A Pity Party and Bad News about Blogging
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Hubby brought this cartoon home from work several weeks ago. I had intended to post it earlier with quite a few LOL and HA HA HA’s and ROFL, but never quite got around to it.
Lately though, I’ve been feeling both sides of this. The Darling Daughter, 12yo, has been on school holidays for the last two and a half weeks. Hubby was home ‘sick’ last week with a bad back, and a couple of days this week with the flu (no, not man-flu thankfully, just ordinary flu).
So in the last few weeks I’ve launched the Two Hour Business Plan in the middle of finding time for a 12yo on holidays, looking after an injured/sick husband and then the lovely generous man (hear the sarcasm there?) decided to pass his revolting germs on to me. Gee, thanks honey.
Self Pity and Woe Is Me is not what today’s post is about though. Today I thought I’d have a chat about blogging with a business and list some resources that I use. Some of the links are affiliate links, so if you end up buying any of these I might make enough to buy a cup of coffee, with cream. Maybe.
Business blogging
I’m going to assume that everyone reading this knows what a blog is and what RSS is. If not, feel free to email me and ask. No, it’s not a silly question and you wouldn’t be the first person to ask me.
What’s your blog’s purpose?
Blogging is really useful for your business but it’s not a golden ladder leaning against the wall of huge profits. It takes time, effort, technique and purpose. It can also be a huge waste of time for very little ROI (Return On Investment).
Before you go putting all that work into your blog, you have to know why you’re doing it. Here’s some of the things that a well-written blog can do:
- attract potential customers
- improve your website’s SEO (as long as the blog is on the same domain as the site)
- show people that you know what you’re talking about
- build a community of like-minded people through comments and discussion
- advertise sales, specials, new products
Know why before you start
Too many people jump into blogging for their business without a clear direction and purpose for it. Just like everything else in business you need to know what result you’re working towards, so you know when you’re on track and if it’s working or not.
Know what you’re doing and why, and then aim every single post towards that purpose.
Readers aren’t buyers
I’m mainly talking to those who sell a service here, although this is still true – albeit to a lesser extent – for those who sell physical products.
Your blog readers aren’t your clients.
The majority of people who read your blog, subscribe to your RSS, comment on your posts – they’ll never buy from you. This tends to be a shock for a lot of people, it sure was for me, when you’ve put in hours and hours and hours writing posts and then you realise that the readers aren’t actually buyers.
The majority of your readers are there for the free content. There’s nothing wrong with that, and business blogging is still a great way to spread the word of what you do. But if you’re looking at several thousand readers and wondering why they’re not buying – welcome to reality.
Readers don’t look at your website
The majority of readers never visit your website after the first hit, when they subscribe to your RSS. So you can update your site to your hearts content, fill it with ads, promote every product under the sun and your readers still won’t know about it.
If you want your readers to know something, put it in a blog post with a powerful headline.
Partial feeds mean non-readers
So when a lot of people realise the above fact they decide to make their RSS feed only partial, meaning that RSS subscribers will see the first paragraph and have to click through to read the remainder of the post on the website. Yay! More hits on the site, better SEO and people see your site and ads, yes?
No.
Statistics show that partial feeds actually reduce readership. Your first paragraph is going to have to be absolutely riveting and compelling to get people to click through. Most readers won’t bother. But if you have a full feed in your RSS – meaning the entire post is there in the reader or email – then most people will read it.
So why bother with blogging?
It’s a pretty depressing picture here isn’t it? The readers don’t buy, they don’t visit the website and they don’t read partial feeds. Why bother putting the effort in?
Because blogging will draw more people to your site. It shows people what you can do and gives them confidence in you. Used properly, blogging will attract the right people and get them recommending you. It’s a great tool, but that’s all it is, a tool.
Use blogging wisely and with a clear purpose, and it will help grow your business.
Blogging Resources
Here’s some resources to help you get the most out of your blogging. They’re all ebooks that I have bought and used myself.
31 Days to Build a Better Blog
31 Days to Build a Better Blog is a downloadable e-book designed to help you revitalize your blog by giving you 31 tasks that will all help to turn it into the page view powerhouse you’ve always dreamed of.
Each day in the project contains:
A Task – something to DO that day.
Teaching – each day you’ll be given great instruction on both the WHY and HOW of the task of the day.
It’s normally $39 but when I checked the link for this post I noticed it’s only $19.95. I have no idea how long this price is valid for though.
