Small Business Marketing Strategies

Is Internet Marketing too Techy for You?

By Christian

I network primarily with home based business and other small business owners who want to use blogging, internet marketing and social networking tools to promote and grow their business. One of the biggest concerns I hear is that this “internet stuff” is just too technical. With terms like “seo”, “image alt tags”, “robots.txt”, and so on and so forth, internet marketing is surely filled with jargon and a lot of things to learn. But so what? My argument is that the learning curve is NOT something that should scare you away. You’re looking at tools that can literally transform your business. And they cost almost nothing to use them! If you’re in the camp that has delayed getting online in a big way because you’re intimidated by technology, I get it, but I hope this article gets you off the fence. That’s my goal anyway.

What’s Your Competition Doing?

Consider this: your competition IS going after the internet space in your niche, so if you don’t you’re putting yourself at a huge disadvantage. Besides, with even a cursory glance, you can see that people are looking for what you sell online, and if you’re not in that space in a big way, then you’re basically begging your customers to go somewhere else. That’s not you!

It’s Time to Be Smart, not Safe

This is not a time to not be smart in business. I see business owners canceling their print advertising left and right. And many have reported to me that they see little to no negative effect. What does that tell you about the power of traditional advertising on today’s consumer?

You need to market yourself in some manner. Would you not agree? I think there’s something essential to consider here. I’m not going to pretend there is not a learning curve to internet marketing. I’ve spent years doing this, making a lot of money for clients, and I’m just now starting to turn the tables to make real money for myself. It takes time to learn the ropes of ANY system. This is no different. Let me tell you that if you take on internet marketing for your small business, you will not only learn a lot about technology, but you will be tapping into a global market…it will likely transform your business in a very real, positive way. It will change the way you think about your business, and you’ll see a whole new set of ways to grow it in the future. This ought to both thrill you AND scare the crap out of you. If not, you can stop reading now 🙂

Success Takes Work, Period

I can’t make the learning curve disappear for you. Anyone who claims to do that is full of BS. One of the top things I concentrate on at Next Level Blogger is how to make money online using blogging, social networking and internet marketing. This field is filled with content on “how to get results fast”, “how to make money fast”, etc. I’m trying to keep my foot off the gas in that department. It takes work, and I don’t want to give any false impressions. Even Frank Kern, the king of laziness in the internet marketing world, openly admits that he has to work hard to make his millions. Deep down, we all know success takes hard work, and as a business owner I have no doubt you understand that. So why should internet marketing be any different? The question is not whether you should do the work necessary…the question is whether or not you can get huge results with it. I’m telling you the answer is “yes, you can get HUGE results with it! It’s worth the work!” My goal is not to make the work disappear, but I do want to put it into perspective.

To Put it into Perspective…

One field I know well is real estate. I’ve had a lot of success generating leads online and helping my real estate team sell a lot of houses. When making the transition from traditional advertising to internet marketing, I often confront (and still confront) the concern of internet marketing being too techy. I explain a new marketing idea I have, and some people just don’t “get it”. And because it’s an uncomfortable concept, they just want to keep doing it old school. Well, if old school still worked, I’d be out of business. The whole point of this is that old school doesn’t work anymore, not when it comes to marketing. To remain competitive, we NEED to try new things.This means we simply have to dive in, get our hands dirty and learn new stuff. Period.

This is what I try to explain to my clients, and this is what I’ll try to explain to you today: to become an expert in your field, to become good in your business, you needed to learn a lot of things. In real estate for example, Realtors NEVER used to use cell phones or laptops. They never used to use contact management databases. They didn’t know how to typeset their own print ads or design brochures…none of this. Now, a real estate agent without these tools and skills is out of business, period. Stuff changes, doesn’t it?

And this is all I’m saying in this article. Soon, a Realtor without a Twitter account and a strong social networking plan is going to be uncompetitive. And this applies to YOUR business 100%. Whether you’re in a home based business, network marketing, whether you sell ebooks or affiliate products, whether your main business is online or offline…no matter what you’re selling, this applies, because what the consumer wants is changing, and the way they’re searching for information is changing. Is internet marketing too techy for you? At this point, yes it probably is. So it’s time to start learning! Embrace change, because it’s here to stay.

How Should Business Owners Approach Blogging?

