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What is Dangerous Tactics?

By Christian

Since I’ve begun this blog somewhat recently, I’ve had some questions:

Why did I start a new site?
Why did I pick the name “Dangerous Tactics”?
What is my thing with ninjas?

I started this site, because I wanted to do a total, complete overhaul of my last site Next level blogger. I’d been wanting to make some changes, and I just decided it would be fun to do a new name along with all the other changes. You know, let’s see just how much I can confuse everyone 🙂

I picked “Dangerous Tactics”, because I think it’s a fun name, and it speaks to the nature of the content here. What’s so dangerous about this site? I think an informed and focused small business owner is dangerous indeed. Someone who truly knows what they want to accomplish and KNOWS how to get it done. Such a person is a true ninja. You better find your own niche, because you have NO chance of beating them at what they do. Every successful business owner is a sponge when it comes to learning new tactics to grow their business, but unfortunately not all tactics are created equal. There are different kinds:

Trendy Tactics
Spammy Tactics
Lazy Tactics
Money-Wasting Tactics
Dangerous Tactics

Given the choices available, I chose to go with #5.

With regards to ninjas, I just dig em. Don’t you? I mean, ninjas are stealthy, effective and dangerously dangerous. What more can you ask for?

How do I get paid in advance? And why is it better for the client?

By Christian

When I sold real estate, it was one of the only times in my career that I didn’t get paid in advance for what I was doing. As most people in real estate, I worked on contingency. In other words, if a client didn’t buy a house with me I was working for free. I have a problem with this business model, and I’ve learned since that many real estate professionals these days are…believe it or not…experimenting with different business models, including getting paid in advance. Kudos.

The questions and concerns…

I’ve long been an advocate for getting paid in advance, and often I get questions about this.

Why do I charge for my consulting up front?
Don’t most consultants work up front and then send an invoice? Is there a benefit (to the CLIENT) to charging your fee up front?
Doesn’t charging up front cause me to lose business?
And then obviously, most readers and clients seem to want to know how THEY can get paid in advance also.

I wanted to address this with you briefly since it’s such a common hang up with small business owners. Look…I know you’d love to get paid up front for what you do, but you might think this isn’t viable. If so, you’re wrong. In fact, you should start charging up front…starting now.

Let me answer these questions one at a time. My goal is to quickly shed some light on this issue, so you can benefit in your business ASAP:

Why do I charge for my consulting up front?

It’s easier for everybody involved. Candidly, that’s how it started. Did I get into business to be a bill collector? No. I am very good at a few things. I can offer you a HUGE amount of value in my area. Everything else I suck at. You know those clients that still owe you for stuff you did 6 months ago? That sucks, right? It’s no fun; that’s why I don’t do it.

I am not going to chase you down to collect what you owe me. I’m just not going to do it. It makes me feel like a schmuck. It makes you an ACTUAL schmuck for not paying me what we agreed upon, and it’s also not dollar-productive to chase down accounts receivable that should have already been received. Why do we sign up for this crap?

There’s an option. Get paid in advance.

Don’t most consultants work up front and then send an invoice? Is there a benefit (to the CLIENT) to charging your fee up front?

Most definitely…most consultants invoice. Let me be candid…I still invoice on occasion. If an existing client or personal friend specifically requests me to invoice them, I will…sometimes. There’s an existing relationship, and that’s what matters to me. I’m not a robot, and I try to be flexible, but I believe strongly in the VALUE of getting paid in advance. If we haven’t worked together before, there are no exceptions. I get paid in advance, and yes…I know this isn’t the norm.

In most industries, it’s true that clients often expect to not pay you until later. So what gives? If clients often expect otherwise, why do I think it’s better that they pay me up front? Because here’s the thing: if you’re not willing to pay up front, you’re probably not a good fit for consulting with me anyway. I suppose if I was working for $20 an hour it would be different. But my consulting clients get massive value; my coaching sessions will save you hundreds of hours of work and give you the tools and techniques you need to make significant strides in your business. In other words, I charge a lot, and my coaching isn’t right for everyone.

When we sit down to go to work on your business, there isn’t any room for doubt or worry or you still trying to decide in the back of your mind whether I’m worth your time and money or not. If that’s the stage you at, that’s totally cool. You’re not ready to hire me, and that’s fine. That’s why I write a blog and give away TONS of free content to help you. You’ll hire me if and when you’re ready, if and when you need what I sell. Until then, I’m more than happy to have you as a reader!

