Christian

Blogging for Lead Generation

By Christian

One of the questions I get most often is how to get more leads coming in from your blog posts. This is obviously a pretty huge subject, and it’s something we discuss in consulting sessions quite a bit, but I wanted to take a stab at it here and cover some basic points.

I have some notes to share with you as well as a video today. I also use the words “whilst” and “y’all”, just for fun. Hope you dig it! If you have any questions, please hit me up in the contact form. It’s my pleasure to help however I can 🙂

Here are a few principles to consider:

Consistency
Calls to action
Relevancy and Contribution
Fun (yay!)

Here is a brief outline of each:

Consistency

This is a situation where a lot of us drop the ball. I say “us”, because I’m included 100%. What I’ve found is that best results come from consistency. I work with small business owners. If you’re reading this, you’re most likely a Realtor, a chiropractor, an attorney or other small business owner or professional. As such, we don’t have unlimited time to write a blog. It needs to be efficient, and it needs to produce a result.

One thing that may stress you out is the time commitment of blogging. Don’t sweat it. It doesn’t have to be this huge project that takes all day. An hour or two per week is plenty to get results over time. Share some ideas once per week. Every Wednesday for example. No need to overthink it or turn it into a big project. If you do that, you’ll never do it.

Instead, do something that fits into your schedule. Do it consistently, and before long you’ll notice that people come to expect and look forward to your posts. This is a key element to getting results. Consistent publishing leads to consistent lead gen.

Calls to Action

When clients ask me to critique their site, they’re often looking to get more leads coming in. When I swing out to the site, I find that they’re not asking people to sign up for their email list. There are very few calls to action, and they’re not very compelling at that. This isn’t a very good combo.

If you want more inquiries or people signing up for your email list, you’re gonna have to ask. I’ve had a lot of clients express an expectation for visitors to hunt down their contact page out of appreciation for the awesome content and ideas they share on their blog. Some will. Most won’t.

Here is a video with some notes on how I place calls to action on my site (if you’re reading this in a feed reader, you may need to click here to see the video):

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Relevancy and Contribution

A couple of the frustrations I come across whilst talking with you are lack of leads and low quality leads. In other words, you’re not getting the response rate you want from your blog, and the leads you do get are not responsive or uninterested in what you do professionally. Relevancy and a focus on contribution really go a long way to help here.

By relevancy, I mean your content (both your calls to action and your blog posts) need to speak directly to the most pressing needs of your readers. A small business blog is a different animal than most others. You’re looking to produce a pretty specific result. This is marketing.

I see a LOT of small business blogs miss a lot of opportunities in this area. They spend a lot of time writing for search engines for example. Everything is really optimized and keyword rich. But the content isn’t solving any pressing problem. Your readers could care less how search optimized your site is. SEO is fine, but the one and only thing it will do is bring you visitors. You can have all the visitors in the world, but it means nothing if your blog doesn’t convert. This is why I write for people, not search engines. I know a lot of y’all disagree with me on this point, but I’d rather get less traffic and 40% conversion rates any day of the week, as opposed to a high number of visitors and very little engagement.

What’s funny is that when you write for people instead of search engines, people like your site better. They visit it often and tell their friends. Traffic is never the issue. Relevancy and contribution are what really matters. Follow these steps:

Identify your ideal prospect
Learn their biggest frustrations
Use your blog to solve their problems
Use your blog as a means of “giving back”. Share ideas and solutions with your readers. Give away too much. Give em stuff you could actually be charging for.

If you combine these steps with effective calls to action, it’s a pretty unbeatable combination!

Fun (once again…Yay!)

One of the biggest missed opportunities in the whole small business blogging world is lack of fun. Have some dang fun! Your blog doesn’t have to be perfect. Write short posts, long posts, video, pictures, podcasts…whatever the heck you want. Whatever is simple and fun for you. Yes, you may need to learn a thing or two, but simply pick up some tactics as you go and employ them. Obsessing over whether you’re doing it “right” or not (I come across this mentality all the time) is only going to keep you from taking action.

