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 Creative and productive Blog Marketing. SocialMedia, News, Money, Traffic, and so on. Fri, 03 Oct 2008 05:17:00 +0200 So, if you're like everyone else (including me), you're probably sick of hearing about the sluggish economy (cue the groans). Lots of business owners and executives are frustrated by shrinking market share and bottom lines that are bottoming out. Unfortunately, too often, companies axe their marketing budgets to compensate for the short fall, which is a huge mistake. Lack of cash flow is a real challenge that many companies today face. What do you do with the vicious cycle in which you 1) no longer have enough traffic coming through the door to 2) make enough money to advertise and 3) keep traffic coming through the door? It's all about the little things. I advise my clients to concentrate on the little efforts, the cheap and free activities, the referral campaigns and relationship building activities. It's great to run TV spots and huge orchestrated pay per click campaigns- when you can afford to. They are proven, effective marketing methods. But these costly platforms are a diminishing opportunity for many small business owners today. My advice is to get your business in front as many people as possible using other avenues: Referrals - begin by working your past and current clients. You may find this to be your best quality-lead generating activity because you gain instant credibility when you are referred by someone who has done business with you. Clean up your database (don't have one? tsk tsk, start one now!) and start contacting people. Send handwritten "thank yous" or "thinking of yous", and include a scratch off lotto ticket. Hold an open house, start a newsletter, offer a gift or discount in exchange for referrals, leave a little gift on their doorsteps with your business cards.... There are so many fun ways to do this! Use your creativity. Newsletters / eNewsletters - this is a great way to keep in touch with your target audience and keep your business "top of mind". Better yet? This is a great vehicle to position yourself as an expert in your industry by sharing insider opinions and observations on your industry's trends and changes. If you're nervous about writing articles, get some help from a decent writer or hire a copywriter to create a final draft from your notes. Some great ways to compel clients and prospects to sign up for your newsletter or eNewsletter is to respect privacy, don't bombard them with messages, provide both industry information and lighter, more enjoyable reading and anecdotes, and don't forget to offer newsletter / eNewsletter coupons, offers and specials only available to subscribers. Get Published - there are quite a few sites out there for publishing your own content like Associated Content and EzineArticles. This could include your own original articles, and reprints of articles written for your newsletter, and blog posts. Each site has their own policies and requirements for your pieces, so be sure to review prior to writing and submitting. This activity benefits you in a couple ways: 1) you gain the credibility of being a published author, again positioning you as an expert in your industry, 2) you will turn up in search engines which means opportunities for new prospects to find out about you and your business, 3) these sites give you the ability to set up a bio about yourself, so be sure to include a link to your website. All the links out there leading back to your website improve your search engine ranking. Join an Organization- I recently joined ASBA, the Arizona Small Business Association and they are great! The membership is very inexpensive and they offer a wide array of educational workshops, informational seminars, Toastmasters and writing classes, and even health insurance! Take advantage of the many opportunities to network with other business owners for purposes of growing your business and get and give leadership and support. Check them out at ASBA.com. Along these lines, you may also want to check out SCORE, and non-profit volunteer opportunities as well.
Sat, 11 Oct 2008 22:43:00 +0200 Should blogs have comments? It is a question that comes up fairly regularly in blogging circles and one that different bloggers take different approaches to.
Between these views other bloggers take a variety of other approaches ranging from:
There are many options - but I thought it’d be interesting to open it up for some discussion.
