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Small Business Marketing Strategies

What’s in a Business Name?

By Christian

Tweetlater.com is a service I’ve talked about on Next Level, and I’ve also recommended them in my latest ebook. It’s noteworthy since readers here may be using this service, they are changing their name. They will be called SocialOomph.com starting in a few days.

I don’t pretend to be breaking news here; they simply announced it this morning, and it made me want to comment on the value of the name of your business. It’s worth some thought. I personally think this is a really smart move for them. Twitter is a single site that may be big right now, but in a digital world, things come and go pretty quickly. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to base their company’s name on the name of another company that they do not control.

What would happen if Twitter went away, or evolved into something else…or what if they decided to change THEIR name? Ha. Do your own thing. That’s all I’m saying. Being thoughtful about how you name and position your business is pretty important stuff. A lot of internet marketers and bloggers skip this.

The Catch-22 of Branding Yourself: Picking Your Business Name Carefully

The event of TweetLater renaming themselves made me want to comment on how many bloggers choose to brand themselves. Most bloggers brand themselves…by that I mean they brand their personal image and their personal name. This can certainly be effective. But there are certain repercussions that I’d urge you to consider.

Why are you building your site to begin with? What ultimate goals are you shooting to acheive? These are important questions to answer. Think ahead to when you’ve been doing this a while and you want to move on to another project. Or retire, or take some time off at least. Are you creating something that can be sold later on? Are you building a site that is inextricably connected to YOU? Is that what you want to be doing?

Again, no problem with doing it that way. Just know that if you build a very successful and profitable property named after YOU, and it’s built around YOU, it’s going to be a lot more difficult to sell it to someone else later on.

Just something to consider. Plan your business…and plan for success 😉

How to Get Visitors to Look Forward to Your Emails

By Christian

If you want to make money online, it’s important to build an email list. Period. This is a fundamental way of building a conversation with your buyers. It’s important logistically, because with an email list you can communicate directly with a lot of people and make money doing it. It’s also important psychologically, because things start on your blog, but if someone signs up for your email list, they’re taking the next step.

It perhaps seems like a small thing, but the visitor understands that they don’t have to sign up for your list. It’s completely voluntary, and the fact that they’re choosing to sign up is of significant psychological importance. They’re moving down the sales funnel, and they’re moving your relationship to the next level.

Signing up for an email list a large commitment of course, but it DOES take a commitment. This person understands that they’re going to receive direct communication from you now, and they’re raising their hand as an interested prospect. In truth, it’s a huge vote of confidence in you. Don’t screw it up! It means that the person signing up for your list has found significant value in what you offer, and they want even more. Hopefully, you have something more to give them!

The key to getting people to look forward to your emails is to give them MORE than they expect

As usual, the principle of success here is fantastically simple. One rule I learned in sales is to always under promise and over deliver. If you do this, you will always create a positive impression on your subscribers. Follow these simple principles, and you’ll have your email readers hanging on your every word:

  1. Give them time to miss you. In other words, don’t email too often. Everyone has a threshold. Even the best content can come in too quickly and be overbearing. I honestly think most professionals (even some of my favorite internet marketers included)  email too often and if they emailed LESS, they would make MORE money.
  2. Build different lists. Categorize your subscribers. This takes forethought of course, and it can be done a number of different ways, but the point is that when you send out a message, it’s important for it to be as targeted as possible. Sending out a single message to everyone on your list is one thing. Sending out a targeted message to a specific group of people for a specific reason is an entirely different animal. Which one do you think is more effective?
  3. Give more. If you promised a report or an ebook or a premium of some kind in exchange for them signing up, make sure it is delivered promptly. Then, follow up a week later with ANOTHER free report or some gift that relates to the first they received. Repeat on occasion. Under promise, over deliver. Do you think this will get people checking their email to see what else they’re going to get from you? It will.
  4. Make your email highly deliverable. This may seem like a no-brainer, but if someone doesn’t receive your email because it was blocked by their spam filter, it doesn’t matter how effective it would have been. They didn’t get it. So it’s important to take steps to make sure your messages are as deliverable as possible. I recommend checking your messages against this free email spam checker. Often, making some small change to your outgoing messages can make a big difference in how many people actually receive it. There is no way to ensure 100% delivery rate, but being mindful about what you’re doing pays off.
  5. Do more than sell. Email lists are powerful sales tools. It’s true, and I recommend you sell things to everyone on your email list. It’s a great way to extend value, continue your conversation with your visitors and make money online, all in one step. But anything can be overdone. If all you do is hardsell people with every message, you will make sales, but you will also suffer from inordinately high opt out rates and low response rates. Concentrate on the quality of the dialog you’re building. You can use your email list as a means of conversation, getting people’s opinions on different product ideas, etc. The possibilities are endless, and with a little creativity, you can explode the effectiveness of your operation through email marketing, but only if you look at your email list as more than a sales tool. The double benefit of doing this is that it will make your sales efforts more effective as well.

