traffic

How to Build a Massive Blogging Business With Only 10 Subscribers

By Christian

I’m a big fan of leverage, and in the internet age, it’s mandatory that we employ as much of it as possible. You need to be able to get things going quickly! You need to be able to launch an idea without delay and build it competently and efficiently, because FAST is the name of the game.

So how to you build a rocking blog with only 10 subscribers? The answer is this: make sure they’re 10 really great subscribers! Make sure they are advocates.

No matter how far you go in your business, you will always have a core business that deserves more of your focus than anything else. This will be your advocates. Even if you have 100,000 subscribers, I guarantee you that only a handful of them are the reason for the majority of your success. It’s the old 80/20 rule. Find your advocates, my friends! That is the key to success; it’s not about huge subscriber lists (although they are fun and profitable of course); it’s about quality, and my point in this post is simple…you do not need a huge amount of subscribers in order to do a huge amount of damage!

Your power is not in your numbers…it’s in your advocates!

Traffic is Not the Answer! Advocates are the Answer

My point is simple. So many of us want to focus on getting more and more traffic to our sites, and that is understandable. But a big part of me believes it’s kind of an industrial age idea being injected into a new business model. It’s natural and human for us all to want a lot of attention, tons of comments, etc. But I contend it’s just not necessary. Fun, yes. Cool, yes. Necessary to run a profitable business? No.

If I had to choose between 10 people who truly love what I do and are willing to do whatever they can to help me out or 10,000 luke warm, half-assed followers, which do you think I’m going to choose? High traffic may be fun, but it’s rarely efficient. It’s also rarely necessary.

You just don’t have to have millions of fans in order to have millions of dollars. It may be your goal for whatever reason, and if so I’m certainly not criticizing. Go as large as you want. With a blog you can take over the world. We see it happening more and more every day.

The Fame Façade

But it’s also true…and has always been true, that a lot of very successful business people are out there operating behind the scenes. Sorry to ruin the façade for everyone (I don’t really think I’m telling you anything you don’t already know), but the very well-known internet success stories we’ve all heard of are only a small sample of what’s actually going on out there. There are also a lot of famous people who are FAR from reaching their personal goals.

I’d encourage you to not look at the famous “success” stories we all hear about to be necessarily indicative of the direction we should all be going, because it may or may not be true. Fame is not a factor. It’s only an interesting an fun phenomenon that happens to some of us occasionally. Fame certainly does not require significant personal achievement, and likewise, significant personal achievement only rarely produces fame.

If it is fame that interests you, fine, but don’t equate it to success.

Blogging to the Power of 10

All I’m saying is that you likely don’t need to start the next Facebook or Twitter or Tech Crunch or whatever to reach all your financial goals with blogging and internet marketing, so don’t assume it to be so. Look at your alternatives, and one alternative is to learn to operate a very powerful operation with only 10 fans!

Of course I use “10 fans” as only an example. The point is to illustrate that many of us assume we need many thousands of people on board before we’re going to be able to do any real damage, and I’m sorry but it’s just not true.

Each Individual Subscriber Really Does Matter

What if one of your subscribers is David Letterman? Impossible you say? I’m sorry, but do you know what David Letterman’s RSS subscription looks like as compared to anyone else’s? I have no doubt that David Letterman gets online from time to time, don’t you think? And if he’s reading your blog, and you’ve written something particularly compelling to him, don’t you see how that could lead to something significant? Absolutely it could.

As of course, here is the magic: While David Letterman (I don’t know why I specifically picked David Letterman, so don’t ask!) knows a lot of people…last time I checked, a LOT of people know a lot of people. It doesn’t take having a celebrity on board in order to make your blog hugely successful and profitable. Here’s what it takes: it takes an advocate.

What is an advocate? An advocate is someone who truly loves what you do, believes in you and actively takes pleasure in helping you spread the word. A few advocates is all it takes. And an advocate can be anyone…as long as they are truly engaged by what you do.

It really does only take 10 advocates to make your blog massively successful. In fact, in many cases it only takes ONE advocate to make a big difference. I had one post recently connect with some people in my network. Several of them tweeted it out and it them got picked up by Perry Belcher, who in turn tweeted it out, and all of a sudden my traffic went up about 800% for a few days. I’ll take it! I got a lot of cool comments and about 50 email subscribers from that one flurry of activity. If I did not have advocates, it would not have happened.

How to Get Advocates

Advocates, like anything of value, must be earned. Sorry, there’s really no short cuts here, and I cannot offer you a link to a website that offers a free tool called “how to get 10 advocates for FAST and for FREE”. This human engagement, and it can only be accomplished through real personal interaction over time.

Think of it this way, which is quicker?

Build 10 significant relationships with people over time, or-
Follow thousands of people on Twitter and hope that half of them follow you back?

Of course it’s quicker and easier to build a crappy list, but the result is a crappy list, so why bother?

