Internet Marketing Strategy

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.

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.

How do you know if your website is successful?

By Christian

I find it curious how some people choose to define success when it comes to web marketing. For example, I have one particular site in mind that many (if not most) traditional web marketers would define as a failure in many ways. It’s been up for over 4 years now, and I’ve never added any content to it. The bounce rate (people who hit the site and immediately leave) is high…over 60% last time I looked. After 4 years, it doesn’t rank very well for many keywords I would like. As if that’s not enough, traffic is low by many people’s standards. It gets fewer than 2,000 visitors per month.

Is my website a failure?

These are all metrics that most web marketers use for indicators of success, and by all counts this website pretty much sucks! But I consider it a success. Why? Because I spend no time on it and no money on it, yet it brings my team an average of $18k per month. How does that sound to you? I think that a pretty good return on investment, so I’m thinking I’ll leave this sucky website up for a little while longer 🙂

What metrics do YOU use to measure your site’s success?

What’s my point? Maybe all these metrics we use to measure “success” don’t mean nearly what we think they do. Maybe it doesn’t matter how much traffic you get, not if you’re converting at a high rate and earning a good return on your investment. Maybe it doesn’t matter whether you have 100 or 100,000 followers on Twitter. Maybe quality matters, not quantity. What do you think? Is it too simplistic to say this? I get lots of questions from clients that reveal their distress over things like not having more comments on their blog or not having as much traffic as they think they should have. First, we always have to address “why”? Why do you want these things in the first place? It’s crucial…

Therefore…

Are you working hard to build your follower count on Twitter? Why?

Are you spending a lot of time or money to get more traffic to your website? Why? If you’re not making a good return on the traffic you’re already getting, why do you think more traffic will help?

Let’s challenge ourselves to set worthwhile goals. Let’s go deeper than the superficial metrics we usually use. Numbers matter. They do, but context is everything. The number of people on your email list, for example, means nothing outside the context of your business plan. Do you have a written business plan? Does your business plan address your web marketing goals? Too many of us do not have these things in place, and without them, the traditional metrics we use to gauge success online don’t have any context.

I know marketers who did over $1M in business last year with a list of 500 or less. You can do it too. The tactics that will work for you are out there, but first you have to figure out your business. If you’re interested, fire me an email about my training solution called “Sales Funnel Mastery”. It addresses this exact thing for you. It gives you that context you need and puts everything into perspective for you, so you know exactly how to approach your business and get laser-targeted results.

Until we have that type of clarity in our business, none of the metrics we use to measure success mean anything.

The biggest myth of “making money online”

By Christian

disappointed — I don't mean to disappoint, but there are some "internet marketing" myths that really need to be cleared up 🙂

Do you want to “make money online”? Do you want to “make money blogging”? Do you want to “build an internet business”? Well, forget about it. This article describes why the whole “make money online” thing is completely misunderstood by most business owners!

I’ve spent some time thinking about the whole “internet business” thing lately, and this is part of what originally caused me to start this Dangerous Tactics blog. I’ve read articles recently like this one from David Risley, where he talks about his feelings on why some people make money online…and why most people don’t. Derek Jensen unloads on us here on why people need to stop talking about how to make money online. Sonia Simone has also shared some awesome thoughts with us about why you can’t make money blogging…ironically enough, her post appears on one of the most profitable blogs in existence. Bottom line, the internet is a misunderstood place. It’s a new frontier, and there’s a lot of opportunity here, but let’s not lose track of what the internet is…and what it is not.

The biggest myth of “making money online” is that the internet has somehow changed how business works. It hasn’t. Here’s the truth:

The internet is a place, not a tactic. The internet has changed HOW people buy, not WHY they buy.

On the surface, this may seem like a minor difference, but the difference has massive ramifications. If you take some time to absorb this truth, it will affect how you approach your business on many levels. It will make you more profitable, because you’ll realize all the flash-bang, snazzy products and courses on “how to make money online” are built on a false premise. They are built on the premise that the internet is some magical place that YOU don’t understand. And of course once you “get it”, you’ll be able to “leverage the internet” and make millions.

How to really make money online

To be completely fair, there ARE some things you need to learn about marketing online. There’s some jargon and some moderately techy stuff that you need to learn, but once you “get it”, you’ll realize the internet is just another place where people hang out. You’ll realize that technology has changed…quite a bit. But people…haven’t changed a bit. Most of us are a bit crazy, mixed up, emotional, awesome, a lot of fun…and we buy LOTS of stuff, spend TONS of money on things, and we buy things for the EXACT same reasons as we did a million years ago.

This is what we need to learn how to do: we need to learn dangerous ninja selling tactics, so we can be highly effective and sell lots of our stuff. And yes, we’re going to do it online. We’re going to run blogs and squeeze pages, and we’re going to build email lists and sell things on the internet, and I’m going to show you how to do it. But we’re NOT building an “internet business”. We’re building a “real” business. Does that make sense?

Real Tactics for Selling to Real People

On this blog I share with you many of the ways I’ve made money…both online and offline for the past decade or so. The tactics are solid. They work on the internet. They work off the internet too. How could it be the case that these tactics are so powerful? One reason: people buy for the same reasons, both online and offline. At the end of the day, you’re either running a real business or you’re not.