Paying up front is a great value for the client, because it keeps clients who shouldn’t be clients from becoming clients. Hmm. I wonder if I could have said that more clearly 🙂

Doesn’t charging up front cause me to lose business?

Yes, charging up front causes some people to not hire you. It causes these people to stay away:

Clients who like you but aren’t quite ready to be working with you yet anyway.
Clients who are just itching to give you a hard time.
Clients who aren’t going to follow through with what you tell them anyway…and then complain about how your advice doesn’t help.
Clients you have to chase down afterwards to get paid, turning you into a part time bill collector.

Anyone who works with people one-on-one has dealt with ALL of these issues and then some. Getting paid in advance clears all of this from your plate. Sometimes, losing some clients can be the most profitable thing for your business.

How can I get paid in advance also?

Want to know the trick to getting paid in advance? The trick is that there’s no trick. When a client is ready to get started, say “Great! I’ll make sure you get an invoice for this shortly. You can take care of it at your convenience, and then we’ll get started.” Simple, no?

Are you cleaning your house for no one?

By Christian

If you’ve followed me or read my blogs for any length of time, you know I’m an advocate of blogging. Clearly I write a blog myself, and it’s because I think it’s a crucial and effective way to spend time with your customers, share ideas with them and of course, sell stuff.

One thing I see a lot of new bloggers do is spend WAY too much time on their blog. We want our blog to be awesome, so we spend all this time putting up new widgets and playing with the design, retweaking articles, etc. There’s nothing wrong with this of course…not inherently. But if your blog is taking up too much of your time, you’re not going to stick with it.

I don’t want you to quit, so if you’re new to blogging or struggling to get results, this post is for you…

Don’t burn out, yo…

Blogging is a long game. It takes a while to build an audience. Is it worth it? Oh my…yes, it’s worth it. But treat it as a marathon, not a sprint. It doesn’t mean you don’t run hard…but run for distance. Don’t burn out before you even get started. Most bloggers (and by most I mean almost ALL) quit before they even have a chance of making it. Don’t do this!

Spending tons of time on your blog when you first start is like cleaning your house for a party…spending all day making sure everything looks perfect…and completely neglecting to tell anyone about the party. You’ve ended up cleaning your house for no one. Doesn’t make much sense, does it?

When you first start, you don’t have a strong readership for your blog. How do you get one? By handing out invitations. Tell people about the party, for god’s sake! I’ve been to some great parties at some really crappy apartments. I know you have too. It’s the people that make it great, not whether everything is perfectly in order or not.

Here’s the big secret about blogging

Here’s the big secret: great blogs come from great audiences. The community really is what it’s about. It’s what feeds you and guides you and motivates you. It’s all about your readers. You don’t create your audience. They come to you, and THEY are what make you great. They make you great way more than you make them great by gracing them with the presence of your awesome blog. Find your audience first…get the party started. The minutia of blogging takes care of itself from there.

Trust me, after you’ve been networking for a while and built an audience, your audience will tell you when they want to see some changes. You’ll get feedback left and right. You’ll get good at knowing when to listen and when to make changes to your blog. But until you have an audience and are getting that feedback, who are you making these tweaks and changes for? No one.

The boring (yet dang effective) truth about how to get started blogging…

Instead, post new content regularly, and then focus on getting the word out. Leave your design alone. Spend the majority of your time talking to people on other platforms. Leave your widgets alone. Leave your plugins alone. No matter what claims you read, I promise you from my very core…no plugin or widget is going to make your blog popular and successful. It’s just not going to happen!

People are the key. Talk to them. You know where:

Commenting on other blogs
Forums in your niche
Community events
Conferences

Get people on board with what you doing. If you’re new to blogging, your audience is simply scattered around out there at the moment. You need to reach out and meet them. The more you talk with them, the more they’ll come out to your blog. The more you talk with them, the more feedback you’ll get. The more you talk with them, the more you’ll learn about yourself, your business and how to run your blog better to create more value.

As counterintuitive as it may seem…no amount of tweaking is going to get you an audience. Tweaking ain’t gonna make your blog great. Your AUDIENCE is what’s going to make your blog great. Until you have an audience, you don’t have anything. Your audience is already out there, you just need to reach out and grab em.

What if all I have is a small email list?

