business blogging

Why Simple Blogs are Better for Business

By Christian

simple-blogs-rock — When it comes to business blogging, simple rules. Keep it simple. You'll have more fun, and your success will come as a result of that 🙂

When it comes to so many things in life, we over-complicate. Wouldn’t you agree? Don’t you think we do this with blogging as well? We make it way too hard.

We run too many plugins
We push ourselves to post more often than we really want to
We spend too much time on our blog
We concentrate too much on our design
We spend too much time trying to “get traffic” than in just “talking to people”

Look if your blog isn’t fun, you’re not going to stick with it. And that means you’re not going to be successful. Pick a simple topic that you love, and stick with it for the long haul. Here are some principles that will help you simplify and love every minute you spend building your blog.

Plugins are a beautiful thing. That said, run a handful of them. After 10-15 plugins, give serious consideration to simply cutting yourself off. You don’t need more. You really, really don’t.
Blogging should not take all day. In fact, it shouldn’t take too long at all. If you’re new, and you’re spending more than a couple hours a WEEK on your blog, you’re spending too much time on it.
Design matters. It does. But it doesn’t make or break your site. If you think your blog needs to be snazzy to be successful…if you think the perfect layout matters to the point that it will affect the success of your blog…if you think readers really give a damn about ANYTHING other than content, take a look at this very successful blog and get back to me with your thoughts.
Traffic matters. That said, it doesn’t matter nearly as much as you may think. I haven’t checked my analytics in weeks. I’m growing. That’s what matters. It may seem odd that I’ll spout the gospel of traffic not mattering and then later on launch a tutorial on how to get more traffic. Is this hypocrisy? I don’t think so. I just like to put things in perspective. You need traffic, but should you spend more than a few hours here and there on “traffic generating” techniques? I really don’t think so.

If all you want is traffic, just buy a bunch of pop-under hits for $100. Done. You’ll have a hundred thousand visitors a month overnight, and it will translate ZERO to your bottom line of course. Traffic matters, but we spend WAY too much time on SEO and traffic generation. We don’t need more traffic, we need GOOD traffic, and that comes via social networking. Just talk to people. Talk to people, and the traffic will come.

If you’re looking for your blog to blow your business up over night, you’re barking up the wrong tree. If you want to build a powerful community that supports you through thick and thin, that grows your base slow and steady over time, that opens up new income streams and gives you a considerable creative outlet, then blogging is your man. Do it, but take it for what it is. It’s really very simple. Let it be fun, and it will pay you handsomely in the long run 🙂

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 🙂

Selling on Your Blog Ain’t Hard (The Art of Asking for the Order)

By Christian

Asking for the order is a key sales principle. In fact, it’s a key life principle! If you don’t ask, you don’t get! This can often come off as a “duh” kind of statement. If you want someone to buy from you, you should probably ASK them to buy from you! Agreed?

But year after year, study after study show that salespeople will often perform an entire sales presentation and fail to ask for the order at the end. Bottom line: it’s scary for many of us to ask people to buy something. So we leave them to figure it out for themselves. We do this in the name of politeness, but really we do it out of fear. As I probably don’t even need to tell you…it rarely produces the desired result.

Internet marketers and bloggers are big culprits of this as well, not just sales people in a classic, traditional sense. 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. They don’t want to be pushy. It’s understandable. But the sentiment is misplaced. I’ll explain in a sec…

First, it’s important to understand that asking for the order goes for making sales but also for many other things as well.

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 your readers what you want. Ask for the order. If you don’t, you’re expecting them to telepathically figure out what you want, and well frankly…why should they go through the trouble? If you want to get good results as often as possible…make it easy for them!

Where to Get Confidence to Ask for the Order

Asking for what you want requires confidence. Confidence comes from three places:

Genuine Value
Technique
Practice

I’ve trained over a thousand sales people, and I can report that very few people are good at sales starting out. I sure wasn’t. Selling simply does not come naturally to most people. It is a skill set you acquire through hard work and practice. One thing about sales is very cool. If you follow the rules, you get the results, period.

Employ these three principles, and you’ll get the results you’re looking for!

Genuine Value

Genuine value is the element I mention first, because it’s the foundation. If you don’t create genuine value for your readers, everything else is a farce. There’s a difference between selling via confidence and simply trying to make money.

Selling is not the act of extracting money from people’s wallets. Selling is the act of freely and voluntarily exchanging real value. Give your reader something very valuable, and then they reciprocate. It’s a win-win. It all starts with value. If you skip this part, the exchange is empty, and you won’t be in this business for long.

This is why I mentioned earlier that the fear of being pushy is misplaced. It’s pushy to try to get something for nothing. It’s pushy to expect someone to pay for something they don’t need. It’s pushy to pressure someone to do something that’s not in their best interest. You’re not doing anything of this sort.

What you’re doing is providing highly valuable information to people who have specifically sought you out, because they want what you’re offering. And as it happens, you’re good at what you do, and you’d like to be able to keep doing it. In order for that to happen, you simply need to get results. It’s fair and necessary to ask for what you want. And your readers aren’t going to know unless you tell them what that is.

