Small Business Blog Tips

10 Powerful Tips for Increasing Your Blog’s Performance and Income

By Christian

So I have been wanting to get this report out to you for a while, and it’s finally complete! It’s called “10 Powerful Tips for Increasing Your Blog’s Performance and Income”. Pretty straightforward I think 😉

There are a number of elements that go into creating a successful blog marketing campaign. Your blog design, your offerings, your email subscriber list, your social media activity…these are all links in the chain. And as we know, any chain is only as strong as it’s weakest link.

This report targets what I consider to be some of the most important links in the chain. Especially for anyone beginning in blogging or social media marketing for their small business, this report will get you started off on the right foot.

This report is about getting started off strong. Instead of learning the basics the hard way, this information will break you straight through to the next level…getting actual results!

Want to know something cool? It’s free 🙂
Sign up here and get it now!

If you’d like a peek inside, check this following list. It’s taken directly from the table of contents, so you can see a lot of the topics covered. If anything piques your interest, then clearly this report can be of some value to you:

Live and Die by the Value of Your List
Power Content Tips
How to Get Your Visitors to Comment
How to Get Your Visitors to Subscribe
How to Get Your Visitors to Keep Reading and Stay on Your Site
How to Get Your Visitors to Share Your Content with Their Friends
Consistency is Essential
Internet Business is a People Business
A Balanced Approach to Using Plugins
How Many Plugins is Too Many?
The Value of Coaching

If you want to knock out a big chunk of the learning curve and start getting results with your blogging as quickly as possible, sign up and get this report today for free 🙂

How to Grow Your Blogging Business Exponentially

By Christian

There is a fundamental sales principle that most business owners do not practice. Most of us have heard of it, but few of us actually practice it. I’m honestly not sure why, but it’s true…it’s costly and time consuming to earn new business, yet there’s a very powerful way to grow our business that’s free…that most of us will never use! It’s called asking for referrals.

Are you asking your existing customers to refer their friends, families, coworkers and colleagues to you? If not, you are not alone. Most business owners and sales people fail to do this or even consider it. But why wouldn’t you?

This principle is something I see applied rarely online. The masters do it, but few others even think about it. It’s one thing to make a sale. It’s a whole next level thing to tap into that customer’s entire base of friends as well. Your paying customers should not be on the same list as your prospects (the people who have yet to buy from you). They should be treated differently, because they ARE different!

Prospects and Customers are Not the Same, and They Should Not be Treated the Same!

If someone has purchased from you, they have entered the fold. They are on a new level with you and your business, and they should be treated as such. They are easier to sell to in the future, because they are already warmed up to you, and it is also reasonable for you to ask them to refer you to their friends and coworkers. If they’ve found real value in working with you, many people will gladly tell their friends about you.

Here are two important things to consider:

Deliberately seeking referrals is one of the most cost effective ways of significantly building your business online, and few people even try to do it.
If you have a customer list of even just a few hundred people, you REALLY have a customer list of many thousands…if you know how to work referrals.

Why Referrals Are So Valuable

A contact is a contact, correct? I’d argue no. Not all contacts are created equal. People that come into your database as a result of a referral are much more valuable for a few significant reasons. Consider these:

With a referral customer, there is more trust right from the start, because they have contacted you through a friend. This usually means they are a very qualified potential customer. It usually means they are very close to buying as well.
The cost of getting a referral is zero, which means your net earnings are almost always higher with a referral lead.
A referral provides an opportunity to improve your relationship with your existing customer. It’s valuable when someone buys from you. When someone buys from you, they are deciding to trust you. But consider what it means when someone trusts you enough to refer their friends to you. A referral is MORE valuable than a sale when it comes to the relationship you have with your customer!
Referral leads, when treated like the gold they are, are often more likely to bring you referrals of their own, continuing the cycle of growth.

When your existing customers send their friends and colleagues your way, it’s essential to treat them well, as you would all your customers, but it’s also essential to reward the customer for sending you the business. This will encourage them to send you more business in the future of course, but it will also strengthen the relationship you already have, making it that much more likely you can continue to help that customer in the future.