10 Essential WordPress Plugins for Your Business Blog

By Christian

I don’t typically do technical stuff on this blog, because my focus here is the effective use of blogging and social media and how to monetize your business using these tools. In other words, I don’t usually concentrate so much on the technical side of things, because my focus is on sales principles and the human element of making money online. However,  it seems appropriate for me to share with you what plugins I personally use on this site and which ones I consider indispensable for any business blog.

If you’re going to operate a blog for your business, efficiency, effectiveness and security should be top priorities. Use these 10 Essential WordPress Plugins, and you’ll be in good shape 🙂

  1. All in One SEO Pack – this one is a classic. It’s one of the most downloaded WP plugins of all time and for good reason. It is a huge asset to your blog with regards to search optimization.
  2. WP Super Cache – this one makes your pages load faster. Why the heck wouldn’t you use it?
  3. Google XML Sitemaps – builds and maintains a sitemap and robots.txt for you automatically. It also lets Google know when it should visit your site again to index new content. “What’s a robots.txt?” you say? You need this plugin.
  4. Login Lockdown – if you’re not too concerned with someone hacking your site, you obviously are not aware of how often blogs get hacked and how much damage they can do. One way they get in is by randomly trying passwords over and over again until they get through. It’s called a brute force attack, one of the most common types of attacks. This plugin shuts your login page down after 2, 3 or however many false attempts you feel should be the limit.
  5. Redirection – It’s essential to think ahead. You probably won’t need this plugin right away if you’re just getting started blogging, but it’s inevitable that you will take a page down, rename a post or something that will break links. This plugin allows you to make sure that everyone visiting your blog lands on a valid page. A very cool tool.
  6. SEO Smart Links – strong internal linking is good for SEO. This wordpress plugin allows you to attach specific words or phrases, and anytime they appear on your blog, they will automatically link to whatever page you designate. This is a great tool for quickly establishing a good internal linking structure. Get it.
  7. WP-DB Manager – your blog is going to require ongoing maintenance. Database optimization and repair, backups, etc. This plugin gives you an easy way to do a lot of these things, and it automates most of it as well, saving you time.
  8. SEO Friendly Images – Images can be your friend when it comes to search engine optimization. Especially if you use good alt tags on all your images. For me, it’s easy to forget to do this, and it takes a minute, so this WordPress plugin automatically does it for you. Another no-brainer as far as I’m concerned.
  9. MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer – Pinging google and other directories when you produce new content is a good thing. WordPress does this automatically. The problem is that when you make a change to an existing post, WordPress pings em again. And when you make any other  small change to your site, WordPress pings em yet again. Basically anytime you hit “save”, WordPress pings Google. This can get you blocked. Not a good thing. This WordPress plugin knows the difference between when you should ping search engines and when you’re just doing edits. This way, you’re getting all the exposure you need, and you’re not abusing the system. A lot of bloggers don’t even know about this. It’s a very good tool.
  10. Google Analytics for WordPress – having some type of analytics program installed on your site is essential for anyone serious about getting results from their business blog.  There are other more robust alternatives. Google analytics is definitely not the holy grail of analytics utilities. However for me it is the best, because it’s free and it gives me everything I need. I’m not going to spend all day analyzing my web traffic. I want a really good snapshot of what’s going on…where people are coming from, my most visited posts, etc. Google Analytics gives you this and more, and it’s free. As far as I’m concerned it’s the best analytics application out there for business bloggers, and this plugin makes installation a snap.

If you’ve been involved with using WordPress for any length of time, you will likely have heard of all these before. My personal take is to keep plugins to a minimum. I like to run as lean as possible with plugins, because the fewer you have, the fewer things can go wrong. I prefer to spend as much time as possible on content and networking…and as LITTLE time as possible on design and coding, etc. Technical stuff is not for me, although I’ll learn whatever I need to learn to get things working smoothly.

That said, a handful of plugins, like what is on this list, will save you a lot of time, make your business blog more secure and much more effective for both your visitors and for search engines.

All these plugins are available for download at no charge by visiting the WordPress Plugins page.

