Small Business Blog Tips

20 Essential Questions to Ask Yourself Before You Start Blogging

By Christian

The last post I wrote was about why to write a plan for your blog. Of course Next Level Blogger is focused on monetizing, business blogs and sales training for everyone involved in internet marketing and social networking. As such, this content doesn’t apply so much to personal blogs or any type of blog that is not concerned with making money online.

If you DO want to make money online…blogging is of course a key activity, and writing a plan before you start is essential if you want to avoid coming off as a spammer and doing more damage to your brand than good. I hope this list of questions is thought-provoking and helps you create good content that not only helps you sell but also helps you engage your prospects on a personal level. This is what building a real business is all about. If you can create trust and build relationships, you can sell many products to the same people over years, get referral business and more. It’s so much easier, simpler and more cost effective than constantly scraping together new business to meet your goals month after month 🙂

People in home based business, internet marketing and many other businesses often take a spammy approach to achieving their sales goals. It’s smart to sell things online through your blog. It’s how you make money and build a business. But if you want to do it long term, it’s essential to do it in a way that is sustainable, smart and well-received by your customers. It takes more work up front to help you make sure you’re selling effectively, but the extra work will come back to you in the form of more trust from your customers, more referrals, more sales over time and a lot more. I hope this list of questions helps you get the thought process started:

What are the top three goals you want to achieve from this blog?
How is the content you produce specifically targeted to help you achieve these three goals?
How do you plan to monetize?
Is your chosen method to monetize sufficient to help you reach your goals?
Have you verified there is enough demand and that this is a strong enough market that your buyers will be able to realistically meet your sales goals?
Have you designed a sales funnel?
How will you drive traffic to the blog?
What actions will you take to ensure that each page of your site moves buyers a little further down that sales funnel?
Can the actions you plan to take to drive traffic be in any way perceived as spam by your prospects?
How will you interact with and engage your customers on a personal basis?
What steps will you take to encourage personal interaction with your readers?
Do you have a unique value proposition? In other words, is there a clear and compelling reason that buyers should buy from YOU, and not someone else?
Does your site rely on buyers taking the initiative to buy, or are you taking steps to personally engage them and lead them to a sale?
Is your site clean, easy to navigate?
Is there a call to action on every page?
Can you write a personal description of your target buyer?
How old are they?
Where do they work?
What social networks, forums and sites do they frequent?
How do you plan to engage them on a personal level in these places and bring them to your site?

Why to Write a Plan for Your Blog

By Christian

Blogging is not usually supposed to be very technical or journalistic in tone. A huge part of the appeal is that blogging is highly personal. This is also where blogging gets a lot of its strength and effectiveness. Whether you’re in a home based business, real estate, internet marketing, network marketing or ANY business that would benefit very much from a blog presence, blogging gives you the opportunity to connect on a personal level with a large number of people over time. When you think about it, there is really nothing like it!

The Power of Blogging

You cannot mail to a direct a mailing list, or do a calling campaign or any other form of contact with your network that is as effective and engaging as a blog can be, if it’s done right. And think about this: blogging is CHEAP! How much would it cost you to do a mailing to 10,000 prospects? It would cost thousands of dollars of course, and how engaging would it be? How many of those postcards would just end up in the trash? But how much does it cost to publish a blog post and blast it out to everyone in your network? Nothing! Think about how powerful that is! But the point of this post isn’t to sell you on the effectiveness, it’s to show you the importance of writing a plan for your blog, why it’s essential and a couple steps to take to make sure you’re doing it effectively.

Unfortunately for many business people, much of what you do ends up coming off as spam to most people. This is not what you want, believe me. And it’s completely avoidable, if you write a good plan for your blog up front!