By Christian

Most business owners I talk with will tell me something like this, “I’d like to start a blog, but how can I know I’m going to get an immediate return on my investment?” OK, maybe they don’t say it exactly like that, but that’s the idea. And as a business owner myself, I understand that mindset. But we have to get past the idea that starting a blog is the same thing as placing an ad in the local newspaper. That’s what we WANT blogging to be, but that’s not what it is. We want to fire it up, put in very little work, and proceed to watch the phone ring off the hook and our inbox fill up with orders, right? If you want to place an ad, place an ad 🙂 Blogging works differently. It requires an ongoing effort.

Is Blogging a Good Marketing Investment or Just a Waste of Time?

So if blogging requires an ongoing effort and does not produce any immediate benefit, how could it possibly be perceived as a good investment for a business? Good question! Here’s the thing: marketing works differently now, in case you haven’t noticed! Consumers respond to things differently, and we need to learn to engage them in entirely new ways. Placing ads in print media has become one of the biggest wastes of money you can imagine. Yes, you can see an immediate result, but that result is getting smaller and smaller. Immediate, yes. But significant? No. Not anymore.

Yet as business owners, we’re hooked on that immediate result. We want to know that every dollar we spend on marketing is producing a result. It makes sense. But continuing to spend more and more money for less and less of a result doesn’t make sense, does it? And that’s exactly what’s happening with traditional advertising. Traditional advertising has become SO ineffective, that I know many small business owners all over the world who have discontinued ALL print and television advertising, and many of them report that it has had little or no negative effect on their business. That’s how ineffective it has become!

Blogging is the New, Cost-Effective Alternative

So what is the alternative? The alternative is to embrace the rules of blog marketing and learn to engage your market in new and creative ways. Yes, it will require that you learn new things and learn to think about your marketing differently and measure your results in new ways. But doing this will enable you to engage a larger number of people than ever before, for less money than ever before. You’ll be able to engage prospects in new places you’ve never thought of before and make money in ways that you’ve never considered before.

Many business owners feel they don’t have time to blog. That’s very understandable, but I’d encourage you to not think of it as an extra effort. You’re likely already producing all the content you need for your blog. You’re already an expert in your field, right? You just need to channel your expertise in new ways. The memos you write to your team, the content you cover at sales meetings, the questions you answer for customers every day, the conferences you attend, the employees you hire, the new products or services you release…you’re doing ALL of these things already, and they are all AWESOME content for your blog. It just needs to be channeled in an efficient manner.

Yes, it WILL take time. It’s not completely free, and I’d be the last one to say blogging can be set on auto-pilot. The point is that it’s a simple extension of what you’re already doing as a business owner. The more engaged you are with your blog, the more engaging you’ll be with your readers, and of course that’s the whole point. Why would you ever want a blog that didn’t take any of your time? The POINT is to take some time…connect with your people. If you do it consistently, you’ll be rewarded.

Should You Blog?

By Christian

My network is mostly composed of people in a small business of one sort or another. People in home based business, real estate, network marketing or some other small sales-based business. I often get questions about blogging, and much of the time it’s not about any technical aspect of blogging. As much as the “how-to” part of blogging, people seem to be interested in the “why”. For those of you who do not currently write a blog, I’d like to take a quick stab at answering the questions of whether or not you should start a blog.

Blogging is Not for Everyone…

I’m going to say you should start a blog, but FIRST I’d like to give you a disclaimer. I am certainly a believer in the power of blogging for small business. I do it myself, and it’s become a cornerstone of what I do to market my business. I DON’T however think everyone is necessarily cut out for this. Anyone who tells you that blogging is easy or that anyone can do it is full of it. It’s a lot of work. That said, there can be a significant benefit to you and your business through blogging. Truth be told, it has transformed my business from the inside out, in a very good way. I’ve had to work really hard at it. I’ve had to learn a lot of things like HTML, CSS, PHP and such that I never would have thought to learn otherwise, but for me it’s completely been worth it.

The skills I’ve learned through blogging have enabled me to make money from anywhere, on my own schedule, and that is very important to me. So can it benefit you to this degree, and should you start a blog yourself?

Do it Anyway!

Here’s my advice: I would highly encourage you to at least give it a shot. That’s really all there is to it. It’s really the best way to know if you like something. Don’t expect immediate results. You get out what you put in. Of course, if you’re going to do it half-assed, just wait til you’re willing to do it right. If you want to make full time income doing it, you’ll probably need to do it full time…just like anything else. But blogging to me is not about directly making money so much as it is about building my network, building a community of like-minded people and then proceeding to sell from there.

