Christian

Why niche marketing is scary

By Christian

Niche marketing is scary because it means turning away business, and that is something most small business owners just don’t have the stomach for. It’s unfortunate, but it’s WAY scarier to operate on the premise that your target market is “everyone”.

Why is that scarier? Because it’s literally impossible to sell to “everyone”. Talk about setting yourself up for failure. There is simply no chance that you’re going to sell to everyone. Not even Coca-Cola sells to everyone. Importantly…nor do they try. Coca-Cola markets to a niche. Compare their marketing to Pepsi, and you will see distinct differences. As reader of this post, there’s a good chance you’re either a Coke or Pepsi person. You’re probably not both. You like one or the other, and the same is true in every business. Some customers will really connect with you, others will not. You need to get in touch with the true value you can offer your customers and market yourself accordingly.

Your goal needs to be to connect with the people who really “get” you…who really see value in what you offer.

Attempting to sell to everyone is a losing proposition, because you’re trying to be everything to everyone, and you can’t be. With most people, you’re going to fall short, and when you work in that type of situation you’re forcing yourself to offer a low amount of value. Conversely, there IS a niche where you can really connect. You absolutely CAN connect with a small niche in a big way, and in doing so you will be offering them a very high amount of value.

Niche marketing enables you to offer significantly higher value while earning significantly more from a SMALLER base of people. When you really nail your niche, you become indispensable. Lack of niche marketing is why most small businesses struggle with competitors, and it’s why everyone seems to compete on price. Everyone wants to be the cheapest. We know in our gut this is not the way business is supposed to be. We’re supposed to offer our customers high value, not just sell them a bunch of junk at the lowest possible price.

When you find your niche, you not only become indispensable to your customers, you also become a strong supporter of the people you used to consider your competition. When a customer offers something you don’t do, you send them down the street to your “competition”. It builds good will, it’s great for the economy, and it connects customers with what they really need. Niche marketing is really not nearly as scary as you think. Avoiding it is what’s scary 🙂

How long does blogging take?

By Christian

One of the biggest concerns I hear from clients when it comes to blogging is “how long is this going to take”? I understand. As a business owner, you already have enough on your plate! The last thing you need me to do is to add more 🙂

Let me make an observation that I think may help clear things up a bit.

When you go to the store to pick out your next cell phone, do you sigh and say “how much time am I going to have to spend on this thing”? Of course not! It’s a communication tool. You use it for your business. When someone calls, you WANT to answer it, because it’s an essential element of running your business.

Well, your blog is a phone.

You didn’t use to have a cell phone, but now you do, and it’s really no big deal is it? Same with your blog. You didn’t use to have one, but it’s become common knowledge that having a blog is simply a great communication tool. Instead of talking with your customers and clients one at a time, a blog allows you to talk with ALL of them all at once.

Actually when used well, a blog will improve your communication with your customers and SAVE you time. But this is advanced stuff, so let’s not get too crazy for today. Right now, just take a minute and try to think of your blog simply as a communication tool. It’s a phone, really. It’s just a way to interact. Can you afford to NOT have a cell phone? Can you afford to NOT have a blog?

How do I start showing up in Google?

By Christian

One of the questions I get most often from new bloggers is how to start ranking in Google for certain keywords. Fantastic! Step one is getting your site set up. Step two is where you begin the process of making things happen. Let’s talk a bit about SEO (search engine optimization), and if you have any questions, fire me an email or hit me up on Twitter. We’ll get you where you need to go.

Random doesn’t help

Importantly, it will benefit you greatly to be tactful in deciding what keywords you want to target. Most people don’t research keywords in advance, and it results in a lot of wasted effort. You can end up ranking for keywords that make sense but that don’t actually help your business.

Example: I just optimized a site for a client who is a real estate agent. Initially, she had wanted to rank for terms such as “real estate agent in lafayette indiana”. That makes sense, no? She’s an agent and wants to rank for that. Through research however, we ended up finding out that no one ever searches for the specific terms she had in mind. We could have easily gotten her site to rank well for those keywords, but who cares? She’d be #1 for a term that no one searches. It wouldn’t help her business at all to pursue those keywords.

So that’s the first big thing: do keyword research to ensure you’re targeting keywords that will bring you the type of traffic you’re looking for. Small little variations in a search term can have dramatically different results! For a video training session on keyword research, I recommend checking out this video I posted a while back. It has some great information on how to research what keywords you want to target.

How to execute

After you have keywords in place that you know are both relevant and helpful to your business, you can set out to rank for those keywords. It’s important to become familiar with SEO basics. One of the best articles I’ve read on basic search optimization for blogs is here.