Here are some steps you can implement to ensure you’re taking advantage of this fundamental principle:

Deliberately ask your existing customers for referrals. “Who do you know that can also benefit from …(whatever it is you’re selling)?”
Make sharing your content easy, and encourage your prospects and customers to spread your emails, ebooks, blog posts, etc around to their peers.
When you get a new prospect, make it a matter of course to find out how they found you. Did they find your site and subscribe through search, through a link, or were they recommended by a friend? It’s good to know where your subscribers and customers came from!
If someone came to you through a friend, make a reasonable attempt to find out who it was that referred you. Send a thank you note or even a special gift to someone who sends you referrals. Of course this just isn’t ever going to be something you can successfully accomplish 100% of the time, but it’s important to do whenever you can. People who send you business should be acknowledged!
Don’t just ask for referrals once. Ask repeatedly, when the time is appropriate. When someone buys something from you. When you answer someone’s question, when you follow up after a consultation, etc…there are a lot of appropriate opportunities to ask your customers for referrals.

It’s not news that everyone in the world is separated by only a few levels of contact. Referrals are your quickest, most effective, most powerful and most personal way of growing your business. Do right by just one person, and you have done right by that person’s entire network. Tactfully tap into that network over time, and you have a shot at doing right by the whole world.

Trust me, there’s more business out there than you could possibly ever handle! It’s just a matter of reaching out and grabbing it. Should you hammer all your prospects and customers everyday? Of course not. But as you know, I’m focused on the human element of marketing online. Keeping a personal dialog going with your customers, as you should, naturally leads to you getting referral business from them over time.

Here’s the thing, if you’re good at what you do, you’re going to get referral business whether you’re aware of it or not. As with all things in business, I’m a big fan of intentionally harnessing these things and deliberately addressing them. Instead of just hoping your business works out and grows simply because you’re so good, be aware of the fact that referral business is a huge factor in the success of most any business. And with that in mind, take steps to deliberately encourage it! Don’t just leave it up to chance 🙂

Selling on Your Blog Ain’t Hard (The Art of Asking for the Order)

By Christian

Asking for the order is a key sales principle. In fact, it’s a key life principle! If you don’t ask, you don’t get! This can often come off as a “duh” kind of statement. If you want someone to buy from you, you should probably ASK them to buy from you! Agreed?

But year after year, study after study show that salespeople will often perform an entire sales presentation and fail to ask for the order at the end. Bottom line: it’s scary for many of us to ask people to buy something. So we leave them to figure it out for themselves. We do this in the name of politeness, but really we do it out of fear. As I probably don’t even need to tell you…it rarely produces the desired result.

Internet marketers and bloggers are big culprits of this as well, not just sales people in a classic, traditional sense. Most often, as much as I hate to say it, bloggers. So many bloggers want to make money yet fail to ever ask for it. They don’t want to be pushy. It’s understandable. But the sentiment is misplaced. I’ll explain in a sec…

First, it’s important to understand that asking for the order goes for making sales but also for many other things as well.

Do you want your readers to comment your posts?
Do you want people to tweet out your articles…
Link to your site?
Download your free ebook?

Tell your readers what you want. Ask for the order. If you don’t, you’re expecting them to telepathically figure out what you want, and well frankly…why should they go through the trouble? If you want to get good results as often as possible…make it easy for them!

Where to Get Confidence to Ask for the Order

Asking for what you want requires confidence. Confidence comes from three places:

Genuine Value
Technique
Practice

I’ve trained over a thousand sales people, and I can report that very few people are good at sales starting out. I sure wasn’t. Selling simply does not come naturally to most people. It is a skill set you acquire through hard work and practice. One thing about sales is very cool. If you follow the rules, you get the results, period.

Employ these three principles, and you’ll get the results you’re looking for!

Genuine Value

Genuine value is the element I mention first, because it’s the foundation. If you don’t create genuine value for your readers, everything else is a farce. There’s a difference between selling via confidence and simply trying to make money.

Selling is not the act of extracting money from people’s wallets. Selling is the act of freely and voluntarily exchanging real value. Give your reader something very valuable, and then they reciprocate. It’s a win-win. It all starts with value. If you skip this part, the exchange is empty, and you won’t be in this business for long.

This is why I mentioned earlier that the fear of being pushy is misplaced. It’s pushy to try to get something for nothing. It’s pushy to expect someone to pay for something they don’t need. It’s pushy to pressure someone to do something that’s not in their best interest. You’re not doing anything of this sort.

What you’re doing is providing highly valuable information to people who have specifically sought you out, because they want what you’re offering. And as it happens, you’re good at what you do, and you’d like to be able to keep doing it. In order for that to happen, you simply need to get results. It’s fair and necessary to ask for what you want. And your readers aren’t going to know unless you tell them what that is.

How do you create genuine value for your readers? Be good at what you do! Study your business like a mad man. Write quality, helpful content, put out good stuff. That’s the first step.

It’s important to understand that this step doesn’t work all by itself. It’s just step one of three. Many bloggers put out awesome content and still fail to make money or get results. It’s not just about genuine value, but it’s a necessary first step.