Blogging can be a Double Edged Sword

Writing up a plan for your blogging and social networking is a rare thing. Almost no one does it. Who has the time? And really, how important can it be? It’s very easy to get started with a blog, but don’t let that confuse you. I mentioned how powerful and cost effective a blog can be as a marketing tool. The fact that it’s very inexpensive to get started is simply a blessing of technology, but I’d encourage you to not treat it like it’s free. The people you’re engaging are real people; don’t waste their time! For decades, it’s cost media companies many thousands of dollars to do what you can do now for basically nothing, but just because blogging is cheap doesn’t mean your audience’s attention is cheap. In fact, you’re not the only one who has access to this technology…everyone has access to it, and as a result your audiences attention span and trust is stretched even thinner than ever.

In other words, just remember this: if you want your blogging to be effective, you need to put out quality content, and you need to be HYPER-sensitive to what they will consider valuable. Value is in the eye of the beholder, and the decision regarding what is valuable is up to your customers, not you. But still, you need to reach your sales goals, no? So what gives? This is why writing a plan is hugely important.

The double-edged sword of blogging is this: if you do well, you will be able to engage a high number of people on a personal level. This is powerful and very cost effective branding. But if you put out content that is not well-received, even if your intentions are good, you can easily do more harm than good. Consumers are incredibly insensitive and unforgiving when it comes to spam, and as far as a consumer is concerned in the social media world…spam is ANY from of non-personal interruption-based marketing that they did not ask for.

The essential element here is perception, not reality. Spam is anything that is perceived as spam. Many business people and sales people have a tough time adapting to social media because of this. What happens is that they take on a blog or create some social media profiles for the purpose of marketing their business. That’s good. That’s smart. But then they proceed to simply use these tools as a way of advertising themselves, completely neglecting the “social” part of social media. That’s bad.

Write a plan for your blog! Make sure up front that you have an action plan, in writing, that will enable you to get the results you’re looking for. And your plan must enable you to reach your goals without doing anything that can remotely be perceived as spam by your prospects. This is a challenge! But seriously, if you don’t do the work up front, you’re wasting your time. I honestly think much of the spam out there is due to business people wanting to sell things (which is smart) but not sitting down to make sure they have a plan to effectively make it happen (that’s NOT smart).

The Value of Having a Plan

Many people, especially salespeople, have told me they don’t understand the value of having a business plan. They just want to go out and sell. What good is it going to do you to have a written business plan sitting on your desk? Here’s the deal: you don’t need a business plan; you need to WRITE a business plan. See the difference? As soon as you write it, you can throw it away for all I care. Actually, it’s best to hang on to it and revise it once a quarter or so, as your business changes and as you learn more. However, the finished product is largely irrelevant. You don’t need it in most cases. What you NEED to do is go through the process of writing it, because the process of writing it will force you to think critically about what you’re doing.

Don’t spend months writing a blog only to find out that you are never going to achieve your goals this way. Don’t start a blog because it’s cool or because I tell you it’s a great marketing tool or whatever else…do it for the right reasons. Write a plan for your business, and make sure your blog is targeted to help you meet your business goals. There are a million kinds of blogs, and there are a million different angles you can take. Write the plan first. Outline what you want to do. Make sure it all makes sense, then start. Measure twice, cut once.

In my next post, I’ll make a list of essential questions for you to ask while writing your blogging plan. Have I convinced you to write a plan?

Use a Sales Funnel to Blow Up Your Blogging and Internet Marketing Sales

By Christian

This is the second post in a series on how to power-monetize your blog, internet marketing or social networking. If you’d like to start from the beginning, you can visit the first post here.

Whether you operate an offline business and are using blogging, internet marketing and social networking as a way of expanding your reach and effectiveness, or whether your online presence is your primary activity, using a sales funnel is mandatory if you want to truly maximize your results. Yet, most people don’t even know what a sales funnel is! And what’s more…even those who have an idea of what a sales funnel is, don’t know how to use one effectively. So, here’s the rundown:

What is a Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel is a tool that guides you on how to optimize your sales. It’s something you come up with through the process of developing a good business plan for your site. This is something I’m going to be covering in depth in future posts, but for now let’s look at the funnel itself. It looks simple enough, no?