Interested to see where this discussion leads us. Further Reading on Comments on Blogs:
Sat, 08 Nov 2008 15:47:00 +0100
At this point TwiTip is firmly in ‘beta’ (if not alpha). It has a long way to go in terms of content, design and almost every other aspect of building a blog. I generally would get a blog in a much better state before going public about it (and I wouldn’t launch it on a Sunday night or on US election eve) - but I thought it’d be interesting for readers of ProBlogger to see the development of TwiTip from the ground up. So far you have not missed much but let me give you a catchup on what I’ve done so far: HostingI’ve set it up on a very basic hosting package (GoDaddy of all places - I just wanted to get it up quick and as it grows I’ll move it to a more reliable service). DesignI’m using the Thesis WordPress theme (I’ve long wanted to test it on a live site and I have to say that it’s amazing). My blog design skills are poor but Thesis is easy to set up and configure - it is also set up really well for SEO which is cool. I plan to give the design more personality in time (I’ll get a designer in to overhaul it) but in the mean time Thesis is a great option and will be a good basis for the design tweaks that will come). So far I’ve developed a few WordPress ‘pages’ that take the design beyond the default set up. These include an ‘about’ page, contact page and a ‘write for TwiTip’ page. ContentI usually would have at least 5 posts live on a blog before launching it but in this case have 3 (including one welcome post). I would normally also have a couple of posts in reserve for the next few days. Again - I’ve gone public early as a bit of a case study but will get another post up in the next 24 hours to keep a little momentum building. My plan with content for TwiTip is for it not to be a daily update initially. I’ll start out with 3 posts a week and work towards more as I find my feet (and perhaps as I bring on other contributers). My focus in the early days will be quality rather than quantity. PromotionSo far all I’ve done promotion wise is Tweet that I’ve launched TwiTip. That was a nice start because the audience on Twitter obviously have an interest in the topic and it was retweeted quite widely through the Twittersphere pretty quickly. Other than the Tweet announcing the new blog (and now this post) my only other strategy for finding new readers has been more about on site ‘hooks’ - highlighting subscription methods and encouraging people to track with me on Twitter and RSS. AnalyticsI’ve set up Google Analytics on TwiTip. While it is a little slow and not great for analyzing stats as traffic events are happening on your blog in real time it’s such a solid tool that it was a no brainer of a choice. Setting Up RSS FeedThe only other task that I’ve completed so far is to set up the RSS feed over on Feedburner. So now the feed is not a ‘TwiTip.com’ one but a Google/Feedburner one. I find that it is best to do this on day one to keep eveyrone subscribing to the same feed. I’m yet to see how many people have subscribed and don’t plan to add a feedburner counter in the short term (in the past I’ve waited until subscriber numbers hit 1000). Things Still to DoI’ve done a few other miscellaneous things including adding a ’subscribe to comments’ plugin, a ‘tweet this’ plugin and adding a sidebar polling tool. There is still a lot to do to get TwiTip up and running to a point that I’ll be happy with it! These include:
This is just the beginning of the list (and I’m sure many of you will come up with other suggestions in comments below). The more I do the more I think of. For this reason I’m going to take my time with this launch. I’ll continue to document my progress here on ProBlogger as I go. Update - a few people have been asking how readership has been so far. It’s a little difficult to tell at this point, I’m yet to see an update of how many Feedburner subscribers there are. Google Analytics shows around 1600 visitors for day 1 (but that’s not finished updating for the day). The vast majority of readers have come from my tweets (and the retweets of others. There have also been a few visitors from facebook (where my tweets get republished) and a few others from StumbleUpon where there are a few reviews/stumbles already). I’m yet to see full stats yet and will update it at some point. Sun, 23 Nov 2008 02:53:00 +0100 “Why do bloggers put so much focus upon growing RSS subscriber numbers to their blog if most of them only ever read your content in Feed Readers and don’t visit your blog?” This question (or variations of it) hit my inbox 3 times in 24 hours from different people so I thought I’d tackle it as a post instead of individual replies. Let me start by saying that this problem can be frustrating. You see your RSS subscriber number growing by your actual visitor numbers remain steady - as do your comment numbers. It can actually feel like you’re wasting your time - I remember myself feeling kinda like this guy when I first noticed this happening to me:
However all is not lost. There are a number of points that I’d like to make in responding to this question about RSS subscribers not visiting a blog. I hope that they give those facing this problem a little hope, encouragement and also a few ways forward. 1. A subscriber that never visits is better than a one off visitor who never returnsI had one blogger recently tell me that he’d removed the option to subscribe to his blog via RSS from his blog because he didn’t want to ‘give away’ his content. He wanted people who read his content to ‘pay’ him by visiting his blog (and earning him money from his advertising) and he saw RSS subscribers as ‘freeloaders’. My response to him was that I’d rather have a subscriber who rarely visits my actual blog than a one off visitors who never returns because they have no way of keeping in touch. While a subscriber might not actually visit your blog they are a powerful connection to have. My reasons for this will hopefully become evident in the points that follow. 2. Every post you put in front of a subscriber is an opportunity to reinforce your brand.RSS subscribers are opting in to receive your content. When they hit ’subscribe’ they are putting themselves inside your sphere of influence and are asking you to teach, inspire and communicate with them. Each time you hit publish on a post and a subscriber sees something that you’ve written you have the potential to deepen the relationship, trust and influence that you have with your subscriber. While this might not have an immediate pay off in terms of advertising revenue - it can have a long term ‘pay off’. 3. RSS subscribers are InfluencersRSS is used by a smallish percentage of the population (around 11% at latest reports). While the percentage may be smallish - I have a suspicion that they are a reasonably tech savvy and influential bunch of people. I’m guessing here - but I suspect that those who use RSS are also likely to have blogs themselves, they’re more likely to be into social networking, messaging and bookmarking tools. This makes RSS readers a potentially very influential audience - capable of spreading news of your posts and blog throughout the web very quickly. 4. Making the Mind shift from Traffic to InfluenceWhen I started blogging one of the main indicators that I looked at when measuring the success of my blog was traffic. If I had a day with lots of visitors I was happier than if I did not have anyone visit my blog. While traffic is still important to me - I’ve noticed lately that I’m checking my visitor stats less than I used to. These days I’m increasingly interested in ‘influence’. I don’t mind so much if someone reads my content on my blog, in an RSS reader or in some other tool - what matters to me is that people are reading it, that in doing so they interact with me, that they are drawn into some sort of ‘relationship’ or ‘community’ around the content. My reason for this is that I’m finding that while traffic can be monetized directly - influence is actually a more powerful (and potentially profitable) thing. Let me explain more in my next point. 5. Influence can Lead to ProfitsMore and more bloggers are discovering that while direct income earners like advertising are great - that there’s also incredible potential for bloggers to earn an income through other more indirect income sources. Making money ‘because’ of a blog rather than directly ‘from’ a blog is possible in may ways including consulting, writing books, running training and workshops, selling products, landing other paid writing gigs, speaking at conferences etc. The more people that you have some kind of influence with the increased chances of being able to monetize that influence in one of these indirect methods. A subscriber might not be visiting your blog each day but if you provide great content on a daily basis to them you can bet that the day they decide that they need to hire a consultant on your topic that they’ll come knocking on your door. 6. Other Monetization Models for RSSIndirect income is not the only possibility for RSS. There is also RSS advertising - this industry is still in its infancy and while isn’t hugely profitable using tools like AdSense I’m hearing bloggers reporting that it’s a growing income source for them. The other great opportunity for income from RSS subscribers is affiliate programs. This taps into point #5 above - when you have ‘influence’ or trust established with readers an affiliate program can be very profitable. 7. The challenge of drawing subscribers into your blogJust because someone subscribes to your blog does not mean that they’ll never visit it. In fact RSS subscribers can be among your most regular visitors to your blog if you draw them into actually visiting it. I won’t go into a lot of techniques for this in this post but using techniques like asking questions, running polls, interlinking posts, writing ‘best of’ lists and more techniques can draw subscribers into visiting your blog on a daily basis. Read more detailed tips on getting RSS readers visiting your blog. 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