How do you create genuine value for your readers? Be good at what you do! Study your business like a mad man. Write quality, helpful content, put out good stuff. That’s the first step.

It’s important to understand that this step doesn’t work all by itself. It’s just step one of three. Many bloggers put out awesome content and still fail to make money or get results. It’s not just about genuine value, but it’s a necessary first step.

Technique

Technique is simply a matter of making sure you’re very clear on what results you need and expect from your blog, and then systematically going through to make sure every element of your site, from the opt in boxes you use to the way you manage your email marketing, is arranged in such a way that it is clear to your readers what you’re offering and what you want them to do.

There are a number of ways to ask for what you want when it comes to managing a blog. As I mentioned before, it’s not just a matter of selling products when it comes to blogging. You want people to comment on your posts, subscribe to your email list, buy your affiliate products, etc. There are likely a number of actions you want your readers to take. It’s important to ask! Try these specific steps. They are all ways of asking, and getting:

Put a line in your theme so it displays at the end of every post, asking visitors to comment.
Make sure you have 2-3 opt in boxes per page. Your opt in box should be visible from anywhere on your site.
Use a pop-up to build email subscriptions as well
Use a free gift to further entice people to subscribe
Your outgoing email messages should give valuable information and offer interaction with your subscribers, but they should also regularly offer something for sale

Use a plugin like TweetThis that makes it easy for people to share your content with others, and make sure to remind people on occasion…”Hey, if you like this post, please retweet it…” you get the idea.

Clearly, different blogs have different goals, but this list is a start. The idea is to have your goals in order, and then simply make sure your site and the way you manage it is conducive to getting the results you want.

Practice

This element is crucial as well. The fact is that when it comes to business blogging, turning your readers into advocates, customers and clients is an ongoing process. The more you practice the better you get.

I’m surprised sometimes at how often someone will ask me why they’re not making money from their blog when, with all due respect, all they’ve done is put up a dozen posts or so and install an Adsense module. Maybe a couple affiliate links. That will make you some cash…if you’re getting several thousand visitors a day. Short of that, you’re going to need to be more aggressive and tactful in your approach.

Think of your blog as a small retail shop. You’re not WalMart. WalMart puts a bunch of stuff up on it’s shelves, sells everything really cheap and then brings in massive amounts of people through. That creates sales. You’re not WalMart, so don’t follow their business model!

What happens in a small retail shop? There are fewer items for sale, and the prices are higher. But things are also very clean. There is character, and when you walk in, a friendly person walks up, smiles and warmly says “Hi! How can I help you?” Personal service. One-on-one engagement. Details…these things matter. And they also add up to you being able to make a fine living off any niche you want. But you gotta ask for the order 🙂

The Breakdown

Here’s the bottom line: sales is simple. It’s hard work getting results on a day-to-day basis. But the process is not hard to understand. It’s just a lot of work 🙂 It’s why you’ve got guys like Gary Vaynerchuk yelling at us to get our hustle on. You have to believe in what you’re doing. And you have to LOVE what you’re doing, because to build a small business that makes bank…is a lot of hard work. No magical web design, no plugin, no kick ass turnkey business opportunity is going to save you from that reality.

That said, if you’re willing to really work it, there is massive opportunity out there! And the fundamentals of sales are steadfast. They are simple, and they remain simple.

If you’re not getting results from your site…there is something broken in your implementation of the steps I just outlined. You’re either not asking for what you want, you’re not asking often enough or *gasp* you’re not creating genuine value for your readers. One way or another, your fortune lies locked behind door one, two or three! All you gotta do is go figure out which one and smash down the door!

The Threshold of Success – Why Most Bloggers Never Make It

By Christian

Success is a nasty, elusive little bugger, isn’t it? Is there a topic in the business space that gets covered more often, directly or indirectly, than “how to succeed”? If you think about it, nearly every how-to tip, every list of the “best WordPress plugins to use on your site”, every tutorial on how to get more traffic to your site, etc…it all centers around the ultimate hub that concerns us all…SUCCESS. How do we become successful?

Success is Not Defined by “Them”, It’s Defined by YOU

One of the reasons success is such a troublesome topic is because it is exceedingly personal. When we accept this fact, success becomes a lot simpler. Not necessarily easy…but simpler none the less. But unfortunately, most of us have not accepted it! The problem is that most of us, understandably, look to the example of others for how to define success, when we really ought to look no further than ourselves. In essence, we look at the accomplishments of others, and make those accomplishments our own goals. This is not the way to do it.

A Lesson from Gary Vaynerchuk – Not All Goals are Created Equal

It’s important to ask yourself if the accomplishment you’re trying to emulate was in fact a goal of your mentor’s to begin with. For example, we see someone like Gary Vaynerchuk with 800,000 followers, or however many it is these days, and we say “I want 800,000 followers too. How do I get 800,000 followers on Twitter like @garyvee?”

Setting a goal is a great thing…if it’s a great goal. There IS such a thing as a goal that steers you down the wrong path, so make sure the questions you ask yourself, and the goals you set for yourself are taking you in the right direction.

