You start up a business.

You understand the only way to make it succeed is to market it.

So you choose a marketing method. Let’s say its an advertisement in a magazine.

You spend the time putting together the ad, work with a graphic designer to make it professional, and wind up giving it a try by signing a three month contract.

It runs for three months, yet little happens. You get a phone call or two with inquiries. And maybe even one new client – a small one. But it really didn’t bring in the thousands you had hoped for, so you drop the ad. It didn’t work, right?

So you move on.

You try the yellow pages for three months. Same results.

You try a postcard. Same results.

You try radio. Same results.

And your dreams of running a great business soon die as you simply can’t pay the bills. You just don’t have the business coming in that you had hoped for.

This is a common scenerio in the world of small business.

And while hopefully you see the problem with this type of marketing, in many ways that same understanding doesn’t transfer over to the online world.

The problem I described above all comes down to longevity.

Its proven it takes on average multiple messages before a potential client notices you,  8+ times depending on what you are selling.

Different people are at different points in the sales cycle, and are looking for different things. Some people are just starting their research; others are ready to buy. When they first notice you, they have to build up the trust factor. By seeing your name again and again, that trust grows.

But the problem comes in creating a marketing cycle that is too short for recognition. You put time and energy into building the marketing tool, only to cancel it right when people are beginning to take notice.

For the three months in the magazine example, a person may have looked through each magazine once or twice – which may mean they’ve seen your ad three to six times depending on if they were looking for it. And right when they begin to notice it, you pull the ad and its gone.

The same applies to the Internet.

Many companies today hear about the benefits of blogging. So they work with a designer, build a blog, invest in graphics and images, put it all together, and start blogging. A company blogs a few times, has trouble writing, so they put it aside not knowing what to say.

This is like buying a box of postcards, but leaving them on your desk because you don’t know who to mail them to.

Then they invest in ghost blogging. Someone else comes to the rescue and begins to blog on relevant topics and keywords exclusively for their blog. They blog week after week. Google starts noticing and the blog begins to rise out of the sandbox. The posts start attracting attention and move into position under a variety of keywords. The content is good, so multiple other sites and blogs start noticing and connecting to it. Traffic starts coming, and things start happening.

Yet in three months, the company may or may not have a new client. They are beginning to attract attention online, but it might not have converted to a new client yet.

Then the owner evaluates, finds no clients have come from the blog, and they cancel the service.

Without fresh content, the blog quickly dies. Google won’t post it if its not supplying fresh content into the search engines. Other sites and blogs won’t reference it if its not current information.

And the owner sadly thinks “one more thing didn’t work”.

Yet blogging actually has more benefits than traditional marketing.

With an advertisement in a magazine, it works as long as someone reads that magazine. The majority of people read that magazine when its delivered, with readership dropping off substantially when the next issue arrives.

Yet with blogging, new posts actually increase the readership of your previous posts. As your blog becomes more popular, when they enter your site, they stick around and click to read more. Meaning your old posts have just as much pull as you new ones.

If you’ve been blogging for a year at once per week, that’s 52 posts. Its easy to connect them to go more in-depth and continue building on your content. And if they each provide content on a different keyword – a different topic – you also have the opportunity to come up in Google search results multiple times, depending on what people search for.

Blogging isn’t a get rich quick marketing method. You can’t blog a handful of times and expect huge results.

But if you commit to it and continue blogging month after month, you will see results over time.

Some of our clients that “get it” have been blogging for years. They have hundreds of posts, all helping them gain attraction in both Google and other online resources every single day.

It works if you keep doing it. Whether you blog yourself, or hire a ghost blogger, it is the one marketing method that will increase substantially the more you do it.