Sep212005
Marketing expert increases visibility with a blog
Filed under Marketing by Michael Klusek at 5:59 pm on Sep 21 2005
Bizwomen: Where women in business meet to network, connect, support, learn and grow..
A few years ago, Mary Schmidt was earning a reputation as an innovative marketing mastermind, but her visibility on the Internet needed improvement. "I had a couple people who had a hard time finding me [on the Internet]. They were entering my name into Google and some lady in Kansas was coming up," recalls Schmidt, a marketing troubleshooter/business developer and sole proprietor of Schmidt & Associates in Albuquerque. So this April, on her Web site containing opinions and ideas about marketing strategies, Schmidt began posting blogs, or informal Web journals.
Thanks to that, folks looking for her online aren’t finding themselves in Kansas any more. And the marketing expert found a whole new way to market herself, through blogs, which could hold the key for other businesses looking to stand out in the crowd and on the Internet’s major search engines. "My Web site traffic has gone up significantly and from a wider variety of visitors from all over the world," says Schmidt. "And, if you Google ‘Mary Schmidt,’ I’m the first of [more than] 13,000 results." Prospective clients of Schmidt’s now often remark that they’ve read and liked her blogs.
"Blogs are a great way to really get people’s attention, and then they really understand what kind of value I can bring to them as a marketing troubleshooter. It’s all about establishing that relationship with potential clients," Schmidt says.
"The whole culture of the blog is more personal, more informal, more about building relationships," Schmidt adds. "People respond to blogs. You have to be ready and able to take criticism. You have to be able to take feedback. I put the responses on the Web site. Very intelligent people disagree all the time. I often learn more from a client than they learn from me."
