Next Level Blogger: blogging

Showing posts with label blogging. Show all posts

Thursday, August 27, 2009

I Seriously Doubt You’ll Ever Be Cool Like Me

Here’s the thing about learning to rock your business…there’s not a formula. Here’s the thing about success…there’s not a single way to do it. Yet everyone is looking for the formula, or the way. We have to cut this out.

You’re not cool like me. You’re cool like you.

I write every day, because I love to. When I was 9 years old, I would stay up til two in the morning writing. Something in me has just never been able to shut up. I do not claim to be an awesome writer, but I do love to write.

It’s About Love, People! Love What You Do!

It’s kind of like a lot of these young girls who become pop singers. Remember Michelle Branch? She’s really not that great of a singer (sorry girl!). But when you hear her sing, you can just tell that she really LOVES singing. It comes through, and it’s engaging. It’s not talent so much as it is love, and when you have that passion about what you do, you command people’s attention. Love. That’s what we all need to tap into. It sells more than just records.

Do you have to have a blog? Yes. Do you have to write on your blog every day? No. Do you have to be a great writer or passionate about writing to have a hugely successful blog? No. Do you have to do exactly everything that Leo Babauta or Brian Clark or Matt Cutts tells you to do? No. You should probably listen to what they have to say. You really should, but then you need to go do what you love. And you have to really rock it. When you rock, people cannot help but like you. We all love a rock star. And believe it or not, that’s what blogging is about. It’s not about finding “the way” or “the system”.

Rock stars don’t follow all the rules, and neither should you.

Rock n Roll is Not Dead

I love those Intel commercials that say “our rock stars aren’t like your rock stars”. That is the essence of new media. You can be the rock star of Bloomington, IN real estate. You can be the rock star of grilled hamburger recipes. You can rock anything you want. And yes, there are things you need to do, but the most important, crucial, undeniable thing you need to do is lock into what you cannot shut up about and just go with it.

For me, it’s writing. I’ve been criticized for not having pictures on this blog. Yes, I could spend time picking out stock photos that somewhat go along with the post I’m writing. But why? It’s taking energy away from what I’m good at and what I love. I accept that not everyone is going to dig my site. If you require pretty pictures in order to be engaged, this just isn’t going to be your cup of tea. But if you want straight up awesome written content on a regular basis that helps you promote your business and motivates you to grow, I think there’s a lot of value for you here. And I’m just getting started.

If You Don’t Love it, Don’t Focus on It

For you, maybe writing is not your thing. Maybe for you it’s video. Maybe it’s live blogging. Maybe it’s conducting seminars or interviews or meeting people face to face. Maybe you prefer to paint pictures or do podcasts…the point is that the possibilities are endless, and the further point is that there’s SOMETHING that you LOVE to do that is in alignment with growing your business.

You need to find it, and you need to blog it.

Believe me, when you tap into something that is absolutely exciting to you, work becomes fun. You can work tirelessly to make things happen, because you love doing it! And this is what makes you successful.

One True Success Flows to All Other Areas of Your Business

And here’s the thing about success. Real, true success in any one area of your life flows into all other areas of your life. You really think Next Level Blogger is going to succeed or fail based on whether or not I add pictures or not? No. If Next Level Blogger succeeds at reaching my goals, it will be because I was successful at getting my message out, and that can be done through pictures, yes. But it can also be done any number of ways. I choose to focus on my strengths and on what energizes me.

If you do this for your blog as well, you’ll see what I’m talking about. I could point out technical problems with a lot of very successful sites. I’ve seen very successful blogs with horrible permalink structures, confusing navigation, images without alt tags…the list is endless. You think the authors care? Why bother with this stuff?

If you think the success of your blog is going to hinge on whether or not every page is ultra-optimized, you’re not focusing in the right place! Focus on the one thing that you absolutely rock at. Do it every day. Do it with passion. Get your message across. Everything else…all the technical B.S….will take care of itself.

The Power of 100 for Blogging Success

I’ve learned something from being in direct sales. It’s something that I feel a lot of other bloggers don’t get. As internet marketers, we spend so much time working on our sites, to optimize and get more traffic. We want to capture as much search traffic as possible, and I think it’s smart to make those efforts.

But I think there’s something a lot more important that we should put at the front of our priority list when it comes to building our small business online. And that something is the power of 100.

For the past week, I’ve been tweeting out updates like “30 down, 70 more to go!” I’ve received many inquiries about what the heck this means, and what it means is that I have a rule, and I’ve decided it’s important to once again follow that rule.