On a side note, I’m looking to run a blogging workshop during August for those who are interested in developing their blogs using this ebook. It’ll be free (but you have to purchase the ebook), and I’m still working out the details. If this sounds like something you’d be interested in please let me know in the comments.
Taken from the Beyond Bricks and Mortar sales page:
The Practical Strategy to market your Offline business using Online tools
Beyond Bricks and Mortar gives you the solid footing you need to access practical, useful information on how to blog for your business – when your business isn’t online.
Beyond Bricks and Mortar fills the gap when you’re standing confused on the edge of the online world, unclear on how to bridge it for your physical business, and wondering who’ll tell you how to do that.
This is an amazing book written for those who have physical businesses with an online presence.
How to Build a Professional Blog
How to Build a Professional Blog – the Quick Start Guide to Plan, Launch and Profit with your own Successful Blog.
$47 value, and absolutely free. Gotta love that! 
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The Clean Shower Guide to Marketing
This one of my favourite posts that was originally published early last year. Now updated and edited to be even more good-er. Enjoy!
I was cleaning the shower the other day. This is something I do regularly. Once a year is regular, right? Just kidding – I clean it a lot more often than that. While sloshing water around and scrubbing the tiles it occurred to me that cleaning the shower is in many ways like marketing your home business.
Read through and let me know what you think.
Firstly it needs to be done regularly. I once lived in a house where we thought the bottom half of the shower door and side was frosted glass, and that round bit on the floor was anti-slip coating. About a week or so after moving in, I cleaned it. Yes, it was ordinary clear glass underneath and plain tiled floor. Yuck.
If you clean your shower regularly, it’s easy. If you market your business regularly, it’s easy. Consistency in small efforts is a lot easier and yields much greater rewards than neglecting it and having to put in hours of backbreaking, gut-wrenching work. It’s much easier to keep up than to catch up.
If it’s done wrong you could end up with a greater mess. Sloshing buckets of water around may be great fun, watching it splash, however it has a tendency to, well, splash. And go everywhere, generally all over the bathroom walls and floor – outside of the shower. Or it just rinses the walls and floor and doesn’t actually clean anything.
You can spend as much money and time as you have on marketing, but if it’s not directed to the right people, if it’s not solving a problem for them, if it’s not compelling them to buy, then it’s a waste of time and money. Know why you’re using a particular marketing tactic, do it right, be focused and see the benefits. Make sure you’re marketing to a niche and not a demographic.
Use the right tools and know why you’re using them. You wouldn’t go to clean the shower with the vacuum cleaner would you? Or with a leaf rake? Of course not, they’re tools for other tasks. You go into the shower with some kind of cleaner, cloths to wipe, some way to rinse off the walls, bleach to clean the tiles if needed, maybe a squeegee. You know precisely what you’re doing (cleaning the shower) and the appropriate tools that you need to do that.
This is where you need to know your target market intimately and thoroughly, inside and out. Why do they buy? Where and how do they buy? What solution does your product provide? How do you market specifically and directly to these people? What medium do they use (online, magazines, forums) to find out about products and ask questions? There’s no point putting an advertisement in the financial times newspaper if your target market loves parenting forums. Don’t put money into any form of marketing just because someone says you should. Know how it relates to your market and what result you expect from it.
It takes work and planning. You clean the walls before the floor. Put bleach on the tiles (my apologies to the environmentalists here) and let it start working before you begin to scrub. And no matter what product you put on the glass and tiles, it still needs some elbow grease to be spotlessly clean. With cleaning, as with marketing, you need to plan the best order to do things.
You can’t sell a product and then tell the customer why they need it. The customer needs to be educated about what it does and why they want it. You, the business owner, need to make this happen. Customers don’t come up and say “I want to buy this widget, what does it do?”. Nuh uh. Customers see your marketing, which tells them how your widget solves their problem and world peace at the same time. And then they come to buy.
And lastly you need to be committed. If you just give the shower a quick swipe over with a dry cloth once a month then you might think you can call it ‘cleaning the shower’. But is it really? If you put an ad in the cheapest magazine once a month, is it the ads fault that no one buys? I have a friend who often tells me that she wishes she could have a profitable online business. And then goes on to tell me how she’s not interested in writing blog posts, or going on forums, or spending money on upgrading her website. She’s not committed to the process or the work required. If your business isn’t profitable, or not as profitable as you’d like, check your own commitment and activity levels first.
What do you think? Are you using the right tools in the right way to clean your shower as efficiently and effectively as possible?
Passive income – is it all it’s cracked up to be?