If you’re running a real business, you will make money. If you’re not, you can use all the blog formulas, make money online formulas, launch formulas or any other type of formulas, and it won’t matter. Formulas don’t make money. Businesses make money.

Now you can choose to market your business online, and that would be a smart decision, seeing as how so many people are here. But don’t think of your business as an “internet business”, and don’t think of your marketing as “internet marketing”. It’s business. And it’s marketing. Just plain old business and marketing.

Screw the internet

The internet could implode tomorrow, and I’d still be rockin, because I don’t run an internet business. I run a business that I happen to market exclusively online right now. If something happened to the interwebz, I would just change my marketing plan. Problem solved. I bet the chances are good that you want that type of flexibility and security in your business as well, no?

If you think of yourself as an “internet entrepreneur” or a “social media marketer” or whatever, then go visit your local shopping mall and try to find a business that considers itself a “mall business”. Try to find a “how to launch a mall business” ebook somewhere. Yeah. Just because a business is located at the mall doesn’t mean it’s a “mall business”, and just because your business is engaged primarily in marketing online shouldn’t define you either. Most internet-based businesses have a LOT more in common with their brick and mortar counterparts than they realize. Figure out your business, and I bet you will see you’re not an “internet entrepreneur” after all. You’re simply an entrepreneur. That’s pretty liberating, no?

Are You Being Fooled by These Membership Site Myths?

By Christian

I’ve heard a lot of talk about continuity programs lately. Continuity is just another word for “membership site” of course. Let me be clear: membership sites can be highly profitable. It’s a great model to follow, and if you’re interested in building a membership site, this post is NOT meant to discourage you from doing so. But, but, but…there’s a huge “but” here; there are 2 important myths about this business model that I don’t see being addressed, so I’m gonna do it here.

Membership Site Myth #1: Membership Sites are a Great Way to Make a Lot of Money Quickly

You know how many articles I’ve read that say something like “Do the math. Just charge $50 a month and get 200 members. All of a sudden you’re making $10k a month.” Dude, nothing is quick and easy. I hope I’m not bumming you out here…my goal really is to save you some valuable time, so you can stay on track.

Don’t look at membership sites as some quick way to make cash. Yeah it’s true, if you charge $50 a month, all you have to do is get 200 members to make more money than most people on the planet. So what? It’s not any easier to sell 200 memberships for $50 a month than it is to do anything else that will make you the same amount of money.

If you want to start a membership site, you should. But it’s the same with anything…do it because that’s what you want to do. Do it for these reasons:

You want to build an ongoing, lasting and long term relationship with members who value what you have to teach.
You want to have an ongoing conversation with committed members who are willing to pay for the value you offer, instead of people who just demand everything be free.
Build a membership site because you want to use it as a smart front end to your sales funnel. Charge a very low price, creating a reasonable hurdle for people to get on board with you, and then give them huge value, and upsell them on premium, totally kickass products or services after they’re members.

Build a membership site for these reasons. It’s not quicker or easier to get rich with a membership site than it is doing anything else.

Membership Site Myth #2: Membership Sites Provide Stable, Predictable Income

When it comes to building a business, many of us are easily lulled by the promise of anything “stable and predictable”, but let’s look at the facts…membership sites are a lot of work. I want to repeat…this is not a BAD thing. Membership sites rock, but I have just seen so much misinformation about them lately that I wanted to take a minute to set the record straight.

What a lot of the top marketers out there will tell you is that a lot of the work can be outsourced, and this is true. But it’s still ongoing work that you’re accountable for completing. This is what happens with membership sites that you may not automatically consider:

Not every member pays every month. Payments don’t always go through. Credit cards are rejected. If you run a membership site, you’re also signing up for the role of bill collector.
By running a membership site, you’re not creating passive income. You will still need to create ongoing content. Yes, that content can still be resold, but that requires a new launch and more work. This can be done with a traditional product as well. Membership sites are not superior to traditional products with regards to passive income. Neither produce passive income.
Once someone becomes a member, that doesn’t mean they’ll always stay a member. Membership attrition (people dropping out) is a regular part of the membership site business. You still need to continue your marketing efforts and provide huge value to your members in order to keep your numbers up.

My solution

So if membership sites are not the magic solution, what is? Ha. You’re kidding, right? There IS no magic solution. Membership sites are awesome. My only point here is one thing: other business models are awesome too, and there is no magic bullet. For me, I am simply going to continue to focus on selling traditional products and consulting. I don’t rule out the possibility of ever running a membership site in the future, but I have no current plans to run one. The reason is not because membership sites aren’t profitable and a great business model. They can be. But I prefer my own approach, which is to simply sell products and services.

Look, I can build a site and charge members $50 a month, or I can sell a product which has all the same information and sell it for $600. That’s the same income as someone staying a member with me for an entire year, which is rare, and I get all the money up front. Which model makes more sense to you?

Yes, I need to continue to market what I do. I need to still prospect and follow up on leads. I still need to continually improve what I do, keep my offers updated and current. All of a sudden, membership sites and selling products for a fixed price seem to be very similar don’t they? They are.

Have you thought of running a membership site? Does this connect with you at all? Have you been reeled into considering a membership site business model by the lure of stable, predictable income? I know I have 🙂