Here’s the rule:

Make 100 contacts a day.

That’s it. Touch 100 people every day. Whether I respond to an email, call someone on the phone, send a letter in the mail…it doesn’t matter. 100 daily. That’s the rule.

Why? Because it forces me to be social. And being social is not only energizing and a heck of a lot of fun, but it’s also an essential process for building your business. In case you haven’t noticed, people rock!

Where the Power of 100 Came From

It comes from my direct sales experience. In direct sales, if you’re not making contacts you’re out of business. Well, I’ve learned to adapt to internet marketing, and here is something I’ve learned about internet marketing…a lot of us hide behind our computers.

It’s very easy to tweak on your site all day. VERY easy. I’ve done it. It’s very easy to spend all day reading blogs or studying tutorials, or God forbid, coding! Tweaking ads, the list goes on…and I’m not busting on any of these things. It’s important to have your site looking good. It’s important for your ads to be optimized, etc. But it’s MORE important…MASSIVELY more important to talk to people.

Why the Power of 100 will Transform Your Business

Why? Because no matter how awesome you are, and no matter how awesome your site is, if you’re not talking to people every day, no one is going to care. Because at the end of the day, no one cares if you’re awesome! People want to know what’s in it for them, and if you want to make money online, you need to be interested in interacting with them to find out how you can help!

Here is My Challenge to You

So here is my challenge to you: make 100 contacts a day. Do it with me! I will continue to put out my updates, and I encourage you to do the same. Are you following me on Twitter? Do it, and let’s kill this thing together! There is power and motivation in numbers! Make 100 contacts a day. It will build your business; I promise!

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about.

I’m using the #powerof100 hashtag to track tweets related to this program. Even if I’m the only one doing it, it’s cool. I’m doing this because I know it works, and since I write a blog, it occurred to me how cool it would be if I could get even one or two other people doing this also. I guarantee, it’s difficult to produce like this every day, and it also changes your business like you wouldn’t believe!

Like I said, I have seen many top performers over the years employ a simple rule like this, and it creates tremendous results. Bottom line, it goes along with all the basic concepts I cover on Next Level Blogger:

It’s very simple
It’s a lot of work
It gets MASSIVE results over time!

Here’s what counts:

Respond to a message: email, tweets, phone calls…it’s all good.
Blog comments: real, thoughtful, engaging ones…not thoughtless spammy ones. The point is real contacts.
Writing a letter, emailing a friend, following up on a lead, etc.
You get the idea…here’s the rule: it needs to be a PERSONAL, ONE-ON-ONE contact.

Here’s what doesn’t count:

Emailing your list: if you email a bulk list of 1,000 contacts, it doesn’t count as 1,000 contacts! Emailing your list is good and necessary, but this principle is only for PERSONAL, ONE-ON-ONE contacts. The point is personal engagement.
Spam commenting: you surely understand this, right? Any form of automation is not the point.

If you make the effort to personally engage 100 people a day on a personal level, you will see real power and real results from this. Like I mentioned, I learned this in direct sales, and I know some of the top sales people in the US literally are employing this concept right now, today, as you read this. It works! Get to it and let me know how it goes!

How to Build a Massive Blogging Business With Only 10 Subscribers

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

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

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?

Not One Single Thing You Do Will Make You Successful

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!

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Quick Start to Internet Marketing

Many people out there are looking for a quick start to internet marketing. I understand. Most people in my network are business people, and we are the kind of people who want to get things rolling quickly. You know being online and marketing yourself with blogging, internet marketing and social networking is essential, but you don’t know the best way to go about it, and you have a million questions.

This massive access to information causes what’s called “paralysis by analysis”. In other words, we’re so fixated on learning what we need to do, we fail to act. This is death for business. You need to act, but you don’t want to screw things up. So here is a quick start to internet marketing checklist that will give you what you need to get started. It contains a little philosophy and a few specific actions that will get you off and running. There is a lot of value in knowing you’re starting off on the right foot, so I hope this helps. If you have any questions, let me know by commenting or contact me!