By Christian

A lot of you are new to marketing online, and there is a common belief that I want to crush today. It’s probably holding you back from getting the results you deserve. Many of you believe you need a big email list in order to make a big profit. This ain’t true.

Yaro wrote a post about how having a small email list is all you really need. I dig it. It’s the first straight forward post I’m aware of…from an A-lister…speaking directly to the fact that small, targeted lists can be highly profitable.

Everyday, we see well-known marketers with tons of traffic and tons of subscribers. It’s natural to compare ourselves to them. We read their sites…just like everyone does. You know, guys like Brian Clark and John Chow and Darren Rowse and Yaro Starak and all these people. I also have several more linked up on my resources page. They follow a familiar business model, and it’s a model that works. You SHOULD read this content, and you SHOULD learn from them. They have a lot to offer, but don’t forget that not everything they do may translate to your business.

This is one of the reasons I feel compelled to write this blog. There’s just not a ton of bloggers out there talking DIRECTLY to the challenges and needs of a small business owner with a small list. Small as in…less than 5000 people. There are a few very important things you may not realize:

Small is NOT a problem. It’s just a different business model.
Many, many marketers are out there as you read this, pulling in a very decent living from a very small list. It’s doable, and importantly…it’s doable by YOU.
Bigger ain’t always better. Should you grow your business? Always. But growth doesn’t always mean bigger. Sometimes it’s way more profitable to focus on quality over quantity.
When you have an email list with 100,000 people on it, you can get away with a lot. I don’t mean this rudely or dismissively. It’s takes a serious amount of awesomeness to build a huge list like that, but let’s be honest…if you have a list that size, you can send out just about anything, and you’re gonna get some orders. When you have a small list, you have to be awesome. There’s a much smaller margin for error, because you need to make every email count.
I was making a full time income on this business when my list crossed 500. Proof that a small list is all you need.

You don’t need a huge list. You need a great one. This isn’t a shortcut, but it’s an important point. Just one subscriber who is totally down with what you’re doing is worth more than 1000 who aren’t. Quality, not quantity, is the key.

Are you running a small business in a small market, like most readers of this blog? If so, then building a huge list isn’t in the cards. Don’t sweat it. It doesn’t matter. Instead, build an awesome, small list. Consider the benefits:

A small list allows you to be much more engaged with your readers one-on-one.
A small list allows you to listen more attentively.
A small list allows you to produce offers that are much more targeted and valuable to your readers.
A small list, when managed properly can be just as profitable as a big list.

I’ll talk more about the mechanics of marketing to a small email list in future posts. For today, I just wanted to encourage you; size doesn’t matter 🙂

If you want to attack this issue directly in your business, hit me up for some small business consulting. In a very short time, we can knock weeks or months off the learning curve for you. Also, if you have any direct questions about email marketing, fire me an email or hit me up on Twitter. Let’s talk.

How can I improve conversion on my website?

By Christian

We spend so much time and money getting traffic to our websites, building our subscriber lists, etc. It’s understandable that one of the biggest questions I get is “how can I improve conversion on my website?”

Think for a minute about the difference between “making contact” and “making an impact”. The difference is huge. For example, you could send a spam email to half a million people this afternoon, if you wanted to do that. It wouldn’t cost very much, and you would be “making contact” with a large number of people, right? But what would it get you? Probably…not much. Consider the fact that “making contact” is probably not really what you’re going for. What you REALLY want to achieve is “making an impact“.

IMPACT: The secret to a 70% opt-in rate

When you “make an impact”…that’s when your conversions go through the roof. That’s the difference between getting a 3% and a 70% opt-in rate. I know, because I’ve been on both sides of that fence. So many people ask me how to get more traffic out to their site, and I respond that my most profitable site only gets a few thousand visitors per month.

If you want to build a site that gets hundreds of thousands of page views monthly, I’m not your guy. I’ve never done that. But if you want to be highly effective with your niche marketing campaigns, that’s precisely what I do. Do you really want to just get more and more traffic? Or do you want to make a much greater impact on the people that matter most to your business?

The direction marketing is headed

We hear about all the A-listers out there who have tens- or even hundreds of thousands of subscribers, but did you know there is an entire world of marketers that make a fantastic living on a list of just a few hundred people? Today there are more businesses marketing online than ever. And do you think that number is going up or down? More new businesses flood the interwebz daily. It’s a beautiful thing. But with as noisy as things are these days, they’re only going to get noisier. This means we need to have a greater IMPACT on our visitors. We NEED to get better conversions, because most of us are not in a niche where getting a hundred thousand visitors a month is even viable. It’s not part of our business model. We need to get great visitors, and we need to keep them.