Now this graphic is just a representation of a sales funnel; you can make yours look however you prefer. The point is to have one. A sales funnel is the process you take your buyers through that leads to a sale. Simple concept wouldn’t you say? But how many of us neglect to implement on this concept? Answer a few questions to see where you stand:

Where do most of your buyers come from?
What pages do they land on most often?
Where do they go from there?
What steps are you taking to monetize each page of your site?
How are you providing maximum value to each buyer on every page of your site?
What stage in the buying process do you suppose is each of your visitors in, and what steps are you taking to guide them to a sale?

If you do not have immediate and simple answers to each of these questions, your sales funnel needs work. The good news is that by developing a well-designed sales funnel, you will be able to truly maximize sales on your site.

Obviously, you can tell by looking at my sales funnel (which I took from a real estate site I run), not everyone who visits my site signs up for what I offer. Imagine that! I expect you’re running on less than 100% conversion as well, and the trick is to really dig in and make sure you’re getting every conversion you can get.

The point of this post is not to go in depth on how to use a sales funnel. That is coming in future posts. I’m really going to dig in for this series and show you not only how to use a sales funnel but also how to maximize sales every step along the way. Make sure to bookmark this post and come back for the future posts as well!

For this post, I want to show you what a sales funnel is and illustrate how powerful it is.

The Power of a Sales Funnel

Buyers visit your site. Some of them bounce right off to another site. Some of them stick around for a minute. Some of them hang out for a while and read several things and then leave. Some of them actually sign up for what you’re offering. This is good stuff. It’s how you make money online! But the problem is that most people take a very scatterbrain approach to all this. The idea is that you put up some good content, drive traffic, offer a product or service for sale and hope for the best. I don’t really need to tell you that’s not a very good approach, do I? We need to do way better than that!

Deliberately designing a sales funnel forces you to think about the process a buyer needs to move through in order for you to make a sale. What process does YOUR buyer need to go through in order to buy from you? Have you thought about this?

Let’s use the sales funnel I pictured above as an example. As I mentioned, it’s from a real estate site I run. The goal is for me to get contact information from as many buyers on this site as possible. Perhaps your goal is to take orders for an ebook. Maybe you want to build a list of email subscribers. You have your own goals. My goal for this particular site is to build a list of buyers and their contact information.

Look at the Numbers…

Do the math and you’ll see I’m pulling a little over 17% conversion from this site. This doesn’t happen automatically! Many internet marketers shoot for 2%. They brag their faces off when they get 7-10%. This site is pulling 17%. I hope this serves as a testament to how powerful a sales funnel can be 🙂

But I don’t just have the total number of visitors and how many leads that came in, do I? There’s more. I have an intermediate step in the middle. I track how many people view the sign up form. Out of all the visitors to this particular site, I am successful at getting about 46% of them to the opt-in page, where they give me their contact information. Not all buyers fill out the form of course. In fact I lose most of them, but I do get an overall 17% conversion from this site.

It’s important to understand that 17% conversion is very rare in internet marketing, BUT it’s very achievable for you as well if you implement the same systems. Like I said, I cannot go into huge detail on the implementation of the sales funnel in this post. I will be doing that in future posts here. Please bookmark this page to return for the future articles as they go live. I will link up all the content here, so it’s very easy to find.

How to Make a Sales Funnel

Of course, this is a simple enough thing to do. Creating a sales funnel is merely a process of accessing your goal and then deciding how to best achieve it. Many people just want to “make money online”. Of course, you need more than that. You need a plan. A sales funnel is an essential part of that plan.

What is your main goal?
What things need to happen in order to turn your visitor into a buyer?
What steps can you take to ensure that every page on your site functions to convert a potential buyer from one step to the next?

Of course if your sales funnel is very simple, such as the one I’ve pictured as an example, there are really only a few steps. It doesn’t have to be complicated. It just needs to be something you’re mindful of when tweaking your site for maximum efficiency.

So You’ve Put Together a Sales Funnel. Now What?

Having a sales funnel is the first step. A defined and laid out step-by-step process you lead every buyer through that results in a sale. As you can see by the example I provided, it doesn’t need to be complicated. In fact, it can be very simple! But it’s essential to write it up as part of your plan and most people skip this.