I’ve received some emails lately and had a couple of discussions with clients on setting up passive income so they only have to work a couple of hours a week. This is a topic that seems to keep rearing it’s head, and there’s a lot of myths, rumours and some truths floating around on what passive income is and what it does.
What is passive income
It’s where you create a product once and sell it forever. Set it up on your website with your shopping cart and people buy it from you without you having to do any more work or spend any further time on it in the future.
Ebooks, e-courses, recordings, reports – they’re all forms of products that lend themselves well to passive income.
Affiliate sales is another form of passive income, however in this post I’m focussing just on the sale of information products as passive income.
What makes passive income passive?
Think Tim Ferriss and his Four Hour Work Week – he recommends outsourcing everything in your business to India, setting up some streams of passive income and living happily ever after without having to do any work.
It’s a great theory, and very attractive at that, after all, who doesn’t want to have money coming in with no effort? But when you really start looking at what’s involved in so-called ‘Passive Income’ it’s not the mecca of riches that it’s purported to be.
Yes, it works to a certain point. But not as well as the get-rich-quick guru’s would have you believe.
It’s not really passive
You’re going to put a lot of work into the product to begin with. A good product that will sell over time isn’t going to be thrown together as fast as a blog post. Nor is it something that you can hand off to a VA or copywriter to produce 100% for you. YOU are going to have to put time, effort, hours, blood, sweat and tears into creating a kick-ass product.
You’ve got to promote it. Sure, there’s the initial launch and promotion that everyone expects to have. But what’s after that? Once you’ve launched it, how do people find out about it afterwards? Google searches and adsense/adwords? Not techniques that I’d want to be relying on exclusively.
Today’s product won’t work tomorrow
Information and products become redundant over time – often a very short time. Technology and knowledge advances and a advice that worked well only a few months ago may now be totally useless. You’re going to have to update your information and products and keep them current. How often you update depends on the product. The point is though; you can’t create a product and expect it to sell long term in a constantly changing world.
If you’re planning to make your main income from passive income then you’ll need to be constantly creating new products to sell and updating older products.
You can’t outsource everything
If you’re in a business for the long term then you’ll have to spend time building your business yourself. You can’t outsource your knowledge and experience. People who buy from you are paying for YOUR knowledge and experience, in a form that they can learn from.
It’s one thing to use a copywriter to turn a ho-hum piece of work into a great selling ebook. It’s quite another to be paying someone from India a pittance to write an ebook for you with information gleaned from a google search.
If you’re looking to build a community, build long term trust and loyal clients who love your product, then you can’t outsource the substance of your work. You’re the one who is going to have to put in the mental effort required to create the products to sell.
So am I for passive income or against it?
Yup, the tone of this post has been fairly negative hasn’t it? Information products as passive income does work, however it’s not a way for you to sit back and take ten months holiday a year while the dollars pour in. Anyone who tells you that it’s that easy is a snake oil salesman.
Heck, I have information products for sale on this site – that’s passive income like I’m talking about in this post. I’ve also got thousands of dollars in information products on my computer and my ipod. I’d be a real hypocrite if I said they didn’t work.
What I am saying is that information products aren’t a get rich quick scheme. It’s a way – and a good one at that – to leverage your work and maximise the return on investment of your time.
If you’re going to do it well though, then you’re going to have to work at it. It’s not set and forget, it’s continually tweak, upgrade, innovate and create.
What do you all think? Do you sell information products? Agree or disagree with what I’ve said? Come and comment and let me know what you think.
How to screw up a cold call and lose customers
We all need to market and sell our stuff, right? That’s the whole point of being in business. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to sell.
Sell something the right way and the person is happy they dealt with you and everyone is pleased by the whole transaction. Sell the wrong way – or try to – and it ends up a bun fight.
How Not to Cold Call
A few weeks ago I had the dubious pleasure of receiving a business cold call. By the time the call finished I was so angry I rang my husband at work to vent – the venting took longer than the call. (Hubby ended up being late for a meeting, and told his boss “She was way angrier than you, and I have to live with her” LOL)
Normally cold calls don’t bother me. We’re on the Do-Not-Call register so if we DO receive any cold calls it’s generally for my business. Usually it’s enough to tell the person very clearly “Nope, not interested, thanks for your time” and that’s the end of it. Not this call. Here’s how NOT to cold call someone:
The one thing they did right
They rang during the day. Ring me in the evening and you’ve got me offside from the second I pick up the phone. Business hours people, that’s what they’re for.
I love you forever, what’s your name?