Focus on engagement. While it’s great to have a big list and a lot of traffic, there is ALWAYS a small segment of your list that is comprised of the people that really “get” you. Focus on them. Focus on making a big impact on a small number of people. I know, it potentially means doing away with the ego stroke of being able to say “I have an Alexa rating of X” or “I have a million-bazillion RSS subscribers”. For some business models, these type of metrics matter. They have their place. But for us small business owners running a website to a niche audience, we need to focus on what’s actually going to grow our business.

How to make an IMPACT

At the end of the day, this isn’t rocket science. Thank God, right? It’s why I love this business. It’s OK to just let it be simple. How do I get awesome conversions with my websites? I have opt-in forms that convert at over 70%, because I build the opt-in form especially for a small, highly targeted group of people. So when they visit my web page, it’s almost impossible for them to not take advantage of my offer. It was built, after all, with them in mind. It speaks straight to their most pressing need, and they know it. They know they’re not looking at a mass-marketed offer, because they’re NOT looking at a mass-marketed offer! They’re looking at an offer that was put together especially for them. They’re looking straight down the barrel of a highly targeted “impact marketing” campaign.

You can do this too. It’s the difference between sending a black and white direct mailing piece, or visiting them in person and shaking their hand. It’s the difference between having your customer on an autoresponder, or taking note of their mailing address when they place an order, and sending them a handwritten thank you note. It’s the difference between having an opt-in box in the sidebar of your blog, or having 7 different opt-in pages…each one targeted to a specific segment of your readership.

Of course, in order to have high conversions like this, you have to do two things:

You have to pay close attention to your clients and customers. You have to know them.
You have to take the time to engage people personally.

People KNOW the difference between automated mass communication and authentic engagement. Personalizing an email is fine, but people still know it’s a broadcast message. They’re not impressed. Mass communication is important, so I’m not saying otherwise, but if you want high conversions you need to go the extra mile.

Authentic engagement is what causes high conversion rates, and it’s just something that cannot be faked. It also cannot be automated. It’s a business decision we all have to make, but if you want to make every visitor count, and if you want stellar conversion rates, that’s how you do it. Make an impact.

Does your blog disappoint you?

By Christian

I just got a great message from a reader indicating he’s fed up with blogging and doesn’t know what to do moving forward. He doesn’t want to quit, but he’s not getting the results he’s looking for, so he’s just kind of stuck.

His main question is “Can you take a look at my blog and tell me what to do?” I get asked this a lot.

Unfortunately it’s just not helpful for me to give you blanket, generic advice. I hate telling people that, but taking a look at your site and giving you some watered down advice is just not good business for either of us. The truth is your ideal plan of attack is completely, 100% dependent upon your goals. It’s also dependent upon where you are now and how long you want it to be before you start making serious things happen. These things HAVE to be addressed!

Since I do consulting with you guys here, I wanted to get that out and be very clear. I can’t give you goals. I also cannot provide you with drive or aspiration. That’s on you, baby 🙂 Basically it works like this: if you don’t have goals, I can’t really help you achieve them. That makes sense, right?

How to make a great goal for your blog

BUT…if you’re willing to sit down and talk it out a bit, we can most definitely fine tune your approach to web marketing and make things happen for you. One of the biggest things small business owners struggle with is knowing what to pursue with their blogs. It’s kind of hard to set a goal for your blog when you’re not really sure how blogging works to begin with, right? So I want to give you a three step process. This is my advice for any new bloggers, without a doubt.

Get very clear on your target market – your audience is NOT everyone. Focus!
Once you know your audience, get clear on your goals – is your main goal engagement with your readers? Affiliate income? Email list building? Client lead generation? Obviously, without a targeted goal you cannot have a targeted approach to achieving it! When you know what you want, step 3 becomes much simpler.
Put together a simple, easy to sustain plan for making it happen – this can involve tweaks to your site, changes to your approach for creating content, changes to your marketing or all of these.

Does it make sense that steps 1 and 2 are absolutely crucial? Does it make sense that without steps 1 and 2 in place, it’s pretty much impossible to do step 3? I can help you with any or all of these three steps, but these represent the path for getting exactly what you want out of your blog.