blogging

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

I Am a New Contributor on RENewsBlog

By Christian

As many of you know I have a bit of real estate experience. I am still licensed to practice real estate. I help friends and family, as the opportunities present themselves, buy and invest in property. I am a big advocate of owning rental property as well.

The reason I mention this is because a lot of readers here may not necessarily be inclined to read RENewsBlog, a blog about real estate sales and investing. I wanted to drop you a line and let you know that I will now be a weekly contributor over at RENewsBlog.

The content I publish there will be focused on internet marketing and blogging, just like here, so if you like this blog, I encourage you to check out my articles over there as well

The fact is that most real estate professionals, like all small business owners, have a real need to market themselves effectively online. I will be the guy who covers online marketing and sales strategy over there on a regular basis. The concepts I cover will at times have a little bit of a real estate spin on them, which is cool because I know many of you readers of Next Level Blogger are in real estate!

But also this is great for everyone else as well, because the sales and marketing concepts I cover on RENewsBlog will directly apply to YOUR business as well, no matter what industry you’re in.

I invite you to swing by and say “hi”!

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!

Blogging vs Internet Marketing

By Christian

There are a lot of articles on blogging out there…and there are a lot of articles on internet marketing. They are mostly treated as two separate endeavors. Are blogging and internet marketing truly two different subjects? Not for my readers. At least I hope not.

Blogging is mostly the activity of posting content on a regular basis in a specific niche, etc. When “internet marketing” is mentioned, most people think of squeeze pages, affiliate landing pages, sales pages of other various kinds, etc. My hope for this post is simple: I’d like to blur the lines a little bit and hopefully get you to realize, if you don’t already…that if you’re blogging to make money online, you are an internet marketer. And it will benefit you greatly to think of yourself as such.

Business blogging and internet marketing are the same thing. It’s important to view every post on your blog as a landing page.

If You Want to Make Money Online With Your Blog…

Bottom line: if you want to make money online with your blog, you need to sell things. This means you are in sales. That’s internet marketing!

Many bloggers do not think of themselves as marketers or salespeople. And then they wonder why they’re not getting the results they want. There is a lot more involved than just writing blog posts.

You Can’t Make Much Money Blogging

The reason I decided to write this post is because there seems to be a line in many people’s minds that divides internet marketing and blogging, and there really needn’t be. Here’s something that may surprise you to hear: you can’t make much money blogging. Really. You can make a bit. If you happen to be building your blog in a high traffic niche, and are successful in building a high traffic site, you might be able to make some cash through advertising. But honestly, this does not apply to most blogs.

If I’m being honest with you, you are probably not going to be the next TechCrunch. I’m not one to be a dream crusher…if you have an idea and a plan, you should work it, and no doubt there will continue to be many huge success stories like this. My point is this: MOST blogs in the vast scheme of things just aren’t going to be high traffic blogs. And that’s OK. You can STILL make a killing!

One more point about this: there are many sites out there that make as much money as TechCrunch does, and you have likely never even heard of them. Popularity does not necessarily correlate to success, or to income. Sales skills, business skills and skillful execution however, usually do.

Low Traffic Blog Niches Rock!

So what about all those innumerable niches out there that just aren’t high traffic niches? Those are my focus and specialty! Look, there are a TON of ways to make great money online. High traffic is just one, and in my opinion it’s far from the best one.

Yes, there are a lot of gurus out there that will tell you magical ways to explode your traffic and build your email list to staggering numbers, but what many of them will fail to mention is that a lot of niches just don’t have the kind of mass appeal that’s necessary to build a high traffic site.

And it’s important to understand that this is NOT a problem…but it SHOULD affect your monetization plan!

For example, you’re not going to get 100k visitors a month to your Lentil Recipes blog, no matter how hard you try. At least probably not :). I’ll say it this way, if you’re the lentil recipe guru of the world, and your success depends on getting tons of traffic, you do not have a good plan, and you probably haven’t done your research.

However, there are a lot of ways to make that niche profitable. There are good ways to make any useful niche highly profitable, and I’m going to be going over specific ways to do this in upcoming posts on this blog.

The Often Overlooked, Money-Making Benefit of Low Traffic

To suffice for now…how do you make a low traffic niche profitable? You learn to sell! In other words…internet marketing. Personal interaction is king in the low traffic arena. See, you can do that when you have a low traffic niche. You can literally build a great, intimate relationship with your audience. It’s not that possible when you’re getting several thousand visitors a day…the level of personal attention goes down.

Both high traffic and low traffic niches have their advantages. So don’t think because you’re only getting a few thousand visitors a month right now that you’re at a disadvantage. The fact is that you’re in a great place! Use what you’ve got. The fact that you can interact with and engage your audience on a highly personal level means that you can create a lot more value for each individual who reads you blog, and when you create more value…you can make more money.

So I will be covering different ways to monetize like this in more detail in coming posts over the next several weeks. I hope you can bookmark this site or subscribe, so you can get this information when it comes out.

I think it’s absolutely essential to do a few things here:

Stop thinking high traffic and huge subscriber lists are the only way to make a good living with your blog.
Start thinking of yourself as an internet marketer, and open yourself up to the idea that you are a salesperson. Sales skills will be what enable you to make good money online in whatever niche you choose. Realize that if you apply high traffic methods of monetizing on a low traffic site, your results will always be disappointing. However, learn to apply the right techniques to your business, and your results will be impressive.
Study different methods of monetizing that I will be discussing here in the coming weeks, and write a plan for your blog that makes sure you can get the results you’re looking for…don’t just assume you’re going to follow the same model of another blogger you like. Do your own research, and write a plan that’s appropriate for your own niche. Follow your own path!

This is the crux of blogging vs internet marketing…if you’re blogging for business and to make money, you ARE an internet marketer. You are a salesperson. You do not have to embrace these things, and I will admit that most bloggers do not. I will also tell you that there is a REASON most blogs fail :). The difference between blogging and internet marketing? When it comes to making your business successful, there is NO difference!

My Most Embarrassing Day Blogging

By Christian

I’m a big advocate of being involved with your community in any way you can. Guest posting is one way of doing this. It is a fantastic way of gaining new eyeballs for your content. I recommend it.

I recently sent David Risley a guest post, and he graciously accepted and published it. That same day, I sent a guest post to Michael Martine, and he also accepted and published a few days later. Two original articles, two guest posts. I couldn’t think of a better way to help get this new blog off the ground than by sharing it with the awesome readership of these two great blogs. Unbeknownst to me, and them, I had sent them the same post.

It was an accident, but the effect was still terrible in my mind. Duplicate guest posting is really not cool. David had published the article first, and then Michael followed, and I didn’t realize my mistake until the post went live on Michael’s site. David sends me a tweet basically saying “what’s up with this, fool?” He had every right…even an obligation…to call me out. And my stomach sunk when I visited Michael’s site to see that I had submitted a duplicate post to him.

I apologized, and both guys were terrific and gracious as always. It seems to be water under the bridge. But I walked away with a terrific lesson I wanted to share with you. One of those damn lessons you need to learn more than once in life. Details matter. Pay attention to what you’re doing. Also, when you make a mistake…own up to it as soon as possible. No one is perfect; God knows I’m not.

Thanks guys for the opportunity to appear on your blogs. It’s an honor, and next time I promise not to screw it up : )