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Over the weekend I had the fantastic opportunity to have a quick chat with David Bullock. Not only is he a super smart guy, especially in the crucial area of actually making money online, but he is a great bloke too. Like most people who heard him in Chicago, I am now a big, big fan.

As Chris Cree reports, David a couple of times said that he was looking at Social Media to boost his community, that he has the making money side sorted but he like many sales people wants to grow his audience connections.

As at one point I told David, perhaps naively, some of the big name IM folks already have a high level of audience persuasion that is so strong it freaks me out. Their devoted following is almost a mind control thing. They have them dancing to their tune. If they shout “jump”, their audience asks “how high?”, and are eager to. At the time I called them Puppet Masters, that they are pulling strings in order to fill their wallets.

The more I have thought about it though, the Internet Marketing product folks have always been up front about their intentions. You join their lists so they can sell to you. It’s not like you have been tricked into a cult, but have gone into it with your eyes open expecting to get a certain amount of information in return for your email address which you know will be added to a marketing list.

But people can still feel the community is tainted when selling becomes involved. How do we maintain trust and an audience bond, while knowing that at the end of it all we are still in business to pay our bills?

Why bloggers struggle I think is that they confuse selling with underhanded selling. Not all IM’ers are selling snake oil. Some have built their audience trust over time by delivering value. While some of the tactics and attitudes would seem offensive in the social media space, in their own context and culture they are doing what works. One big lesson social media folks can learn from the IM guys though is to be up front with your business.

When you come to my blog I don’t beat you over the head with my offers but they are there. I say that I am a consultant. Either way, you know I am in business. While I am happy for people to get value out of my free content, part of the reason I do what I do is that I hope when people see me share my expertise they will consider hiring me to work with them on their specific issues. Thankfully many of you do. It’s not a hidden agenda and there is no need for tricks when it is so visible. We only feel cheated when there is a bait and switch, or when things are misrepresented.

How do you feel about this? What do you think when the money subject is raised in communities? How can we do business in social media without losing the “social” aspect? I would appreciate your thoughts and comments …

One of the big struggles when you are launching a business blog, is how to write content that will both appeal to your audience and have some connection to what you have to offer.

I have been helping a couple of clients pull their blog topics together, they both were frustrated that there was apparently very little to talk about the widgets they sell. The solution for both was the same, even though they are in starkly different industries. You might find the same solution works for you also, even if you have nothing to sell.

What motivates your audience? Not just “interests” but really motivates?

How does this connect with what you do and how you do it?

This is why it is helpful to create a very detailed Mind Map, talk to potential or existing customers, get into your audience head space. Otherwise there are opportunities you can miss.

Without giving away my clients niches before they even launch, both sold something seemingly straightforward and practical, but there was something for each that connected with the audiences self-identity and aspirations. One was in the way the product ingredients were sourced and manufactured, the other in the customers overall life goal.

Rather than creating a “widget blog”, talk to topics that will make your audience really take notice. We often talk about addressing needs and problems, but when you are talking about products and services you can also address your readers sense of purpose, hopes and dreams.

Goals, Inspiration and Aspirations

What is the ultimate benefit you are the solution or part of the solution for?

• Make more money
• Freedom and free time
• Be famous, Prestige
• Safety and security
• Adventure and excitement

World View and Activism

Are your potential customers facing a challenge, are they of a particular moral/political/advocate group? Do they share beliefs with you?

• Fair Trade
• Environment
• Organic
• Alternative Energy

Successful Inspiring Blogs

Consider the following successful blogs, what are the aspirations behind them?

• ProBlogger
• ZenHabits
• CopyBlogger
• Successful-Blog
• Strobist
• FreelanceSwitch
• BudgetFashionista

Some are obvious, some not immediately obvious, but all have a promise that they deliver on. Everything from “make more money” to “look good without spending a fortune”.

This blog you are reading has a promise connected to my services (build more business through new media), but the promise with real crystal clarity I spun off into Authority Blogger.

Where do you fit Into your readers world?

Rather than just focusing on your widgets or services, think how you can fit into your customers world. What can you talk about that is inspiring, fills a need but also connects authentically to what you do and offer.

For any blog you need to go beyond merely supplying information or being “kinda useful”, if you do not connect in some way to what really matters to your audience, then you will get lost amongst the sea of alternatives and the many distractions of modern life.

Can you think of any other brands or blogs that are attracting readers through inspiration and aspiration?