This post is specifically for WordPress blogs, but the concepts are solid, and the basic principles are the same from one platform to the next. If you read this post, it will familiarize you with all you need to know to get started. I could rewrite the material here, but Glen did such a great job on his post that I pretty much consider it the best place to get started if you want to pursue search optimization on your own.

If you’re intimidated by the technical aspects of optimizing your blog, I assure you it’s not overly complicated. Once you learn the basic terms like “title tags”, “meta descriptions”, “link building”, etc, and learn how these things work together to make you rank well in search engines, it’s simply a matter of executing.

If you want to perform better in Google but don’t want to mess with the techy stuff, fire me an email and I’ll do it for you. Or, you can grab a copy of the Simple SEO course. It’s a system which removes all the mystery from optimizing your blog, and it shows you exactly what to do step-by-step. If you want to do it yourself but don’t want to mess with months of wading through technical tutorials and go through the trial and error phase, the Simple SEO course is worth a look. I know a lot of you want to get better results with your blog but don’t necessarily have the cash laying around to hire a professional to do it for you. I put this course together as an awesome alternative to hiring me as a consultant. I think you’re really gonna like it 🙂

Focus on quality, sustainability and value. Those are what power a great blog. Google recognizes and grants authority to blogs that post consistently over time.

Basic SEO principles to consider

Post consistently: this doesn’t mean you have to post new content to your blog daily. Most people I work with are small business owners, and time is always a factor. There are still people out there preaching the old-school mentality of “more is better”. They will try to convince you that you need to write daily. It’s true that if you have more content, you have more that can rank in Google, but it’s essential to maintain your blog over the long haul. You already know that blogging is not a magic bullet, it’s a long term approach. So, do what’s sustainable. There are LOTS of very successful, profitable blogs that update weekly, some monthly. Is more better? Yes it can be…as long as you’re really going to keep it up. For most small business owners, I recommend once or twice a week. Focus on quality, sustainability and value. Those are what power a great blog. Google recognizes and grants authority to blogs that post consistently over time. If your stuff is good, people will read it, talk about it, link to it…Google is smart and takes all this into account.
Focus on quality: as trite as it may sound, quality really does matter. There’s an old saying in SEO that goes “search engines follow people”. Basically, focus on your readers. At the end of the day it’s not our job as bloggers to trick search engines into giving us some love. It’s the search engines’ job to provide relevant results for their users. So the best, most ultimate way to rank well in Google is to simple BE RELEVANT 🙂 Yes, there are technical considerations that will make your blog more accessible to search engines, get you indexed more quickly and build more authority, but I can’t stress this enough, so I’ll repeat it…if you are creating content that is relevant and helpful to your readers, it’s Google’s job to find you! That’s what it’s there for. If there’s a single thing that will do more good for you than anything else, that is it. Create awesome content that your readers love.
Ask for help: this doesn’t just refer to hiring me or someone else to work for you. It means asking your readers for what you want. If you want people to share your post on Twitter, ask them to do so, and make a Twitter icon easily available to them. If you want them to link to you, again…ask for it. Make it easy for them. Go so far as to provide the html, so all they have to do is copy and paste it into their site. Read my about page, and you’ll see I do this also. I ask visitors to link to me, and I put the code right there in the page, so all they have to do is copy and paste it. When people share your content with their people, it builds links to your site. It builds traffic to your site, and it spreads the word about what you’re doing. But people don’t always automatically do this; don’t be afraid to ask people for what you want. It goes a long way.
Learn your business: by running a blog, you’re taking an awesome, important step toward improving how you engage and interact with your customers and clients. Like anything, you get out what you put in. When you take on a new tool like this, it’s easy to feel like there’s too much to learn. This makes you want to just not mess with it. I encourage you wholeheartedly to continue the pursuit. It can take a little while to learn what you need to know. Don’t put the pressure on yourself to learn every single thing all at once. Learn a little bit at a time. This post all by itself links up resources for you that can easily keep you busy for a while. Don’t rush it; just do a little at a time. It pays off huge over time!

More SEO resources

In addition to the ViperChill article I linked up above, here are a few more resources I highly recommend if you’re interested in learning more about search optimization.

101 Ways to Build Link Popularity – this is a comprehensive, awesome resource addressing the important concept of link building.
SEO Basics – this is a great resource from Aaron Wall, covering the basics of SEO.
Google Keyword Tool – in the video I linked up above, I talk about using the Google Keyword Tool for keyword research. This is a link to the invaluable tool.

Have fun! As always…that’s one of the most crucial elements of successful business blogging. Take on new knowledge a bit at a time and have fun. Trust me, your readers know when you’re having fun (and when you’re not), and it makes a big difference. If you have any questions, hit me up.