If you’re in a business and want tot sell more products or services, chances are good that a properly built and executed blog can be a highly effective, cost-efficient, powerful way to expand your business. So give it a try! Dive in, and give it an honest effort. See what results you can get. Blog for a year…that’s my advice to anyone in a small business who really wants to harness the power of this media. By that time, you ‘ll be intimately aware of your competencies and lack thereof.

I could of course write a detailed analysis of the pros and cons…but the fact is that blogging is the most powerful way I know to connect with a large number of people, in a personal, interactive way, for very little money. Will you be awesome at it? I don’t know, but it’s such a highly leveraged and powerful tool to anyone in a small business, that I feel overlooking it or writing it off simply because it will require you to learn some new things is foolish. So should you blog? Yes, at least for a little while 🙂

It’s not the only way to promote your business of course, but it is a very powerful one. Coming from direct sales, I know that I can go out and make money any time I need to…even if the internet died tomorrow, I’d be OK. Blogging is not the end all and be all of success in business, but if you want to put all the odds possible in your favor, starting a business blog as an extension of your business is just about the smartest thing you can do.

How to Improve Traffic from Your Social Networking

By Christian

This post is part of a series. If you’d like to read from the beginning, check out the other posts so far!

This post of course is entitled “How to Improve Traffic from Your Social Networking”. Notice I said “improve”, not “increase”! As business people who want to sell things and make money online, we always want more traffic. And surely more traffic can be a good thing. But if your traffic is of low quality, you can get all the hits you want, and you’re still not going to reach your goals.

If it was really just about getting more traffic, you could just go purchase pop-under traffic from some traffic broker. You can get hundreds of thousands of visitors to your site like this very quickly. Of course, you won’t make any money this way…it just goes to show you that traffic is not everything. Quality is what counts!

The crux of the high traffic conundrum is that if you’re putting out quality content, and you’re taking steps to attract quality, targeted buyers to your site, high traffic and substantial profits are eventually inevitable. The ease and simplicity of the internet makes us want everything right now…yesterday in fact. I’ve talked with so many business people who run a blog or who have taken on different internet marketing projects, and they get discouraged after only a few weeks. It takes time! If you’re laying the groundwork in the manner I describe in Next Level Blogger, high traffic is on its way! But first, you want to make sure you’re attracting the right traffic.

The Value of Social Networking Traffic

Everyone knows (or SHOULD) that social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are great sources of traffic. But like anything else, let’s not just take what falls on our plate. We need to stop being happy with just getting hits. Look past the numbers and figure why…WHY are people visiting your site, and how can you bring more targeted buyers to your site every day? Here are a couple things to consider doing if you want to make more money and get better results from your social networking traffic:

Better social networking contacts
Better social networking prospecting

Better Social Networking Contacts

Once again…there are no shortcuts! If your social network is not high quality, you’re not going to get high quality results. As marketers who want to sell things and make money online, so many of us want to ramp things up quickly. We want to build a large network as fast as possible, so we take short cuts.

There are automation tools available for MySpace and Twitter that I’ve seen out there, and let me tell you if you’re using a tool to “automatically” add followers for you on Twitter for example, with the hopes of building your follower count, guess what’s going to happen…you’re going to get a lot of followers most likely! And you’ll feel all warm and toasty inside because you have a ton of followers, and when you tweet out a link to your latest post, guess what happens. Nothing! Know why? Because the network you have built is junk!

It’s understandable to think that you need to have a large network on Facebook or wherever, and truth be told if your network is larger, you’re going to get larger results, but this is only the case if the people in your network actually care about you or what you’re talking about!

Build your network the old-fashioned way, by making personal contact with people you’ve found “out there”. Maybe you’ve come across their blog or seen them in a forum. You’ve talked. You know what business they’re in. They are aware of who you are, and you add them on Facebook. That’s a real contact. That’s a targeted lead. That’s someone you KNOW is interested in what you’re selling. It’s someone you can truly connect with and possibly help in the future. Build your network this way, not through automation, mass following or any other junk-building methods.