In my previous post I wrote how educating customers can provide more sales, increased trust and loyalty.

Richard asked in the comments if people took this advice would advertising diminish.

I started answering as a comment but then I realized the issue deserved a full post.

Advertising Versus Blogging?

So first things first, do I advocate blogging instead of advertising? No.

Blogging is not a marketing strategy, it is one tactic of many. Using one tactic to the exclusion of others is rarely a smart move. The best approach is to use complimentary tactics, of which advertising could well be one of them.

Using Multiple Tactics

You need to approach your audience with

1. what they need,
2. when they need it,
3. where they need it.

Look at what I do. My marketing reaches out in a number of ways. I have a blog, two email lists, an email sequence, a forum, I guest post and do interviews, speak, and just co-authored a book (did you think I wrote a book for the money?). I have even used advertising as a test where I drove awareness of my flagship content ebook, which of course requires an opt-in to get.

While I don’t advertise now, Google Adwords could be a fantastic way to do this for your business. By matching your response (offer, search result) to your prospect’s questions (search phrases and keywords) you fulfill the requirements I just set out in one go.

Advertising to Educate

In the last post I said advertisers should be aware of the buying cycle. Advertising is not the only tactic. Going from advert to sale is only appropriate for people who are ready to buy *right now*

If your customer is ready, and they will show this through the search phrases, by all means send them to the sales page. What you do not want to do though is send a researching customer to a buying page. That is where education comes into play.

They could instead use the same Google ad budget to drive people to

• your blog
• an informative email sequence,
• video series,
• customer adviser call back,
• webinar event
• or PDF report.

Instead of going from advert to sale, you will find it far easier to go from advert to opt-in, from opt-in to eduction, and from education to sale. Providing you offer value all along the way this patient no-pressure technique will definitely pay off.

Sometimes blogging can be the difference between making a sale and giving the sale to a competitor.

What do I mean?

I was talking to a client the other day who was moving from Pay Per Click marketing of his products into SEO and blogging. His widget is expensive so while the per click price is not up there with lawyers and loans, the sheer quantity it takes to make a sale works out just as expensive or even more. Their PPC budget is in the tens of thousands a month. With that kind of overhead, trying SEO and blogging is a no-brainer.

There are loads of markets where a similar strategy makes sense. A key reason is “customer education”

Educate to Sell

As Brian says, Teaching Sells. In any market where the customer needs to be educated in order to sell to them, anyone who uses “Advert to Sales page” as an approach is going to lose a lot of sales. That is because 90% of your audience is not ready to buy (yet).

Flip that around though, what do bloggers do best? Produce engaging content!

Educating customers is good for bloggers, bad for advertising-only companies

If you talk to the people at these companies they tell you they want more sales but customers aren’t ready to buy. They increase their brand advertising spend, optimize their adwords campaigns. Basically fix what isn’t broken.

There are a series of books by a brilliant guy called Dr Goldratt (makes me think of a James Bond character!), who invented the “Theory of Constraints“. This idea basically tells you to find the constraint in a system and prioritize it. In our scenario here, the customers knowledge is the constraint, not the advertising.

Sales Education Cycle

Take the simplistic example of Digital Photography. You start not being aware of very much about the topic, but you might hear or see something that makes you interested. It could be an ad, a friend, newspaper mention, could be anything. At this point you are aware, moving toward interested.

The more you learn, the more interested you get, so you do some research. You buy magazines, look online, read reviews. Adverts will interest you more but they are not going to get you to extract your credit card until you are good and ready.

Only when you have done your research (models, brands, complexity, learning curve, capability, price, and so on) will you buy, but even then you will research where to buy.

That adwords ad is looking less effective now, isn’t it? Adwords are great, but if you are using them to make a direct sale, they only work for a specific part of the buying cycle and only when paired up with the “buying” keywords. Comparator sites can be as effective if competing on price.

It doesn’t end there, as anyone who has become addicted to photography will tell you. You have bought your camera but there is a whole world of photography related purchases. As you learn your camera you find you need to upgrade, or you want a new lens (or 10), a flash, tripod, bag, various other widgets and do-dads. Yup, the cycle starts all over again. You are not the same customer before, it is an entirely new cycle of education to purchase.

Blogs, or at least content, fit in very well into this model. It could be gardening, cigar reviews, business to business, many markets need to be educated before they will buy.