The salesperson introduced herself and told me the name of the person she was calling for – I slightly know this business owner from a couple of forums that we’re both on. Her script, after the intro, went something like:
Our business helps other small businesses just like yours to grow and make more money. Tell me about your business, what do you do?
Huh? You rang me, you help businesses just like mine, but you don’t actually know what my business does?
Imagine you’re in a bar and a complete stranger comes up to you, takes you in his (or her) arms, looks into your eyes and says in complete seriousness “I love you and want to marry you, have kids with you and be together until we die. Oh, and what’s your name?”
You’d be like “Get away from me you freakin weirdo!”
That’s what this call was like. First you tell me your business is to help small businesses just like mine to grow – and then you ask me what my business is? If you don’t know what I do then how do you know that your business can help me?
Do some research. Look at my website – it’ll tell you. That’s what it’s there for (ok, one of the things). Or at least reword your script so it’s not so contradictory and doesn’t make me think you’re ignorant.
Pushy Pushy
I told the salesperson a very brief and general description of what I do. She suggested that I needed to narrow down my niche. I said it was a lot more focussed but my description would do for now. That didn’t please her at all. Did she really expect me to discuss my business in detail with a stranger who called me?
And then she started on her spiel. She was selling a course on creating info-products. I’d seen some details from the business owner on a forum, so I knew what she was talking about.
“No thanks, I’m not interested at the moment”
You know how in sales books they tell you that a ‘No’ is only an objection? Well, this person had been reading those books.
She began on the marketing questions that are designed so you either have to sound like a complete idiot to turn it down or you open the door for more selling. Her question was something along the lines of:
“Do you want to learn how to sell more effective and higher priced information products to your customers?”
Well, what am I supposed to say? “No, I like being broke and not selling anything” how stupid would that answer be? But if I say “Of course I do” then she’s got an open door to keep pushing the sale.
So I didn’t answer. I pointed out that it’s a typical marketing question designed to either open the door or make me look stupid, and I don’t appreciate being manipulated. And said again “No, I’m not interested in this product”
The pushy got worse
I’m sure she took my ‘No’ as a personal challenge because she continued to try and sell to me. I ended up saying ‘No’ at least three times, very clearly. I told her “I’m not interested and I’m not your ideal client” and she kept on pushing to sell!
At this point I was interrupting her and talking over the top of her. Rude, yes, but it was the only way to let her know I wasn’t interested short of outright hanging up on her.
It ended when I told her (again) I wasn’t interested and was going to hang up. At that point she agreed I wasn’t their client and we said a rather terse goodbye.
Do unto others….
How many of us enjoy having someone disrespect us and ignore us when we tell them no? Who wants to get off a call feeling they’ve just been manipulated and sold something they didn’t really want? Why are these sales techniques still being taught?
A few years ago I read “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” by John Cialdini. In it he discusses the brain conditioning and instinctive responses that we’re all wired with. Marketers hook into this brain wiring and structure their questions so we’ll give them the answer they want rather than look a fool.
Marketing or a Used Car Salesman?
Cold calling works – I won’t deny that. But at what ethical cost? Do you really want to sell to someone knowing that they bought because you twisted their responses? That’s why Naomi and Sonia created ‘Marketing for Nice People’ last year, because everyone is so fed up with the manipulative, sleazy sales techniques that are being used. (Marketing for Nice People is no longer available unfortunately, but if you’re looking for a marketing course try the Marketing 101 – great course!)
The point of marketing is to make the customer be panting to buy the product, to be standing there with their wallet in hand throwing money at you. Not because it’s the only way to get rid of you, but because they can see how that product is going to change their life forever and THEY MUST HAVE IT NOW!!!
Pt 1, the end
After the call, when I’d calmed down reasonably, I sent a message to the business owner to let her know that the call went badly and that I hadn’t appreciated being pushed and manipulated by a hard-selling salesperson. Tomorrow I’ll show you her response, and we’ll have a chat about receiving feedback. Let me just say, her reply was even more entertaining than the cold call!
Black Magic SEO vs Logic
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Used under Creative Commons Attribution licence, from RankedHard SEO
Hehehehe, found this online and loved it. How true!
(If you’re looking for an easily understandable SEO book, check out IttyBiz SEO School (opens in new window) – fantastic ebook. Leads you step by step through how to set up SEO on your site and why it all works, written in plain english for the non-techie. Note: the price isn’t on the page but it’s $39.00 and worth every cent!)
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The web's business planning expert - just for work at home mums. Together we'll find the time for you to make money.