Same as what I say about high traffic, large numbers only mean something if there are quality, targeted prospects behind those numbers. Otherwise, it’s just junk. Build a quality network. It’s better to have 500 highly targeted people than 50,000 people who could care less what you have to say and who only added you because they didn’t want to be rude. Yes, this approach takes time, but it doesn’t take MORE time than doing it the fast, crappy way. Because the fast, crappy way doesn’t work. Then you’ll end up having to start over. If you really want to make money online, you might as well do it right from the beginning 🙂

Better Social Networking Prospecting

As business people, bloggers, internet marketers, we don’t often think of ourselves as salespeople, but if we’re selling things online (whether it’s a service, a product or anything), we are salespeople whether we think we are or not! And posting links, tweeting out your latest blog posts, engaging your buyers online to get them over to your site…this is prospecting. We are well-served to think about it this way. If we want to get maximum results, that is.

I will talk more about the power of prospecting and how to prospect in later posts, but for now, I want to simply state how you can get better results from the posts you make on your social networking sites.

First of all, I highly recommend using Ping.fm. It’s pretty well-known at this point, but there are still a lot of people not using it. I’m not sure why. You can post once and have that post hit any number or all of your social networking profiles all at once. You can use it for your blog posts, status updates and more. It’s a massive time saver and a great, simply way to reach more people without any additional effort.

Second, I think it’s important to consider the content of your posts carefully. This is another great example of an area where you can get great results, but most people don’t give it much thought. I believe it’s essential to be deliberate in your approach. If you can get a 1% better response from your status updates, that may not seem like much, but if you multiply that by 500-1000 status updates over the course of a year, it can easily add up to a LOT more traffic to your site, more orders and subscribers, etc. Trust me, 1% adds up!

It’s a common practice to tweet out a link to your latest blog post for example. Keep doing it. It works. It’s a great way to let people know about your newest content. Many people do not subscribe by email or rss. They follow you on Twitter. I was originally surprised when I learned this, but it makes sense. Many people who care about what you’re writing are only going to hear about your new posts this way, so make sure you keep doing it.

But you can get a better result, and a lot more clickthroughs if you are just a little thoughtful about how you post the link. Many people use Tweetlater or some other automated tool in order to automatically tweet out their latest posts. That’s cool. It gets the job done, but you probably won’t be surprised to hear that I don’t use any automated tool for this purpose. People are HYPER-sensitive to automation, and I honestly think they can smell it from a mile away. I don’t want my followers to think I’m not there in person. I want to cultivate that personal connection as much as possible. So I do it manually.

Take your post and think about the main value proposition to your readers. Don’t just tweet out the title and expect people to click over and read it because you’re so awesome and people love you. Give them a REASON to click over and visit your blog. Answer the question honestly, why should your readers visit and read this post now? What problem does this post solve? What real value are you offering them? State this briefly and tweet the link out that way. It takes 3 seconds of thought, and that’s all it takes in most cases to make that extra connection with someone. The details matter!

How to Identify Your Most Profitable Niche Market

By Christian

There are a couple common challenges to blogging effectively when it comes to picking your niche:

How to pick a profitable blog topic, and…
How to pick a profitable blog topic when you already have an existing business.

I will try to shed a little light on both of these. Most importantly, if you’re blogging for the purpose of selling stuff, you’re smart. Good call. But if you want to sell stuff, you need to first make certain that there is a market for what you’re selling. This is the first order of business. It may seem like common sense, but you’d be amazed how often this step gets skipped entirely! I recommend using SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool. This is a free tool, and it can give you some huge insight into whether or not there is a real market for what you want to sell.

Here is a typical report this tool will generate for you:

I ran this report on the keyword “cake recipes” just as an example, because I wanted to show you what this tool offers you. Look at a couple things here:

It seems “cake recipes” itself only generates an average of 63 searches per day. Not too heavy. But look at all the other related searches. Check out the scroll bar to the right in this screen shot, and you’ll see that it’s quite a list of very related searches, all totaling up to several hundred searches per day. Is this sufficient for your needs? I have no idea, because I don’t know what you plan on selling to these people, but the point is that it’s important to look at the whole report, not just the exact keyword you type in.
Look at all the resources to the right. All those links take you to other reports and resources you can use to cross reference your results and get more ideas. It’s pretty comprehensive.

I’ve used this tool a LOT over the past couple years, and believe me it will enable you to save yourself a lot of heartache by confirming up front whether the niche you’re pursuing is even something people are interested in.