Blog to Educate and Inform

Teach customers what they need to know and you build trust and loyalty. Bring them along on their journey, show them they can rely on you to steer them right.

Does it really work? Put it this way, I and my friends have spent a few thousand dollars through the Strobist affiliate links. One company seems to realize the value in the content and are advertising that they stock what David recommends. I imagine they get better sales for a much lower cost than had they tried the PPC route.

When we put up a website, blog or even an article, in most cases we do so hoping for the visitor to do a particular thing, take a specific action. Those actions are called conversions. We are converting the visitor into something else, a subscriber, a customer, and so on.

As you know from daily life, getting people to do what you want them to can be tricky. We have our own agendas, we see the world differently, there is also self interest, which can work for or against you.

That is why many bloggers and webmasters take the easy route. They don’t even try to get any real conversions, they are happy to sit at the bottom of the web metric food chain.

The value pyramid looks something like this, but obviously will differ from case to case:

Traffic

As you can see, when dealing with CPM (page impression based ads), you are only concerned with the bottom two rungs, visits and page views. They are the easiest to obtain and therefore the lowest value. Your visitor here doesn’t need to like what they see and might have been tricked into visiting. Traffic is not a sign of quality.

Click Throughs

Next up is the clicks. If you make money from Adsense or other pay per click ads, this is where you spend your effort. You might also try to get many clicks as a way of influencing other webmasters. When people see a site in their referrers generating a lot of traffic they tend to take notice.

Another value to take from clicks is if you deal with a wide appeal affiliate merchant like eBay or Amazon. Those clicks can eventually turn into sales but the selling is not your problem, all you need to do is drop that affiliate cookie onto the visitors browser and the merchant does all the hard work.

Again, clicks are not a sign of quality. The visitor might be just wanting to get away, to anywhere but here. In fact, many Adsense webmasters count on just that.

Loyal Readers

Now we are in the zone where a blogger or webmaster has to earn their money. You don’t get return visits, or subscribers without offering some value. Even more true with opt-ins as the visitor needs to trust you not to spam them or pass on the list to someone else who will. Up until this point you could have been automating, spamming and churning out pages by the thousand with not a care for quality.

When you want people to return, that is when you need to get serious about your content.

You need to concentrate on not just demonstrating value on the first visit, but showing enough promise that there will be value in future for them to give you another try. Hopefully you will do a good enough job that they will keep checking in on you and turn into loyal readers.

Leads and Sales

You will have no doubt heard many times that “the value is in the list”, and it is broadly true. If you get a lot of people to want to hear from you on a regular basis, more importantly if you have an engaged audience, then you should be able to make sales.

A number of times you will have read me say that I would rather have a smaller and more engaged readership, and now you know why. Across the properties I own, part own, write for or work with, I have access to millions of page views. I would give all those page views up for ten people who really want to hear from me. Just think about that for a second. Wouldn’t you?

Unlike many bloggers, my mortgage gets paid when people believe in me enough that they seek my advice on blogging, new media and internet marketing. I love to see a Digg front page as much as the next guy, and there is a certain value in that, but if people just click or view pages then my bills don’t get paid.

To make a sale, and even more to get repeat sales, you have to step right up and show real value and engender enough trust to overcome the very significant objections of doing business over the internet. You have to show that not only is your product or service worth the money, but that you can be trusted to deliver what you promised.

Plus of course you have to ask for the sale.

Loyal Customers and Fans

When you deliver on your promise, then you have a chance at repeat custom. Even better, if you delight your customer, you might just get a fan or two.

In order to do this your customer must experience your product or service in the most positive way possible. You are not merely delivering a package and saying “bye bye”. That product has to more than meet expectations, be more than just “worth what was paid for”. The customer needs to reap the benefits of what they were sold.

This isn’t always possible, it’s not a perfect world, but you must try. The pay off is someone who will forever sing your praises, and the value of someone willing to tell the world how great you are is beyond measure.

Summary

When you are thinking about what you are doing online, do not be content with merely attracting traffic and gaining some clicks. The real value is in the relationships, the trust and the actual value you can create. Are you truly helping people or are you just going through the motions and writing the appropriate keywords?

It might be with a smaller audience you create more value for both you and your audience. Worth considering, right?