8 Ways Your Business is Losing if You’re Not Blogging

By Christian

  1. You’re losing word of mouth advertising – Any business owner I talk to would be quick to admit that word of mouth advertising is the best advertising they can get. Owning and operating a blog enables you to be part of the conversation online. People ARE talking about you, you know? If you have a blog, you have way more than a traditional website, you have a personal presence…one people are comfortable and happy to send their friends to and talk about. People are a lot more comfortable referring someone they know to you if you have a personal blog, as opposed to a traditional static website. It makes you more personal, more approachable, if people can read about you and get a feel for what you’re like. Yes, people like to stalk. If you’re in business, and you want people to do business with you, why would you not want to be part of that? On the flip side, when you DO have a blog, you can set the record straight anytime someone’s talking trash. You can also build a strong community of people who are advocates for you. Strong bloggers eventually build networks consisting of thousands of people who consistently link to them, send them traffic and talk positively about their content. This is word of mouth for the 21st century.
  2. Your name is being dragged through the mud, and you don’t even know about it – People are talking about you. The process of learning how to blog is about a lot more than just writing an article every now and then. It’s about networking. Having a blog will teach you how to be part of your online community. And don’t think you don’t have one…you’re just not aware of it! If you own a business and you’re doing business with people, people are LOOKING for your blog, right now. And they’re not finding it. They’re commenting on other blogs and forums about you, and you’re not there to be part of the conversation.
  3. Your competition is establishing themselves as the expert, while you are quickly becoming irrelevant – Blogging is personal. You don’t use it as a way of simply placing ads or “building a list” or making sales. You’re selling yourself. You’re telling the public about yourself. You’re networking. You’re having a conversation with people. What happens when you do this is people learn that you actually have a lot to say. This is a good thing. Of course, this is assuming you DO have a lot to say. If you’re not actually creating value for your customers at this point, that will become apparent also. It’s best to either BE good, GET good, or NOT blog. Having a lot to say about your industry and how you can honestly help your customers and maintaining a blog together are a very dangerous combination. If your competition is blogging, and you’re not, they are quickly and quietly building a very compelling network of people who love them and who don’t even know who you are.
  4. Customers are simply not connecting with you, so they don’t buy from you – This is an inevitable consequence of not having a blog. Seriously, it’s that big a deal. First, search engines love blogs (well-built and actively maintained ones that is), and if you don’t have one, you’re missing out on a lot of love from the search engines, which means your getting a lot less traffic than you should be. But it’s a deeper problem than that. The type of content people want is different than what it was 5 or so years ago. Yes, things have changed that quickly. People don’t want static content. They don’t want boring ads that talk at them and tell them what to do. They want interactivity. They want to connect with you. Think about this…they WANT to connect with you and like you on a personal level. It’s how they make buying decisions. Your static website is most likely turning them off. Your competition realizes this. They’ve learned to think of marketing differently. They’ve realized that they can connect with many thousands of people through blogging, on a personal level and massively extend the reach of their business. Your customers are connecting with them, not you.
  5. Your expenses are getting out of control, and the money you spend on traditional marketing gives you a less impressive return each year that passes – Let’s face it…traditional marketing, like newspaper and magazine ads, mailing campaigns, billboards, etc…they are getting more expensive each year, and they are getting LESS effective each year. Anyone who’s been in business for more than 5 years knows this intimately. How long can you tolerate your expenses rising coupled with more and more inept returns on your advertising dollars? When you look at this commonly understood fact, it’s obvious that you need to make a change somewhere, isn’t it?
  6. The quality of the contacts you make is going down, which means your return on investment is going down – Like I said in #5, traditional media is getting less effective. The reason is because people are drowning in advertising. If it doesn’t connect with them personally, it’s unlikely to have any effect on them whatsoever. That’s not very much bang for your buck, is it? Traditional marketing is based on “interruption marketing”. The idea is to jolt your attention and get you to notice an advertisement that you ordinarily not be interested in seeing. People have built up some serious walls to this type of advertising. Social media connects with people on their terms. Believe it or not, people want to buy cars, books, appliances, all types of services, or whatever it is that you’re selling. If you connect with them on their level and on their terms, they will love you for it, and they will buy from you. That’s what you can do with a blog that is impossible for you to do with traditional advertising.
  7. You have a lot of talent and expertise that is not being shared – Blogging is therapeutic. As a business owner, you have a lot to say, and blogging can be a channel for all that expertise. Not only is it good for your business and good for your customers, it’s also good for you. C’mon now, let it out!
  8. You are losing your most valuable asset of all…your time – It is a myth that blogging has to take all your time. It can. Make no mistake about it. But it doesn’t have to. As a business owner, you know that time is your most valuable asset. And you know that time is money, right? So stop wasting money on advertising that doesn’t work. You know it isn’t pulling it’s weight lately. I say this confidently, because I know you know it’s true. I’m in the real estate business for example, and I know for a fact that many Realtors are dropping print advertising and mailing campaigns altogether. It just doesn’t work. Yet NAR reports that less that 8% of Realtors have a blog. What gives? You can’t do NOTHING to promote your business. You need to simply do what works.