Quick Start to Internet Marketing

Make the decision that your focus is going to be building a real business…or extending your existing business. Do not allow your sole focus to be making money. If your focus is on building a real business, creating a good reputation and brand and creating value for others, it’s hard to screw things up. It’s when we decide to focus solely on making money that we start doing crappy, spammy things that we will regret later…and that will not do us any good. This is the first step, and it’s easy. Just decide that your focus is going to be on creating value for your customers, not just selling stuff. With that, you have already cleared half the hurdles. Believe it or not, it really is that simple!
Start a blog. Don’t over think it. Don’t dwell on it for more than five minutes. Pick a platform, and fire it up. If you want my specific advise, I recommend using Wordpress, and I recommend having a professional set it up for you. I can do it for you, or you can have any number of other professionals do it for you. Wordpress can easily be search engine optimized, and it is highly extensible. Some of the most successful blogs on the internet use Wordpress, and for good reason. That said, it’s more important to have a blog than it is to make absolutely certain that every detail is perfect. Your blog will serve as the hub of everything you do to market yourself online. It is your home. You need a place to hang your hat. You need a blog.
Post to your blog regularly. The more you blog, the more you will learn. The most important thing is to get started. I could write for 10,000 words easily right now about how to do this. And if you want to solve any specific marketing issues sooner rather than later, I recommend using my consulting services to jumpstart your efforts. That said, this is not rocket science, and if you put in the effort you will learn everything you need to know simply by doing it. You get out what you put in. Again, if you’re focusing on creating value for your customers, your blog will be on target.
Get on Facebook and Twitter. Are there other social networks? Heck yes there are. Is there value in checking them out and learning about them? Heck yes. But this is a quick start to internet marketing guide, right? So let’s keep it simple. The fact is that Facebook is huge, and Twitter is massively important and an indispensible tool. You can do a lot of damage with just these two. Just as with blogging, use them regularly. An inactive profile is worthless to you. Just like if you leave your house unattended…it will deteriorate over time, this is true for your internet property as well. You have to maintain it for it to grow and remain valuable. Use your social networking profiles for being social and meeting people. Sure, link out to your blog posts and such, but keep the content you produce 99% social. Believe it or not, people know you sell widgets even if you don’t tell em. It’s linked up on your page, see? So they know already. You don’t have to tell them every five minutes. Meet people and concentrate on getting to know and learning from others with similar interests. After doing this for a while, you will start to get these mysterious messages in your inbox. They will be coming from people who have visited your site and are interested in what you’re selling, and you’ll wonder where all this magical activity is coming from. Some of it’s coming from Twitter, beleive it or not. And it will have all happened without you having to hardsell anyone. This stuff works really well, if you work it. Let it take time. It’s fun anyway, so why turn it into hard work?
Let it take some time. Like I mentioned in the previous step, this stuff doesn’t happen instantly. One thing about internet marketing is that people often expect immediate results. I’m not sure why that is. It must come from a misconception about what’s happening. When you give someone a business card at a social event, do you expect them to buy something from you right there on the spot? No. You meet 28 people that night, and 9 of them call you back over the next few weeks. You build it from there. This is how it works. Social networking has become confused with being this new phenomenon, and we think it’s complicated. It’s not. Social networking is people with common interests hanging out, talking. This has been going on for ages. It’s how business is done. And building a business takes time.
Read and learn. Study what you’re doing. Read other blogs. Look at other websites, especially within the same field as you’re working. Apply the CASE principle of success I’ve described in a previous post. Never stop this. Learning and stealing ideas from your competitors is another age old business principle that is not ever going to go away. Use it to your advantage.
Don’t quit. Be consistent. As I say so many times, things take time. As the saying goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Of course I don’t consider this quick start to internet marketing checklist an ultra-comprehensive tool. After all, it’s a quick start checklist! However, I would love your input. Do you have anything you’d add?

In upcoming posts, I will be posting some of my top resources. Articles and tools I’ve used to learn this business. It’s only fair for me to share all my secrets with you, seeing as how everything I’ve learned about internet marketing is online…imagine that

100 Awesome Articles to Get You Fired Up and Motivated About Blogging

These are articles I’ve read recently that I found particularly valuable. They are all from blogs I read regularly. As someone who writes a blog, I know it is also essential to read a lot of blogs. I get questions from professionals and business owners about how to get started blogging, and this is always one of the first things I say: read blogs!

This is the number one way to learn what works, what doesn’t and what YOU want to write about. I recommend anyone interested in blogging should spend a month or so just reading other blogs. Subscribe, comment, spend some real time. Do this specifically in the space you want to occupy. For example, if you want to write a blog about real estate in your particular market area, search people up and find out who’s already doing that. Subscribe to their blog, comment them, read plenty of articles. Take note of the design of their sites. Who is hosting these sites? What things do you like, dislike, and what can you improve upon?