Interesting tweet I picked up this morning from SEO Chicks

“Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008” This interesting law comes in to force on May 28th 2008 and within the UK stands to criminalise some regrettably common practices

It seems that fake blogs (”flogs”), like those from Sony and Walmart, will become not just black hat in the UK, but illegal!

This seems like a victory for the UK consumer, if of course it really does work out that way (how many times have we seen promising legal moves turn out to have no teeth?).

The law outlaws activities that include:

“Falsely claiming or creating the impression that the trader is not acting for purposes relating to his trade, business, craft or profession, or falsely representing oneself as a consumer.”

Just to recap, Walmart faked a blog about a family RV tour, as Jack at the Guardian describes

The blog, launched Sept. 27, was profiled in this week’s issue of BusinessWeek, which exposed the site as a promotional tactic engineered by Working Families for Wal-Mart (WFWM), an organization launched by Wal-Mart’s public relations firm Edelman. WFWM paid for the RV and all travel expenses, rerouted the trip’s original plan, and plastered a logo on the RV’s side. Although the blog featured a link to WFWM, it did not identify the organization as a paid sponsor.

Advertising Age fills us in on the fake Sony blog

a blog titled alliwantforxmasisapsp.com (which has apparently been taken down by Sony) that featured two guys trying to spread the word about convincing family members to get one of them a PSP for Christmas.

Except the whole thing wasn’t really a blog — a fact revealed by cyber sleuths who looked up the domain’s registration Sony’s fake PSP blog effort appears to have backfired on the marketer — and provided an important lesson for other marketers and their ad agencies.

Sony’s fake PSP blog effort appears to have backfired on the marketer — and provided an important lesson for other marketers and their ad agencies. file. It was all just an advertising ploy. Once this news broke, it only took a matter of hours for the word to spread and the rapid fire comments and responses began.

So “astroturf” blogs, fake reviews and probably paid reviews might well fall under this law.

Let’s hope it does come into being, and spreads to the rest of those countries who care about the intertubes!

Yesterday I asked you to answer my Have you read “The Cluetrain Manifesto” poll

The question was based on a quick question I posted on Twitter. I have been thinking about this book and its impact on the web and social media concepts we take for granted.

As you can see from the chart here, most people today haven’t heard of it.

So what is this “Cluetrain” I speak of? Why am I so concerned that nobody who joined the web this decade seems to have heard of it?

In 1999 a group of the webs biggest and brightest got together to write a “call to arms”. A manifesto of 90 some ideas, rants, statements, essays, that together put forward the theme that the internet changes everything and that business had better wake up.

“A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.”

You don’t have to buy the book, you can read the whole thing online if you like. But I do like to dip into my much-thumbed dead tree copy.

The “cluetrain” wording is from the famous saying:

“The clue train stopped there four times a day for ten years and they never took delivery.”

Rather than broadcast, interruption marketing that business up to then focused on, they asserted that “markets are conversations”. How many times have you heard this, or “join the conversation”?

They also talked about the technology, like intranets, but for me it was the impact on marketing thinking that had the most lasting impression.

The ideas will be familiar now. Through social media we almost take for granted some of the ideas that were debated at the time.

I talk a lot about flagship content and authority. This manifesto sums up both! At the time it was huge. Those associated with it were seen as thought leaders on a massive scale. Of course there were lots of people against it too.

That was nearly ten years ago. As we have seen, many barely know the name let alone have read it. Those that have read it have a good number who haven’t read it all the way through or are not terribly impressed.

Is the Cluetrain influence fading? Is it just us oldskool types who remember it fondly?

With that in mind, is it still relevant? I had to ask!

“I haven’t reread it recently, but YES it’s still relevant”

Seth Godin

“Yes the Cluetrain is still relevant. Things like that don’t stop being relevant.”

Dave Winer

“Cluetrain is relevant, and there are still people who haven’t quite adopted the concepts within, but I think of Cluetrain as an earlier iteration of what is ready for discussion now. If we all accept that conversations matter and that humans are driving the business in new ways, there has to now be an “applications layer” discussion to take what we accept and move it forward as protocols and applications that businesses and individuals can execute against.

Put shorter: once we get it, now what? “

Chris Brogan

“it’s more relevant than ever. At least the ‘markets are conversations’ part”

Robert Scoble

“I cant be bothered with the Cluetrain stuff, no one who’s a real player even knows about that stupid sh’t, let alone cares.”

Loren Feldman (to be fair to Loren, this was not in answer to my exact question but seemed relevant so I got his permission to include it here)


This leads me to some questions for you, dear reader!