Blogging will force you to learn new things. It will certainly be a learning process. And it will take time. It’s not a magic bullet. It’s one of the things we need to learn as business owners…good things take time. Blogging will not pull immediate results like a banner ad will. But blogging also will not cost you several hundred dollars a week. And once you get past the start up period, the online network you’re able to create will continue to reward you passively for the life of your business…and if you do it right, it will even continue to reward you beyond that…even if your current business fails for whatever reason, your network will know you, they’ll understand you, and they’ll support you in your next venture as well. What kind of newspaper ad can do that?

How to Not Suck at Business Blogging

By Christian

This is a post I wrote a while ago, and I’ve decided to share it on Next Level Blogger for this reason…I believe everyone reading this blog is concerned with truly doing what’s necessary to be effective at marketing themselves online. This means different things to different people, but the one thing it means to all business people is that we need to make money blogging. In business, if it’s not profitable, it’s not sustainable. We need to be efficient, and we need to be good.

I maintain regularly in this blog that being successful at making money online requires embracing the salesman we all have inside of us. The topic of sales is always volatile. Most people do not want to be salespeople, but I argue you are a salesperson whether you want to be or not. It’s not a matter of whether you are or not…it’s only a matter of whether you’re good or not. My goal is to help all readers of Next Level Blogger to truly excel in this area and to be successful at making their business all it can be through blogging, social networking and internet marketing. That said, here are some of my thoughts on salesmanship. I’d love to hear your comments…

“Salesman” is a dirty word. It’s one of the reasons I’m attracted to the profession and why I consider myself a salesman. It’s a massively misunderstood profession. It’s also a massively abused and poorly executed profession. There are good salespeople out there, but there are very few. I am one of the good ones. It’s my mission to teach others that salesmanship is not dead but more vital and needed than ever. It’s good salesmanship that will make or break your business. It’s good salesmanship that will make or break your life. It’s good salesmanship (not money) that makes the world go round…

A good sales experience can profoundly change your opinion about something. It can make you a fan for life. It can affect your decisions in a fundamental way. Believe it or not, everyone is in sales. It’s not a matter of debate. You want stuff. Other people have what you want. You want them to give it to you. That makes you a salesperson. Look, this doesn’t mean you’re a GOOD salesperson. You’re probably not. You’re probably a bad salesperson. You’re probably ineffective and inept at sales. But there’s a good reason for that. The reason is you’ve never focused on your sales skills. You’re never sat down to make a plan to systematically improve your sales skills. Probably because you don’t consider yourself a salesman. That’s fine. It’s your choice. But I’m telling you, the sooner you accept the fact that you’re a salesperson, the sooner you can get down to work and finally start getting what you want out of life.

You Have Ethical Responsibilities

Here’s a real key to success in sales. And it’s one of the reasons so many salespeople are bad at what they do. You have ethical responsibilities. It is your right to live how you choose, but it is your ethical mandate to live in a way that is mutually beneficial. Most salespeople just want the close, and that is where they screw it up. The largest most important thing you can do to greatly improve the quality of your life in sales is to answer the question of “why”.

Why do you want what you want? Why do you want your boss to give you more money? Why do you want this person to buy from you? Why do you want more vacation time? Why do you want that new car? Why are you willing to work late and sacrifice time with your family in order to get these things? See, you better have good answers to these questions, and they better be answers you’d be happy to share with your mother. If not, you need to own up to the fact that maybe, just maybe that new car just isn’t worth working for. Maybe you want it for the wrong reasons. Follow?

If you want good things, for mutually beneficial reasons, that is the first and more fundamental step towards becoming a good salesperson. See, if you know why your goal is mutually beneficial, all you have to do is explain it well to your customer, your boss or whoever you’re selling to. With good communication skills, the rest is a piece of cake. It’s when we try to use good communication skills to our customers’ peril…that’s when we give salesmanship a bad name. When we have a goal which is not in our customers’ best interest, but we try to acheive the goal anyway…that’s when we’ve violated our ethical responsibilities. That’s not success, my friend, even if you DO have your dream car.

How to Rock

When you’ve aligned your goals with a healthy concern for others, you will ultimately find that what Zig Ziglar says is true, “You can have anything you want in life, if you can just help enough other people get what they want.” There is no better way to achieve your goals! Now that your goals are simply to help others, you will find that this one factor alone will affect your entire approach to building your business. Instead of just trying to close the deal, you’ll investigate the customer’s motives, needs and wants, and you’ll work to find a way to help and add value. This is true salesmanship. This is where you find common ground and develop a mutually beneficial relationship that lasts. This is how you REALLY reach your long term goals.

And that is why I’m in sales. I know that when I sell a product or a service, I’ve made a friend. I would honestly do whatever I can to help them out, and guess what…I get paid too. A nice little bonus.