How many subscribers do you have now? If you have 100 subscribers, and those 100 subscribers were procured the right way, I bet you that your 10 advocates are already there. Now it’s just a matter of identifying them and cultivating a relationship with them over time. Don’t let them slip away; you’re staring at a literal gold mine!

If you’ve just started this whole blogging thing, and you only have a few subscribers…don’t look at that as a bad thing. You’re not deficient. You’re sitting on a gold mine…I promise you! It only takes a few advocates.

If you rock, they will come.

Talking to People is More Important Than Anything Else You Do

By Christian

There is so much concern about getting traffic to your blog. This is how you get people to your blog: Talk to people!

When you talk to people and become a valuable part of the conversation in your space…wherever that is, you will get traffic to your site. Now, KEEPING that traffic, getting subscriptions and actually selling, monetizing and so on and so forth are all essential elements as well, but the point I want to make here as succinctly as possible is this: Talking to people is the number one most important thing you are going to do to build the success of your blog.

So Where Can I Find These People You Speak Of?

People are everywhere, aren’t they? They’re not hard to find! There are a lot of tips I’ve read about where to go, and the TRUTH is that they ALL work…if you’re talking to people, you’re doing it right. The better the quality of the conversation, the more valuable it is for all concerned, the better it is for your business. You are branding when you talk to people.

You Are a Salesperson

It might seem scary, but you are a salesperson. Yes, YOU. You are in sales, and you may never have wanted to be in sales, but the world has changed, and to make it in business, you have to be able to make it online, and to make it online, you have become a good salesperson.

Lucky for you, I’ve been a sales trainer for years, and I have a very important fact I’ve learned that I hope will help you with this:

Sales comes naturally to very few people, but ANYONE can learn it. And with practice, EVERYONE can benefit massively from learning sales skills.

This the essence of why I started Next Level Blogger. To teach sales skills. I’m not about big media, and I’m truly not a techy guy. I’m a salesman, and I’ve learned how to apply sales principles to internet marketing. And one of the first things you learn in sales is that if you’re not face to face with a prospect, you’re unemployed. If you want to make it, you have to engage people.

Talking with people is key. It is absolutely mandatory. It doesn’t matter if you’re on Yahoo Answers, some Facebook group or a forum you just joined…it’s all essentially the same. Ideally, do them all! There is not one place that’s better than any other. The point is that you’re getting out there, networking and engaging people on a personal level as much as you can.

What Are You Doing Right Now to Grow Your Business?

Do you spend more time tweaking your site than you do networking? Do you spend more time creating content than you do networking? Do you spend more time reading about how to blog than you do networking? If so, you are doing it backwards!

The fact is that tweaking your site is important. So is creating content and reading content. I recommend all of them, but if you want people coming to your site, the number one most important thing you can do is to simply talk with people. A lot of them. Every day.

Google is Gravy – Why I Refuse to Depend on Google

By Christian

Have you ever heard of the “Google dance“? When it comes to business, I don’t dance. Google is a beautiful thing, and it sends me good quality traffic. I’ll take it. I’ll even take reasonable measures to make sure I get plenty of traffic from Google and other search engines. The principles of SEO are fairly simple to learn, and you don’t need to get overly complicated with it. But I refuse to base my business around Google.

I Don’t Control Google. Neither Do You!

Why? I don’t own Google. I don’t control Google. Neither do you. And if we have no control over something, why would we base the success of our businesses on it? I encourage Next Level bloggers everywhere to take this stance. Blogging is essential for every business owner, and that is why I’m writing this blog. Let SEO be what it is…gravy. Traffic is a cool thing. It greases the wheels. But don’t build a business that is dependent upon something you cannot truly control.

Don’t get me wrong, you CAN build a powerful blog that gets tons of traffic from search. There is nothing wrong with that. Go ahead and get tons of traffic, make money from advertising. It’s a good thing! But let me ask you a question…what happens when Google drops you from their index…for whatever reason?

Do you think it won’t happen to you? It happens to the best of us. And when it happens, what is your back up plan? If your business is dependent on search traffic…you have no recourse but to sit and wait. Like I said, when it comes to business, I don’t dance!

Business the Traffic are Two Separate Things

All I’m saying is that my BUSINESS and my TRAFFIC are two separate things. I encourage you to think of them as separate as well. Your traffic is something that comes in on a daily basis from a number of different sources; I hope eanestly that you do the work to establish traffic streams from many sources, not just search.

Additionally, your BUSINESS is something else entirely. Your business is:

Your database of leads and past customers
Email subscribers
Contacts
Relationships

If all my traffic from Google went away, I would still have a business. A considerable one. I appreciate the traffic Google sends me, and I’m going to continue working to get traffic from Google, but I refuse to have my business depend on it.

What if Google disappeared tomorrow? What would you do? Would you still have a business?

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!