1. Does what I have said above lead you to want to read Cluetrain for yourself?
2. Is Cluetrain relevant today?
3. Have the authors diminished in authority or will this always be a positive legacy?

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comments …

Just under 10 years ago a website then book was released called The Cluetrain Manifesto.

I did a quickie poll on Twitter and found around half of people questioned had heard of it.

Today I want to repeat the experiment here.

You will find out why I am asking later in a full article. Today I want to know your immediate reaction, hence right now I am not linking to any of the material online, but I am sure you can find it if you are curious, just please answer the question first

Yesterday I wrote about how you can identify your Sneezers and Linkerati. Essentially these people are incredibly valuable to you because they are your advocates. They spread your message, defend your honor and if you do a good enough job of nurturing them, become your all-round raving fans.

How do you grow your readers from first time visitor to long term fan?

It doesn’t happen over night, or at least not very often. I am sure there are many ten year olds who walked out of the first Star Wars (episode 4, not that Jar Jar rubbish) a raving fan, but most of us can’t hope for that kind of impact.

Let’s first take a look at this evolutionary process:

1. First visitor
2. Repeat visitor
3. Commenter
4. RSS Subscriber
5. Email Subscriber
6. Long term subscriber
7. Fan
8. Customer
9. Recommender
10. Raving fan

Obviously in some cases people will skip steps or do some items all at once. I have found blogs before and subscribed after only reading one post because it was that good (and some times regretted it).

How can you get someone to go from #1 to #10? By consistently providing value. Even better, by routinely delighting your audience.

You have to identify your audience, find out exactly what they want and need, and deliver it perfectly.

That’s a tall order, but exactly what you need to aim for.

Every single interaction, every post, every discussion, every mention of your name absolutely positively has to be the best it can be.

Create something truly valuable rather than a vehicle for your own greed.

We are all human and therefore fallible. This means we will make mistakes. Because of that extra effort needs to be applied to a) avoid mistakes, b) make good apologies and c) make up for mistakes by performing even better next time.

It helps if you are genuine, approachable and friendly. People are much more willing to overlook the foibles of someone they feel they have a personal connection with.

You might recognize the picture at the top of this post, I have used it before. It is from a Marillion gig. You could say I am a raving Marillion fan. That band has seen more of my fan-money than any other but perhaps more tellingly, more blog article inches than any other I like them because they are all about their fans, they value and respect their fans and their fans repay them tenfold. Plus they are really nice guys. That’s an example we all need to follow.

Customers are made by creating something valuable, but long term raving fans are created by going that bit farther and building something truly remarkable and making sure each fan knows they are appreciated and valued.  

Imagine scenarios where you would be a fan, or the opposite. Think of your own experiences as a consumer …

When was the last time you felt truly valued as a customer? Have you ever told someone else about a great product, blog or service without being prompted? Why have you been an advocate and when have you not recommended something even though it was “good enough”?

It’s about respect, value and making connections. What can you do today to start the process?

Are you a raving fan? Tell us all about it in the comments …

In marketing circles you often hear about “Sneezers” and “the Linkerati”, but what are they? Who are they? And most of all, why should we care?

Sneezers and the Linkerati are people who will spread your message or help promote your work by linking to you.

While the Linkerati are obviously going to link to your content, “Sneezers” are people who “spread ideaviruses”, which is a fancy way of saying they tell other people about your stuff via word of mouth, email, social voting or messaging rather than link to it.

Watch this short video by Rand from SEOMoz and all will become clear

So for you the Linkerati could be:

• Fellow Bloggers
• Writers
• The media
• Forums
• Webmasters
• Directories
• Social Media users
• Emailers

Why does all this matter?

Job 1 is to identify your sneezers and linkerati and delight them!

More than anyone else they will aid your promotion efforts by getting the word out, and a third party endorsement tends to be much more believable than blowing your own trumpet.

How do you identify them?

• Look where your links are currently coming from and who is talking about you.
• If you have a happy client or have recently done someone a favor, don’t be afraid of asking them to vote or link you up. What goes around comes around, so make sure you are giving the love before asking for it.
• Do you have fans in your comments and Twitter followers? Make sure you are keeping them nurtured and happy.
• Build new connections all the time. Network Network Network!

Bottom line: If you look after your sneezers, they will look after you

photo credit: Dr. Hemmert