Having a process in place, you now have the real work cut out for you: how to maximize results at each stop along the way to the sale!

In future posts, I will take you through each step of the sales funnel and how to maximize results each step of the way. Suffice to say for now, your sales funnel is the process you lead your buyers through in order to make a sale. It’s essential to understand where each of your buyers is within your sales funnel. If you know where they are, you can take them and guide them to a sale. Or you can use the scattershot approach, put up good content and hope for the best. I hope you’ll keep reading and learn to use your sales funnel for maximum success in your blogging and internet marketing 🙂

BTW…let me know if you have any questions!

Make sure to visit the next post in this series also…

Make Money Online by Selling More to Fewer People

3 Simple, Killer Steps to Improve Traffic and Monetize Your Blog or Website

By Christian

This will be a series of posts, because there are a few separate points I want to cover here. I’m going to outline the 3 steps here in this post, and then in future posts in this series, I will go through each step in detail. There’s a lot of good information here if you’re serious about making money online, so if you don’t have time to read it all right now, please bookmark this page and feel free to come back later!

The Truth About Traffic

Traffic is important. No doubt. But not all traffic is created equal. Would you agree? And I would submit that you’re probably not all that concerned with seeing your traffic numbers increase so much as you are concerned with seeing your SALES increase. With me so far?

But the assumption we often make is that in order to increase sales and income, we need to increase traffic. This is an understandable assumption, but I am writing this post for the purpose of hopefully giving you a broader and more profitable way of looking at this situation. In other words, you don’t necessarily need more traffic. What you need is a better traffic system. What you need is…a sales funnel.

This is a key element of sales that most people miss, both online and offline, and without it…I’ll be honest with you, you’re shooting in the dark. Let’s not leave your success up to chance. Agreed?

I understand there may be some resistance to this. It’s extra work for one thing, and who wants to do that? And besides, so many other blogs make money just by getting tons of traffic and selling ads, right? Here’s the thing, that model works fine. It really does. There’s a couple problems though. First, advertising revenue is down as a result of our recession right now, and this is across the board. Many bloggers are finding that ad revenues are just not cutting it right now, and they’re having to find new ways of making money online. Second, not every niche is a high traffic niche. Your business can use blogging and social networking tools to make a fine living in any niche, even with only a small amount of traffic, but you need to be deliberate and effective in the way you monetize.

Low Traffic is Profitable Too…if You Know What You’re Doing!

Throw some ads up on a site that gets 3,000 visitors a month, and you’re NOT going to make it! But monetize properly, and that amount of traffic can work just fine for you. One of the sites I have is a real estate blog, for example, and it brings in about $40k in sales commissions a year, all from about 1,000 visitors a month. Trust me, high traffic rocks, but it’s not a necessity. You can monetize any level of traffic, as long as you deliberately set up an effective plan to make it work. But it’s not going to happen automatically!

Here’s something to think about. You don’t want to build your business to be entirely dependent upon a constant flood of traffic, do you? Learn to be profitable when you’re small. Do this, and when things click and you get that flood of traffic, you’ll be ready for it, and you’ll make a killing. But let’s set things up for you so that even with modest traffic, you’ll be able to to very well. Cool?

So here are the three steps I’m going to cover. Again, feel free to bookmark this if you want to come back later. There is a ton of info I’m going to be following up with here…

The 3 Simple, Killer Steps to Improve Traffic and Monetize Your Site…

Review where your traffic is coming from
Develop a sales funnel
Use an effective, targeted follow up system

Review Where Your Traffic is Coming From

So, let’s first take a look at where you’re traffic is coming from. I will go over some of the most common areas, and I’ll show you how to apply these simple principles to each one. This will give you an idea of how you can really optimize the use of your traffic to make sure you’re maximizing sales. Some of the most common sources of traffic are:

Organic traffic…from search engines
Social networking
PPC
Email marketing
Incoming links (whether from articles you’ve published, guest blogs or other bloggers who have linked you up)

In the next few posts, I’ll show you how to funnel and optimize each of these for maximum results. I’ll show you what a sales funnel is, how to design one, how to use it, how to build your ultra-effective follow up system and more 🙂

Make sure to check out other posts in this series here:

Use a Sales Funnel to Blow Up Your Blogging and Internet Marketing Sales

Make Money Online by Selling More to Fewer People

How to Improve Traffic from Your Social Networking

Blogging is a Business and Most Businesses Fail

By Christian

Failure is a part of life, and it’s surely a part of business. This really isn’t news, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. So what can we do about it?

