of the many calculators I've created over the years. Some of them are free to use, some were built for clients. If you…

variants.loanpaymentplugin.com

 

[Excel-Expert]

Thanks.

I think for Excel stuff it is not really giving away secrets. When the reader googled what they were looking for, they would have been offered dozens of other free alternative functions to download - many of them would work in the same way as mine. By not giving away the function, they will just click on to the next search result.

I am hoping to write articles around the functions explaining how they work in plain English (i.e. no techno jargon) and how they can be adapted for use by the reader. Most alternatives just offer a lump of code with no explanation, leaving the reader floundering.

The functions will be added to a toolkit of handy functions, that the reader can download as one file (if they sign up to a newsletter etc).

For Wordpress calculators, I presume there are no readily available free alternatives and programming one from scratch would be beyond most readers abilities. It makes sense to keep those secret and selling them.

 

[fisicx]

Back to the beginning. Is the purpose of the articles to just be helpful or are you hoping to get new leads?

If it’s the former then traffic is irrelevant. If it’s the latter focus more on case studies.

 

[Excel-Expert]

Don't get me wrong, I hear you on the case studies and they will be given on the website. And as you suggested, I will also be spinning off separate articles on any handy functions I build in the process.

The heavy content idea had a few elements to it, marketing just being one of them The marketing element of it is probably flawed and I will revisit that after your advice.

BTW - The other elements to the idea was building up content for putting together books/guides and maybe a toolkit of ready made functions or Excel add-ons. These would then either be sold on Amazon etc or given away as freebies for newsletter sign ups. But I was mainly thinking about doing this just to squeeze more life out of the content.

 

[UkAppCoder]

Excuse me for interrupting here, lads, but do either of you see some potential for a synergetic collaboration here?

Hint: some people like webpage calculators, others prefer spreadsheets. Currently, each of you are providing only one of these types, but either can quite easily be converted to the other.

And there's another trending medium. Can you spot it?

 

[Excel-Expert]

Excuse me for interrupting here, lads, but do either of you see some potential for a synergetic collaboration here?

Hint: some people like webpage calculators, others prefer spreadsheets. Currently, each of you are providing only one of these types, but either can quite easily be converted to the other.

And there's another trending medium. Can you spot it?

I love a good collaboration, but I suspect @fisicx and I have interests that will conflict on this one. I am guessing, he will want people to go online to use his calculators and he will earn money from keeping his calculations hidden. Where as my aim would be to give things away for free, including the calculations, to show off my skills. The hope is either increasing my profile or me becoming my customers first choice when they have bigger projects.

If @fisicx can see an opportunity I would love to discuss and work on it with him

 

[Paul Norman]

I always publish articlces on my own digital real estate.

I then use platforms like LinkedIn to attempt to drive traffic to my site(s).

I have done articles on LinkedIn. A couple got a decent number of views, too. But I want traffic driven to my own shop front.

 

[Excel-Expert]

Hi Paul,

Did the articles on LinkedIn translate into visitors to your digital real estate?

Most of my articles can be accompanied by a file to download e.g. an example of the function discussed in the article, or a copy of the tool discussed in the article. I could potentially redirect LinkedIn readers to the article on my website so they can download the file. They would then be on my digital real estate

 

[fisicx]

Most of my articles can be accompanied by a file to download...

People are very reluctant to download files. download = virus

Had a friend who paid a marketing company to publish articles on linkedin every couple of weeks. After 2 years he stopped as they didn't generate a single lead.

 

[UkAppCoder]

Excel-Expert said:

I love a good collaboration, but I suspect @fisicx and I have interests that will conflict on this one. I am guessing, he will want people to go online to use his calculators and he will earn money from keeping his calculations hidden. Where as my aim would be to give things away for free, including the calculations, to show off my skills. The hope is either increasing my profile or me becoming my customers first choice when they have bigger projects.

If @fisicx can see an opportunity I would love to discuss and work on it with him

I have a thousand and one project ideas. One of them is my calculators project. I have a basic app with a simple categorisation architecture. Often takes minutes to incorporate new calculators into this app and upload to Google Play.

I would like to have a separate website specifically for calculators. This is something I've been thinking about for a while. I would like to offer calculators for mobile devices, spreadsheets and webpages.

Now obviously it would be difficult for one person to create and develop calculators in all three formats - touch-screen, spreadsheets and webpages. So, since I've been seeing you and fisicx around here recently, I just thought I'd mention it to see what you think.

I know that all three formats are in demand depending on customer preferences and requirements. Also, overlapping skillsets could be to everyone's advantage. There would also be many other advantages.

Apologies for taking your thread off topic. I suppose it is related to developing your business, but we could PM if you like.

 

[Excel-Expert]

Apologies for taking your thread off topic. I suppose it is related to developing your business, but we could PM if you like.

No apologies needed. I'm actually on the lookout for services to collaborate with to expand on the services I offer. A phone app developer maybe one of those collaborations I will need in the future.

We have had a few instances where clients wants remote workers to access and update data held in the office via a phone. When it is just a handful of people it is do-able with Office 365 and some file sharing, but is mostly impractical and far from ideal. In an ideal world they would need a central database, accessed by a phone app and a reporting tool / central tool in the office (Excel, PowerBI etc)

So there is always space for collaborations

 

[Paul Norman]

Hi Paul,

Did the articles on LinkedIn translate into visitors to your digital real estate?

Most of my articles can be accompanied by a file to download e.g. an example of the function discussed in the article, or a copy of the tool discussed in the article. I could potentially redirect LinkedIn readers to the article on my website so they can download the file. They would then be on my digital real estate

The articles on LinkedIn did not convert.

The posts, drawing attention to articles on my website, converted better. Not amazingly, but significantly better.

 

[Excel-Expert]

Thanks Paul.

That is an important distinction "Articles vs Promotional Posts" which I had messed up in my posts. Hence some of the crossed wires between me and Fisicx - sorry Fisicx.

The plan to put articles on LinkedIn is now gone, instead I will keep them on my website and post about them on LinkedIn.

Thanks Everyone