Technique

Technique is simply a matter of making sure you’re very clear on what results you need and expect from your blog, and then systematically going through to make sure every element of your site, from the opt in boxes you use to the way you manage your email marketing, is arranged in such a way that it is clear to your readers what you’re offering and what you want them to do.

There are a number of ways to ask for what you want when it comes to managing a blog. As I mentioned before, it’s not just a matter of selling products when it comes to blogging. You want people to comment on your posts, subscribe to your email list, buy your affiliate products, etc. There are likely a number of actions you want your readers to take. It’s important to ask! Try these specific steps. They are all ways of asking, and getting:

Put a line in your theme so it displays at the end of every post, asking visitors to comment.
Make sure you have 2-3 opt in boxes per page. Your opt in box should be visible from anywhere on your site.
Use a pop-up to build email subscriptions as well
Use a free gift to further entice people to subscribe
Your outgoing email messages should give valuable information and offer interaction with your subscribers, but they should also regularly offer something for sale

Use a plugin like TweetThis that makes it easy for people to share your content with others, and make sure to remind people on occasion…”Hey, if you like this post, please retweet it…” you get the idea.

Clearly, different blogs have different goals, but this list is a start. The idea is to have your goals in order, and then simply make sure your site and the way you manage it is conducive to getting the results you want.

Practice

This element is crucial as well. The fact is that when it comes to business blogging, turning your readers into advocates, customers and clients is an ongoing process. The more you practice the better you get.

I’m surprised sometimes at how often someone will ask me why they’re not making money from their blog when, with all due respect, all they’ve done is put up a dozen posts or so and install an Adsense module. Maybe a couple affiliate links. That will make you some cash…if you’re getting several thousand visitors a day. Short of that, you’re going to need to be more aggressive and tactful in your approach.

Think of your blog as a small retail shop. You’re not WalMart. WalMart puts a bunch of stuff up on it’s shelves, sells everything really cheap and then brings in massive amounts of people through. That creates sales. You’re not WalMart, so don’t follow their business model!

What happens in a small retail shop? There are fewer items for sale, and the prices are higher. But things are also very clean. There is character, and when you walk in, a friendly person walks up, smiles and warmly says “Hi! How can I help you?” Personal service. One-on-one engagement. Details…these things matter. And they also add up to you being able to make a fine living off any niche you want. But you gotta ask for the order 🙂

The Breakdown

Here’s the bottom line: sales is simple. It’s hard work getting results on a day-to-day basis. But the process is not hard to understand. It’s just a lot of work 🙂 It’s why you’ve got guys like Gary Vaynerchuk yelling at us to get our hustle on. You have to believe in what you’re doing. And you have to LOVE what you’re doing, because to build a small business that makes bank…is a lot of hard work. No magical web design, no plugin, no kick ass turnkey business opportunity is going to save you from that reality.

That said, if you’re willing to really work it, there is massive opportunity out there! And the fundamentals of sales are steadfast. They are simple, and they remain simple.

If you’re not getting results from your site…there is something broken in your implementation of the steps I just outlined. You’re either not asking for what you want, you’re not asking often enough or *gasp* you’re not creating genuine value for your readers. One way or another, your fortune lies locked behind door one, two or three! All you gotta do is go figure out which one and smash down the door!

5 Idiot-Proof Ways to Make Money from Your Blog

By Christian

I’m a big advocate of sticking to the basics. These 5 things are what I focus on in my business. Keep in mind that I come from a direct sales background. I believe personal interaction and real relationships are the key to success long term.

This paradigm leads me to look at blogging and internet marketing a little differently than a lot of my peers. I do not focus on traffic, at all. I do keep my site fairly well search optimized, because I’m hardly one to say “no” to free traffic, but I refuse to depend on Google for a variety of reasons.

I would be the last to argue that my way is the only way, but this is the game as I play it. As with all things on Next Level Blogger, this list is focused on what it takes to build a highly profitable niche business online. Stick to these business basics, and you will be on track to achieving your goals…