People know when it’s forced. People know when you’re doing something just because you think you’re supposed to be doing it, not because you really want to. And that’s not fun for anyone. Something funny…people think when you share ideas with them, but they ACT when they’re emotionally engaged. You can have the most badass, super-optimized rock star blog in the world, with half a million visitors every day, but if you’re not having fun and helping people solve their problems, it’s unlikely you’ll see impressive lead generation.

If you’re inclined to think you don’t really want to blog..that the truth is you really ARE doing it just because you think you’re supposed to, then that’s cool. There’s no rule you need to write a blog. It’s just a really effective and leveraged way to share ideas with people.

It really does work. This is my livelihood. It works. But just like any tool, you get out what you put in. Just because you have an office doesn’t mean people are gonna visit. Just because you have a phone doesn’t mean people are gonna call. These are simply the tools of our trade. A blog is a publishing tool. Your prospects are on the web, looking for content. This is your opportunity to get in front of them, be cool to them and get a conversation started.

If you are having fun with your blog, contributing relevant content that solves people’s problems and offering compelling calls to action as I outline in the video above, it’s nearly impossible for you to not start seeing high quality leads come in every day from your site.

It can take a minute to get the pieces put together. That’s true. It’s true that marketing and the internet has changed quite a bit over the last few years. Shoot me an email if you have questions. I’m happy to help!

That was a call to action. Get it? No seriously, send me an email! There’s a contact form right here 🙂

Darth Vader-Proofing Your Blog with Login Lockdown (Blog Security Series)

By Christian

Step one: lock your WordPress blog down against 99% of the malicious attacks out there in one fell swoop. It’s simple. It’s free. And you can set this sucker up in just a few minutes.

The most common form of attack out there is the brute force attack. Little college kids with nothing better to do write programs that will pound your login page with login attempts until they find one that works. After they’re logged in…well, you know what happens then. So let’s take a couple steps to help ensure that doesn’t happen.

When attempting to hack an account, you of course need to nail down both user name AND password. So first of all, use a solid password for god’s sake. Guys, I work on your websites every day so I KNOW what kind of passwords you’re using, and it’s pretty rare for me to see a good one 🙂

Password rules:

Alphanumeric – have your password contain both letters and numbers.
Combine upper and lower case – use at least one upper case letter in your password.
Use symbols – if you really want to screw with anyone trying to crack your password, throw in a symbol or two. You know… *$%()#. That kind of stuff.
Change it periodically, and OMG…don’t use the exact same password for all your accounts.
If you’re installing a new version of WordPress, choose an admin name other than “admin”. Nearly all WordPress logins have the user name “admin”, so selecting a different user name from the beginning is definitely a smart choice.

Now that you have a solid password and aren’t begging to get hacked, let’s lock your login form down. Any brute force attack that comes along will get shut down before it even begins. And remember from the last post, it’s not a question whether or not your site will get hit with one of these attacks. It’s just a matter of when.

Installing Login Lockdown is a smart move. If I’ve built a site for you, you already have it. If a malicious attack hits the login page of your blog, they get three attempts to crack your password. Otherwise, they get locked out and it’s flat out impossible to login. Or you can change this setting to whatever number you like. Installing it is a piece of cake. Observe…

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Questions? Hit me up!

How to Stop Darth Vader from Taking Over Your Blog

By Christian

I remember my first blog. I poured my heart into that thing. Never really made much money but I met cool people from all over the world, and it was a lot of fun.

I logged on the check comments one fine morning, and I was confused by what I found. There were no comments. None. There were also no articles. In fact, there was no website at all.

There was however a big ass picture of Darth Vader.

I sat there staring at Darth for a bit. I was in disbelief. My website was gone. Where the heck was it? I remember looking over my shoulder and around the room in confusion, as if that was going to shed some light on the matter.

The reality was clear. I had been hacked. Big time.

Let’s be real. This is a pretty extreme case. Most hacks are far less extreme. I had a friend check her site one day to find various obscene words placed randomly throughout her site. At least she still had her website 🙂

Here’s the thing: security is usually the last thing we want to think about when it comes to running a website or blog. Especially when you’re a busy business owner.

But it’s absolutely crucial. And the truth is that protecting your blog is actually pretty simple.

Over the next few articles here, I’m going to lay out a few very simple and effective ways you can prevent 99.9% of the attacks you’re bound to experience.