Don’t reinvent the wheel!

By Christian

Think about this:

Have you written an article on your blog that’s received a great response? Why don’t you take that content and turn it into a pdf report. Design a cover for it, and repackage it as a free report. Put it up on a squeeze page, and use that great, proven content as a way to build your email list a bit more?
Do you get the same question from your prospects about your product all the time? Instead of writing the same response in an email over and over again, why not just copy and paste it into a FAQ on your website? Or turn that content into a blog post?
Have you sold a service effectively? Is it possible to document the service you perform, and turn that service into an information product to sell?
Why don’t you take a collection of your most popular blog posts, and edit them all together into a book to sell?

Don’t reinvent the wheel!

Don’t reinvent the wheel. This will save you so much time! So much of what you do can be reused again and again. Think about it. Anytime you write a blog post, respond to an email, do a phone consult, take a photograph, have a meeting at your office…you’re creating media. The awesome thing about media is that it’s highly fungible. Blog posts and emails can easily be copied into different formats. Meetings and phone calls can be recorded and packaged together into blog content or even products to be sold. Look at what you’re doing in your business now, and ask yourself how you can use the media you’re ALREADY creating in other ways.

Again, don’t reinvent the wheel. Take what you’re already doing and reuse it over and over. I have a report up on this site right now called “My 7 Horrible Marketing Mistakes”. It’s a highly valuable report that can save business owners a lot of time, money and hassle with their marketing. It helps business owners get better results faster. But I didn’t just put the report up. I put up three different squeeze pages marketing the same report to different groups of people within my niche market.

Is this cheating?

Is reusing and repackaging your content cheating? Are you breaking the rules by doing this? No. You’re taking the content you put out and making it as valuable and accessible to as many people as possible. Some people like to read blogs. Some prefer ebooks. Others still like video…give them what they want.

When you think about your business this way, it becomes a lot easier to put out that product you’ve always wanted to put out. It becomes a lot easier to maintain your blog, because you realize that you’re ALREADY creating all the content for it…you just need to capture it! By doing this you not only reach a wider audience, but you also leverage your time.

Are You “Getting Ready to Get Ready”?

By Christian

When it comes to increasing our sales, we are often compelled to focus on a number of things:

Refine our business plan
Improve our product
Run more ads
Hire an assistant
Go back through past clients and survey them, find out how we can improve
Take on a new lead generation system

There is value in all this, but it all comes second. If we do these things at the exclusion of engaging our customers on a personal level, nothing else matters. You can do this a number of different ways:

Phone calls
Social networking
Responding to comments on your blog
Interacting with your audience in forums
Contacting people on your email, mail or phone list

These are obviously just a few examples. Here’s the point: so many of us don’t like selling, but at the end of the day, sales need to be made. If it’s not getting done, it doesn’t matter how many cool systems you have in place. It also doesn’t matter how refined your business plan is. It also does not matter what your past clients say to you or how many great leads they refer to you…if you don’t have a strong sales system in place that is put into action daily, you won’t increase your sales.

What matters is genuine, earnest engagement between YOU and your CUSTOMERS

Make a decision how you will engage and interact with your potential customers daily. Do it with a blog. Do it with a phone. Do it with a pen and paper if you want…it doesn’t matter how you do it. Blogs aren’t magic. They just work. They are an awesome tool. They’re a tool that works really well…if you use it. Same is the case with any sales system. What matters is not the method of engagement. What matters is that there is engagement. You need to get ear to ear, face-to-face, with your customers in whatever way you can.

Do it however you wish, just do it

You may be inclined to argue that not all methods of engagement are equal. Certainly some are better than others. For example, selling vacuum cleaners door to door is certainly not as effective as selling through other means, correct? I’d like to point out that I know more than one person personally that earns a high six-figure income doing just that. It’s not what I consider ideal; it’s not how I roll these days. I feel I’ve found ways to market my business much more effectively. That said, if you can earn $50k+ monthly selling door to door in this day and age, you can do well doing ANYTHING.

Tweak as you go, but get started. Stop trying to figure out the system that will work best for you, and get busy putting something that makes sense to you into action. Figure out the rest as you go. It will be messy, and that’s how real top producers get stuff done. They just do it.

Make a plan, then EXECUTE

Making a plan is crucial. Take 10 minutes. Make a plan. Then put it into action. Action is key, not perfection. I talk with clients all the time that are spending too much time trying to “figure stuff out”, trying to “perfect their systems”. They’re getting ready to get ready. If you ask me, an ounce of action beats a pound of preparation. Go make it happen.