Spending time reading and interacting on other blogs will help you develop your own blogging voice, and your own blogging voice is one of the most essential elements to any successful blog. For my own personal space, I obviously read a lot about blogging itself, and I wanted to take one post and really link up a lot of my favorite fellow bloggers, and share with you some articles I’ve read recently that I think will motivate, educate and/or inspire you. Some of these are great, educational posts. Some are motivational, and some are great resources to help you get started and be successful with blogging and social networking for your business. This list will direct you to some really rockin ideas about how to get awesome results from your blogging and social networking. It’s guaranteed to get your creative juices flowing! Take time, do the work. Get started right now!

20 Ways to Instill Trust and Make More Money

Trust is a hot commodity. It’s essential to instill trust with your readers if you want to get good business results from your blogging, social networking and internet marketing. So how do you instill trust?

The methods we use to market products and services these days are changing rapidly, and if you’re reading this blog you’re obviously aware of these changes and are taking steps to learn. Kudos. But it’s important…absolutely essential…to understand one simple fact.

The way people buy things is changing, but the REASONS people buy things haven’t changed at all.

In other words, people may be searching for information differently, they may be hyper-connected and using new resources to find out what they want to know, but deep down they still need the same things. People want to avoid pain and increase pleasure. They have the same hot buttons: greed, envy, love, etc. And they also need to trust you if they want to buy from you.

Here are things you can do to instill trust:

Create quality content, specifically written for your target audience.
Respond to your comments. Be thoughtful.
Respond to your email. Take time to be helpful.
Be everywhere. The more your audience sees you “out there”, the more your credibility increases.
Offer a guarantee for everything you sell. Take all risk upon yourself, leave only value for your customers.
Honor your guarantee. It should be just as easy to get a refund as it is to place an order.
Don’t spam people.
Leave thoughtful comments on other blogs. Use comments on other blogs as a conversational tool, not a promotional tool. People know comment spam when they see it. If you think real customers are going to click through your comment spam on other blogs and buying things from you, you’re deluding yourself!
Be honest.
Be consistent.
Make your products and services targeted. In other words, don’t just produce what you want. Confirm there is a need first. Targeted product creation instills trust, because it speaks directly to your customer. They will really feel like you really know them.
Don’t post blind, stupid links on Twitter or in your social networking status. Would YOU click on a link that says “hey check this out! crappyaffiliatelink.tinyurl.com”? I’m not against affiliate marketing of course. Not at all. I’m just saying, blindly blasting out affiliate links, hoping some of them will stick is NOT the way to build trust.
Before you post anything, anywhere, ask yourself “Is my goal to create value for my customers, or am I just trying to sell something?”
Be around for a while. There’s really no getting around this. The longer you are around, the more credibility you’ll build and the more your reputation will proceed you. This is a key element of trust, and it takes time.
Make your site easy to navigate.
Be an active member of other forums or a guest author on other properties that are valued and trusted by your target audience. This is another element of “being everywhere”, from #4.
Avoid overzealous claims in your sales copy, even if they’re true.
Don’t ignore complaints, and don’t be rude…seriously, someone who has taken the time to complain or leave a stupid, hateful comment on your blog is EXACTLY who you want to interact with. They care enough to let you know…99% of the time, it’s a simple issue you can resolve immediately with very little effort, and when you do this, you come off like a hero. If you choose to attack back, you will be justified in doing so, and you will also lose at least one customer forever. You can choose between using such an event as an opportunity to grow trust in your brand, or you can choose to come off looking like a jerk. Your choice!
Testimonials. This is a classic. It works, and it will ALWAYS work. Show people proof that your product or service has produced favorable results for others. Produce a system for getting testimonials from your buyers today!
Be good. This one might sound like a cop out, but I think it might be the most important one of all. Being good requires constant hard work, networking, staying on top of things and really putting your honest, full effort into your business…every day. These are all things the “gurus” claim they can teach you to skip. Learn all you can from the gurus, but then go out and bust your ass implementing what you’ve learned. Don’t skip the hard stuff, because doing what your competition is not willing to do…that’s exactly what will turn the tables in your favor. Can you make money online by doing very little? Yes, you can make chump change that way. Of course, if you’re in it for chump change, you’re reading the wrong blog

Of course, I don’t consider this to be a masterfully comprehensive list, but it’s a few things I consider to be absolutely crucial for instilling trust with your buyers.

Do you have any to add? Let me know what you think!

Thursday, August 27, 2009

It’s About Love, People! Love What You Do!

Rock n Roll is Not Dead

If You Don’t Love it, Don’t Focus on It

One True Success Flows to All Other Areas of Your Business

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Tuesday, August 11, 2009

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