The assumption I’m making here is that you want to succeed. And with that, I’m assuming that you want your blog or web pages to get adequate traffic to meet your goals. You want a sufficient number of people to convert into subscribers and paying customers. You want to travel the world with a margarita in your hand, hardly working a day in your life and living like a jet-setting lifestyle without a care in the world. With me so far? So how do you do it?

How to Succeed

The way you succeed in blogging, internet marketing and social networking is the same way you succeed in any other business. This is why I created Next Level Blogger to begin with. I want to get this point across to everyone in my network. Here’s the problem: there is a general mentality that comes with internet business that needs to be dismantled. Bloggers and internet marketers work at home in most cases. It’s not like you really need a corporate office or even any employees starting out. All you need is a functioning laptop and high speed internet. This is where the trouble starts. Given the low point of entry, internet business gives us some false impressions, and it’s essential we dispel these falsehoods once and for all. Here are a couple:

Internet business/home based business means “small”: this couldn’t be further from the truth. There are entire real estate firms operating entirely online, with no corporate offices. There are huge newspapers (the Christian Science Monitor was the first I believe, and there will be more and more) that are moving their entire publications online…and DISCONTINUING most of their hard copy newspapers. Internet business is HUGE business, not small business.
Working from home is easy: taken at face value, I bet most of us would be inclined to believe we don’t believe this. But look at the facts. The work-at-home industry is inundated with get rich quick schemes and frauds of one sort or another. At the end of the day, most people are looking for a quick fix. People want to make money fast. Want to know how I know this? I study keywords. I look to see what people are actually looking for, and “how to make money fast” is one of the top keyword strings in Google, consistently month after month.

Next Level Blogger is a business blog. I am creating products and services to sell, and I will certainly make sure you all know about them as they come out. That said, this is NOT the place to come for the quick fix. I come from direct sales. Door to door sales. Real estate. I learned how to sell in the real world. Face to face. I know what works, for real. I understand that web traffic doesn’t buy squat…PEOPLE buy stuff. Page views cannot be monetized in any meaningful way. If you want to make money consistently, hand over fist, online, at home, you need to run your business like a business. You need to know how to sell stuff. That’s what this blog is about.

How do you make money online? You have to adopt the habits and systems of others who are successful. This means hard work, consistency and creativity. If you happen to have the attitude that online business is easy, means quick money, can be fully automated or any such nonsense, you are setting yourself up for failure. My goal for Next Level Blogger is to fully destroy any myths surrounding how to make money online by showing in detail how to run your business like an actual business. It means more work, but it also means success. Predictable, money-in-the-bank success. Are we on the same page?

Why Most Fail

Most businesses fail. We know this. Most business blogs fail also, and failure to monetize is the reason. If you’re serious about taking your blog or other online marketing to the next level and ensuring success, it’s time to take your sales plan and make sure it’s up to snuff. This, interestingly enough, applies to Next Level Blogger as well. I’m up against the exact same standard. If I fail to provide meaningful value to you as a reader, and if I fail to monetize properly, this blog will fail. The principles are the same across the board. If you learn the basic sales and business principles I talk about here, I honestly believe it’s impossible for you to not see a dramatic improvement to your sales.

In upcoming articles I will be covering why to write a plan for your blog, how to identify your most profitable niche market and a lot more. If you have any specific topics you want covered, I always welcome input and will make every effort to make sure all questions are answered.

Thanks for reading my very first post on Next Level Blogger. I look forward to a lot of awesome conversation with you 🙂