Another thing to consider

Let’s say you’ve found a keyword that gets plenty of traffic. That’s a good thing, right? Can you make money in that niche? Possibly. But just because there are a lot of people looking for information in a particular niche doesn’t mean they’re spending any money. There’s a difference between getting a lot of traffic and making a lot of money. This is a theme that will continue to come up here a lot, so I’ll go ahead and say it again: it’s better to get only moderate traffic in a profitable niche than to get tons of traffic in an unprofitable one. This sounds like a “duh” statement, but go look at how many people are trying to make a living with entertainment blogs and news blogs, and you’ll see very clearly that most bloggers often monetize as an afterthought. That’s fine of course, but if your goal from the start is to make money online, make sure you pick a niche where there is sufficient interest AND where people are actually spending money!

Do a search in Google and see if there’s any advertising in the sidebar in the search results page. Look at this result for “cake recipes”:

Now this is just my personal take on it, but there’s over a million search results and a grand total of 7 ads. And 3 of those ads are from big name companies, probably wasting money. If I was looking for a profitable niche, I’d want to see more than 7 people trying to make money on it. I’ve talked about this before, but competition is a good thing! If there are a bunch of people advertising to try and reach this niche with paid advertising, I’d take that as more of a sign that people were spending money on this niche. As it stands, I see a million pages offering free information and half a dozen people charging for it. This is not what I call a good target.

What if You Already have a Business?

Let’s say you own a business already, and you want to start blogging. Or maybe you’re already blogging and social networking and not getting the results you’re looking for. One common mistake a business owner will make when starting a blog is to simply use their existing business niche and build a blog around it. This is surely a logical approach, but don’t make the assumption that what you’re doing offline is going to work online. The internet is its own marketplace.

Think about it this way: if you were taking your business and starting another store in a new location…you would research that location first, right? You wouldn’t just assume that any old place will do, and you wouldn’t assume that what you do in one place is going to work somewhere else, right? There are a whole variety of factors to consider when opening a new location for your business, and doing it well and profitably requires that you do research up front. Give your business blog and social networking presence the same consideration.

For example, let’s say you’re in the real estate business. I use this example because I have experience in real estate, and I know a lot of people in the real estate business. The common assumption for a real estate agent would be to use their blog to post their new listings. That makes sense of course, but will it help you produce results toward reaching your goals? The name of this post is “How to Identify Your Most Profitable Niche Market”, so we need to find a niche for your blog that is actually profitable, not just one that makes sense.

From what I’ve seen, I’d say 99% of Realtors who have a blog, use their blog primarily as a place to post their new listings, and that’s about it. Look, marketing your listings is a big part of the real estate business, so that makes sense, and I think you should do it. But I strongly encourage you to dig a lot deeper. Are people in your market searching for vacation property? Short term rentals? Foreclosures? Multifamily investment property? If so, then any of these are worthy niches…valuable pockets of your market where you could slip in and dominate your competition…and you’re missing out on it entirely if you’re not doing your research!

Type in all the keywords you can think of that fit your existing business. Anything that you think is relevant to what you offer. How do you want to be found online? Type it in. See what comes up. Get familiar with what people are actually looking for. This keyword tool is a fantastic, free resource…use it! You can start a blog using a topic that “makes sense” if you want, but if you want great results, you need to be sophisticated in your approach. You need to provide content that is highly targeted to a market with demand that you have verified. This goes for those of you who want to start a new blog to make money online or for those of you with an existing business. It’s the same either way. Do the research and verify demand up front, and you will be well-rewarded.

A Specific Example of Finding a Profitable Niche

An example of this…I work for a real estate broker, and in her particular market there is a high demand for bank owned properties. There are a lot of people searching for bank owned properties; we’ve seen it. It’s funny, because compared to many markets across the country, there are very few bank owned properties in this market, but nevertheless…people are searching for it. So we set up a single page with a keyword-targeted domain name pointing to it…to target that traffic. When people search for bank owned properties in this market, her site will show up. No other real estate people in this market are doing anything nearly as targeted as this, and as a result I bet this page is going to do very well for her.

That’s all I’m talking about. It’s not rocket science. It’s just a matter of digging in deep, doing research up front and taking the time to make sure that whatever blog you want to set up is going to actually help you meet your goals.