This is an important series of posts! Make sure you’re subscribed, so you don’t miss any of these. You need to know that if you’re running a website these days, it will be attacked. It’s not a matter of if…it’s only a matter of when.

Don’t let Darth Vader take over your website! I will show you the way. May the force be with you.

Here are the articles in the series:

https://www.dangeroustactics.com/login-lockdown-blog-security-series/
I will post the new articles here as they are published 🙂

A Really Simple Way to Make WordPress Run Faster

By Christian

I’ve had a few conversations with you all about plugins lately. And getting better, faster performance out of WordPress is always a good thing…so I wanted to share a couple pretty rockin plugins with you.

Install and run these two plugins (very simple, very free), and they can do a lot to speed up your database, make your site run faster, etc. Good stuff! I figured the simplest thing to do was show them to you in action, so here’s a quick video for you.

If you have any questions, let me know!

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As always, if you’re reading in email or a feedreader, you may need to visit the site to watch the video. Thanks 🙂

Why Content Isn’t King

By Christian

content-is-not-king — If content is not king, what is?

The success of your website isn’t entirely about “creating good content”. Let’s be clear. Content is a necessity. It needs to be:

Relevant (something your readers need or want to hear about)
Valuable (helps solve a pressing problem)
Unique (can’t find the exact same thing a million other places)

But let’s be honest. There are a lot of websites out there that possess the holy grail of “great content”. Yet they still have failed to reach their audience. They have failed to engage anyone on a high level. They have failed to generate a significant number of subscribers. They have failed to earn sufficient revenue.

When this happens, the next step is closing up shop. No one can write “great content” forever without any reciprocation. It’s time to move on and try something new.

If you have good content and ideas to share on your blog, but you’ve failed to get the results you’d like so far, there’s a reason for it. That reason might be your blog itself.

If Content isn’t King, What is?

Let’s get it straight. Content isn’t king. You are king. Content is simply your messenger. Content is just one element of your empire. And it’s an important one. Really important. But it doesn’t get the job done by itself. There’s another element I wanted to mention today, and that’s design.

There’s an idea that great ideas will find their own way. An idea with merit and value will surely be welcomed with open arms by it’s ideal audience. If you put out something of extraordinary value, surely people will buy in. Right?

In other words…if you build it, they will come. Isn’t that the way it works?

Well, you know the answer to that don’t you? But just to make sure I’ll let the cat out of the bag. The answer is no. They usually don’t come. People don’t usually see real value even if you try to beat them over the head with it. It’s not how people work.

We’re too busy. We’re too distracted. Our bullshit meter is on high alert 24/7, so even when we hear something great, it takes a real feat to truly get our attention.

What’s the solution?

The role of design

Just like content, design isn’t the end all and be all of marketing success. But just like content, it is an essential part of the equation.

Whether it makes sense or not, whether we’re liable to admit it or not, we respond to packaging. We judge books by their cover. We really, really do. We know instinctively that it may not be fair, but it’s an effective way to filter out some of the noise in our lives. If it doesn’t look awesome, it’s probably not.

Bottom line: value does NOT speak for itself. It’s in dire need of some awesome packaging. *Especially* if it’s a truly awesome product. All the more reason to spend the time and money to really package it well!

When it comes to your website or blog, your design is your packaging. Spend some time on it. Make it yours. Test colors and layouts and ideas. Your design is JUST as important as your content. This doesn’t mean it needs to be over the top. It doesn’t need to be gaudy or even expensive. It just needs to work.

Whether consciously or unconsciously, people respond to aesthetics. It’s just how it is. I’ve noticed a few things in my own business, and I apply these to client projects all the time:

The placement of an opt-in form can make a huge difference in how well it converts. Take an identical opt-in form and put it in a different place on the same page, and watch a completely different result take place.
Changing the color of a headline can change out well an entire page converts. Whether you’re going for clicks, subscribers or whatever, people respond differently to different colors.
Typography matters. Font types and especially font sizes can dramatically affect how long someone stays on your site.

These are just a few examples. Even on very simple-looking sites, a lot of thought and experience goes into an effective design.

I read an article on Copyblogger today and gives some great tips on web design, and I recommend checking that out as well.