The fact is that Gary Vaynerchuk has never given a damn about how many followers he has on Twitter. Getting 800,000 followers was never a goal. It just happened as an automatic result of following his business plan.

Do you want to model his follower count, or do you want to model his success? See the difference?

Maybe you should model Gary’s work ethic and business philosophy…the things that actually LEAD to 800,000 followers, instead of just trying to get 800,000 followers on Twitter.

If you truly wanted to model Gary Vaynerchuk’s success, you wouldn’t give a damn about how many followers you had on Twitter either. This is just one of many examples of arbitrary goals we set for ourselves, that sound good but ultimately don’t lead us in the direction of success.

I’m just using Gary as an example because he’s a marketer and business man who I personally agree with a lot of the time. Your mentor may be someone else, but the concept is the same.

Why Success is Elusive

My point is that success is elusive for many of us for two reasons, and the first one is because often, we set goals that take us in the wrong direction. To take care of this first concern, make sure you set goals that will truly lead YOU in the direction YOU personally want to go, not goals that you believe possibly lead someone else in the direction they went. See the difference?

The Threshold of Success – How to Cross Over and Make Your Goals a Reality

Second, success has a threshold. And many of us, while we want the things success provides, are not willing to do the work. Plain and simple. I’ve worked with a lot of sales people one-on-one and in group settings over the years. Sales training like I’ve done puts you front and center with what it takes to make a business work. It also puts you front and center with the reasons they all too often DON’T work.

No business is successful without strong sales. Whether it’s a service, a product or whatever, you need sales, and I’m hear to tell you that the sales skills I aim to teach my clients are able to be learned by anyone.

If you do the work, you will get the sales, period. I’ve seen it time and time again. When a business person or sales person wants to know how to make more sales, the first place I look is at their daily production. And by production I don’t mean sales…I mean their daily work-related tasks…the work you can actually control on a day to day basis.

You cannot control whether a person is a good prospect to buy a certain product at a certain time, believe it or not. But you CAN learn to have complete control over the following factors:

Prospecting
Lead generation
Lead follow up
Presentation skills

If you are not making the money you want to online, or wherever your business is based, there is something broken somewhere in that list. Why? Because that’s all there is. Success is simple. The plain fact is that while people SAY they’re working their tail off every day, they’re either working on the wrong things (things NOT on the list above), or they’re not working as hard as they say they are.

What is the threshold of success? It is hard work…on the right things. And bottom line: most of us just don’t want to do it.

We have things we like to do, and perhaps we just don’t like prospecting. That’s fine, but if you want your business to be successful, you need to make sales, and if you want to make sales, you have to prospect. Period. End of sentence. That’s all she wrote. And if you don’t do it…or hire someone who does…your business will fail.

The reason most of us don’t make it through the threshold of success is not because we don’t work hard. We just don’t do the work that needs to be done. Perhaps the reason “successful” people seem to be at ease is because they realize how simple it is to make their goals a reality. There are, however, only four things on the list!

Not One Single Thing You Do Will Make You Successful

By Christian

In my years in business so far, I’ve learned something simple that I have yet not been able to disprove. I have had the pleasure of meeting and staying in touch with some of the world’s most successful salespeople and small business owners. I’ve had dinner with them, hung out with them on boats, gone out drinking with them…to me this is the ultimate learning environment.

This is what I’ve learned:

Not One Single Thing You Do Will Make You Successful!

This is what I mean: big success is made up of thousands of tiny, almost imperceptible successes. Many new business owners and bloggers are looking for a quick way to get their blog to the top of Google. They want to find the “trick” to getting a lot of email subscribers. They want to learn the correct method of generating a lot of traffic quickly.

The Trick to Blogging Success!

The trick is that there is no trick. The cream rises to the top, period. And it takes a little time in most instances, period. I’m not saying it’s going to take years to reach your blogging goals. I’m saying there is no ONE thing that’s going to make any difference. Everything matters!

Creating valuable content on a consistent basis matters.
Moderating and responding to comments and interacting in a genuine way with your readers matters.
Maintaining clean SEO practices matters.
Commenting on other blogs matters.
Being active in forums matters.
Maintaining a clean and up to date email list matters.
Keeping your blog software up to date matters.

You see where I’m going…it all matters! I don’t mean this post to be discouraging. I mean it to be motivational…I’m trying to save you the heartache and lost productivity that comes from seeking a short cut. Just get to work! Hit it every single day! Hustle! Work hard! Isn’t this how successful businesses are built? Blogging is no different. The benefits are real. The benefits are substantial. But the benefits are mostly reserved for bloggers that build very valuable blogs. And value takes time.

There is no one single thing that will make your blog rock. It’s like getting your body in shape. There’s not really a diet program our supplement out there that will REALLY create magical results for you in no time. But if you eat clean and exercise, you WILL get great results, and it won’t really take very long. It is hard work, yes. But it works. In fact it’s a LOT quicker to simply buckle down, clean up your diet, and work hard in the gym than it is to search for some kind of magical diet plan that will get you results quickly. It’s actually QUICKER and takes LESS EFFORT to just do the work!