Build a list: This is the foundation of your business. If you’re not building a list, you’re not building a business. For the foreseeable future, email marketing is still king, and if you want to make money online…learning the art of list building and selling through email is mandatory.
Ask for the order: This is a key sales principle. This often comes off as a “duh” kind of statement. If you want someone to buy from you, you should probably ASK them to buy from you, right? But year after year, study after study shows that salespeople will often perform an entire sales presentation and fail to ask for the order at the end. Internet marketers and bloggers are big culprits of this as well. Most often, as much as I hate to say it, bloggers. So many bloggers want to make money yet fail to ever ask for it. Asking for the order goes for making sales but also for other things. Do you want your readers to comment your posts? Do you want people to tweet out your articles…link to your site…download your free ebook? Tell them what you want. Ask for the order.
Ask for referrals: This is something I see applied only rarely online. The masters do it, but few others even think about it. It’s one thing to make a sale. It’s a whole next level thing to tap into that customer’s entire base of friends as well. Your paying customers should not be on the same list as your prospects (the people who have yet to buy from you). If someone has purchased from you, they have entered the fold. They are on a new level with you and your business, and they should be treated as such. They are easier to sell to in the future, and it is reasonable for you to ask them to refer you to their friends and coworkers. Deliberately seeking referrals is one of the most cost effective ways of significantly building your business online, and few people even try to do it. If you have a customer list of even just a few hundred people, you REALLY have a customer list of many thousands…if you know how to work referrals.
Identify your advocates. Use them, and treat them like gold: Of course, not everyone will refer you to their friends. Not everyone is going to connect with you enough to become an advocate of yours. But when you have an advocate, even if you just have one advocate at the beginning, you better treat them like a king or queen, because an advocate is something rare and powerful. I’ve seen powerful real estate brokers sell several hundred houses a year with a list of only a few hundred people. This type of efficiency is not possible if you don’t know who your advocates are. Can you build a very profitable blog with only 10 subscribers? Yes! If those 10 subscribers are advocates.
Multi-tier product and service development: There really isn’t such a thing as one size fits all. In this day and age we need to connect with your readers in as personal a way as possible. Many internet marketers will come out with a single product and then simply proceed to drive as much traffic as possible to that offering, and rack up whatever sales they can. I can’t argue that it’s a way to make money online; I just don’t think it’s nearly as personal, efficient or profitable as it could be. The beauty of blogging is that you have an awesome opportunity to interact with a large number of people in a personal way. Ask them what they want. Believe me, your readers will tell you what they want if you just ask! Build your audience and your list, and then proceed to interact with them often. Have them tell you what products and features they’re looking for. Use their feedback and come up with products and services based specifically on that feedback. By “multi-tier” I mean specifically that you should have options for people. One Blogger that does this very well is Michael Martine at Remarkablogger. He offers one-on-one blog consultation for an hourly rate, and you can also get group consultation at a much lower rate. You can also invest in one of his very reasonably priced products like WordPress SEO Secrets to get specific solutions at a great price. He doesn’t just do one thing. He offers multiple solutions, so that he can connect with his readers in any number of different ways. That’s smart.

Each of these 5 steps deserves a post of it’s own. And they will get one. They are already in the works! I encourage you to bookmark and/or save this page and visit back, because I will link them up as I publish them. Or, subscribe to Dangerous Tactics, and I’ll make sure you get an email with the new articles as they come out!

Why I Use a Pop Up Opt In Box to Build My Email List

By Christian

I recently had a reader ask me about the pop up opt in box that I use on Next Level Blogger. He wanted to know how it was working for me and how I felt about using a pop up. He said he personally didn’t like pop ups and felt that it therefore might not be a good idea to use one on his site. I think this is a great concern, so I wanted to share my thoughts on this.

Why I Started Implementing a Pop Up to Build My Email List

I haven’t always used a pop up to build my email list. The reason was the same as what this reader suggested. I personally do not like them. Then a mentor of mine made a really interesting comment to me a few months back. He said he has NEVER clicked on a banner ad in his life. I realized that it is likely true for me too. I cannot remember a single time I’ve ever clicked on an Adsense link or banner ad. But this friend of mine makes bank on banner ads. Obviously, many people DO click on them. Just not me :).

After this conversation I realized that I’m really the last person I should use as a judge when it comes to what I should use on my site. After all, I’m not building it for me. I’m building it for my readers. I’m providing a service for others, not myself. And consequently, I should simply do what works for them!

Fact is, if a pop up opt in box generated a lot of complaints or failed to convert, I wouldn’t use it. So far, I have received ZERO complaints, and the pop up window on Next Level Blogger is the second-highest converting opt in box on the site. Clearly, it’s going to stay up for a while!

I use Aweber to generate the pop up, and I highly recommend using their service as well. It’s super-easy to design and install on your site, and it functions flawlessly for me. Anything that’s not techy and gets great results is always cool in my book 🙂

Lesson for the day: I encourage you to set aside any personal assumptions when it comes to building your online business. Don’t do what you like or think is cool. Do what works. A lot of times it’s the simplest stuff in the world that will make huge results for you.