blogging

Don’t Compare Your Blog to Others

By Christian

You have a unique value proposition to offer your readers. Get in tune with it! What do you do better than anyone? Competition is fierce. That’s not news, and it shouldn’t surprise you. I’ve written about how to research keywords and find little pockets of opportunity here and there, and that’s good stuff. It’s important to be able to do that, but it’s MORE important to simply know who you are and work really hard at being better than anyone else in something.

There is SO much content out there right now about niche marketing. I get it. People want to make money online. They want to connect with a lot of people really quickly, easily and very inexpensively. And there are a ton of people out there talking about how to do it…how to find “your niche”. There is certainly such a thing as niche marketing, and learning how to write for search engines is important, but there is way more value in just going out every day and creating huge value for your readers. This is what’s going to create long term success for your business, nothing else.

Niche marketing is the equivalent of writing a great ad. It will pull in sales, and that’s a good thing. But it doesn’t last forever. It’s not substantive. If you want to be successful in business, you’re going to need to get in touch with what real value you can offer your customers. Nothing short of this will do.

Niche Marketing is not a Magical Cure

Please keep your magical thinking in check. We’re all subject to falling into this trap. God knows I’ve done it…but magical niches that provide you with huge traffic, tons of sales and easy money cannot be counted on. Can you make millions in internet marketing? Of course, but please don’t waste your days on trying to find some magical niche…in other words, don’t shy away from competition. Competition is a good thing; it means there is strong demand, and strong demand means you can make money in that area.

But what we see is not opportunity, we see competition. We see all the other guys and gals out there competing in a certain niche, and we think that because there are so many others that there is no room for us. Not true. Stop comparing yourself to others! And definitely don’t compare your blog to the others out there in your niche. You are unique. You are an expert in your field. You bring a new and fresh perspective.

Why I Write This Make Money Online Blog

Look at what I’m doing…a blog about making money online. This has been done before! But I bring a unique perspective. I come from direct sales; I’ve had a lot of success in that area, and over the last few years, I’ve been applying everything I know about sales…to online business. I look at making money online in a unique way because of the experiences and successes I’ve had, and I can offer value in that area. People who want to purely do internet marketing from a technical perspective and who are only interested in making money are not likely to find a ton of value in this blog, but people who understand the value of connecting with their customers on a human level and who want to build a real business will be able to see that I actually know something about that.

By not comparing your blog to others and focusing intently on the value you can provide, you can get in touch with what you really want to do. This is huge! It’s absolutely essential for you to like what you’re doing and to have a LOT to say in whatever niche you decide to target. Don’t pick something just because you think it’s a good market. Bad idea. Do what you love. Otherwise, you’re setting yourself up for failure…forever seeking some magical niche that will solve your problems. Not gonna happen! Answer these questions:

What niche do you WANT to work…regardless of competition?
What unique value can you add to it?
What experiences and unique successes have you had that can lend to your expertise in this area?
Why should people listen to you?
Is this a topic that you talk about a lot anyway?
Would you do it for free? (the answer should be “yes”)

If you can answer these questions, it will help you get in tune with what you ought to be blogging. Regardless of what others are doing…you need to develop the conviction necessary to market in the area where you really feel the most competent and where you can really provide the most value to other people. That’s what a real business is built on…it’s built on you, not a niche.

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 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.

Why to Write a Plan for Your Blog

By Christian

Blogging is not usually supposed to be very technical or journalistic in tone. A huge part of the appeal is that blogging is highly personal. This is also where blogging gets a lot of its strength and effectiveness. Whether you’re in a home based business, real estate, internet marketing, network marketing or ANY business that would benefit very much from a blog presence, blogging gives you the opportunity to connect on a personal level with a large number of people over time. When you think about it, there is really nothing like it!

The Power of Blogging

You cannot mail to a direct a mailing list, or do a calling campaign or any other form of contact with your network that is as effective and engaging as a blog can be, if it’s done right. And think about this: blogging is CHEAP! How much would it cost you to do a mailing to 10,000 prospects? It would cost thousands of dollars of course, and how engaging would it be? How many of those postcards would just end up in the trash? But how much does it cost to publish a blog post and blast it out to everyone in your network? Nothing! Think about how powerful that is! But the point of this post isn’t to sell you on the effectiveness, it’s to show you the importance of writing a plan for your blog, why it’s essential and a couple steps to take to make sure you’re doing it effectively.

Unfortunately for many business people, much of what you do ends up coming off as spam to most people. This is not what you want, believe me. And it’s completely avoidable, if you write a good plan for your blog up front!

Blogging can be a Double Edged Sword

Writing up a plan for your blogging and social networking is a rare thing. Almost no one does it. Who has the time? And really, how important can it be? It’s very easy to get started with a blog, but don’t let that confuse you. I mentioned how powerful and cost effective a blog can be as a marketing tool. The fact that it’s very inexpensive to get started is simply a blessing of technology, but I’d encourage you to not treat it like it’s free. The people you’re engaging are real people; don’t waste their time! For decades, it’s cost media companies many thousands of dollars to do what you can do now for basically nothing, but just because blogging is cheap doesn’t mean your audience’s attention is cheap. In fact, you’re not the only one who has access to this technology…everyone has access to it, and as a result your audiences attention span and trust is stretched even thinner than ever.

In other words, just remember this: if you want your blogging to be effective, you need to put out quality content, and you need to be HYPER-sensitive to what they will consider valuable. Value is in the eye of the beholder, and the decision regarding what is valuable is up to your customers, not you. But still, you need to reach your sales goals, no? So what gives? This is why writing a plan is hugely important.

The double-edged sword of blogging is this: if you do well, you will be able to engage a high number of people on a personal level. This is powerful and very cost effective branding. But if you put out content that is not well-received, even if your intentions are good, you can easily do more harm than good. Consumers are incredibly insensitive and unforgiving when it comes to spam, and as far as a consumer is concerned in the social media world…spam is ANY from of non-personal interruption-based marketing that they did not ask for.

The essential element here is perception, not reality. Spam is anything that is perceived as spam. Many business people and sales people have a tough time adapting to social media because of this. What happens is that they take on a blog or create some social media profiles for the purpose of marketing their business. That’s good. That’s smart. But then they proceed to simply use these tools as a way of advertising themselves, completely neglecting the “social” part of social media. That’s bad.

Write a plan for your blog! Make sure up front that you have an action plan, in writing, that will enable you to get the results you’re looking for. And your plan must enable you to reach your goals without doing anything that can remotely be perceived as spam by your prospects. This is a challenge! But seriously, if you don’t do the work up front, you’re wasting your time. I honestly think much of the spam out there is due to business people wanting to sell things (which is smart) but not sitting down to make sure they have a plan to effectively make it happen (that’s NOT smart).

The Value of Having a Plan

Many people, especially salespeople, have told me they don’t understand the value of having a business plan. They just want to go out and sell. What good is it going to do you to have a written business plan sitting on your desk? Here’s the deal: you don’t need a business plan; you need to WRITE a business plan. See the difference? As soon as you write it, you can throw it away for all I care. Actually, it’s best to hang on to it and revise it once a quarter or so, as your business changes and as you learn more. However, the finished product is largely irrelevant. You don’t need it in most cases. What you NEED to do is go through the process of writing it, because the process of writing it will force you to think critically about what you’re doing.

Don’t spend months writing a blog only to find out that you are never going to achieve your goals this way. Don’t start a blog because it’s cool or because I tell you it’s a great marketing tool or whatever else…do it for the right reasons. Write a plan for your business, and make sure your blog is targeted to help you meet your business goals. There are a million kinds of blogs, and there are a million different angles you can take. Write the plan first. Outline what you want to do. Make sure it all makes sense, then start. Measure twice, cut once.

In my next post, I’ll make a list of essential questions for you to ask while writing your blogging plan. Have I convinced you to write a plan?