Oops! I made this Social Media mistake. How about you?
Sep 28th
By Stanford Smith, Contributing {grow} Columnist
Many passionate and hardworking social business operatives are making a business-killing mistake.
Proud of their impressive Twitter followings, Facebook crowds and Klout scores they are lulled into a false sense of security.
The rude awakening often comes when they try promoting their product to their audience. Suddenly, their enthusiastic following vanishes into thin air leaving behind crickets and one or two “mercy” sales.
Their error is simple. They have invested too much time engaging their peers and have overlooked their customers in the process. This social rut is easy to fall into, let’s see if you are in danger of falling into it yourself.
Pop Quiz:
- Do you spend hours trading @mentions with people with profiles identical to your own?
- Do you struggle to remember the Twitter handle of a customer but can rattle the usernames of 5 social media A-Listers in 5 seconds flat?
- Are you afraid that promoting your product would offend 90% of your followers and blog readers?
- Are you hoping that your followers will share their audience with you when the time is right?
If you answered “yes” to any of these questions then you are in danger of being popular and broke.
But, don’t beat yourself up. I’ve been in the exact same rut. In fact, I started and shuttered two blogs before I realized that being social is different than “Social Business.” Knowing the difference is critical to your success.
This is How Social Business Works
The world of Social Business is like your typical high school cafeteria.
Take a second to remember lunch hour.
Striding into the cafeteria you quickly made dozens of “life and death” social decisions. Sit with your friends? Invite the new kid to your table? Introduce yourself to the Student Government crowd or take a risk with the Jocks?
Depending on your social goals: getting a prom date, finding the best parties, not getting hassled on the school bus, you picked your “community.’
As a hormone happy teenager, I should have sat with crowd most likely to attract the cheerleaders’ attention!
Instead, I spent my time, dreaming and drooling from afar with the chess club geeks. My buddies were “Stand By Me” cool. We encouraged each other. We had our own language and didn’t miss an opportunity to hang out on Friday night.
But, my buddies rarely helped me get a date.
It’s easy to make the same mistake on social media.
Sure, it’s comforting and safe to hang out with people with similar interests. But if you are in business, you need to sit with a different crowd – your prospects.
Why Do We Get Trapped Selling to Our Navel?
It’s easy. We go to a popular conference in the name of research and networking. We meet some cool folks, share some raucous memories and head home snug in our mental rug.
Meanwhile, not one new person with cash and a purpose has been introduced to our blog. Oops. Not one person with signing authority has started to follow our Twitter account. Double oops.
Here’s the tough love. You should be networking and masterminding with professionals who share similar goals. You should not build your business on these comfortable get-togethers.
If you do, then you are needlessly delaying your success. You should immediately take a frank look at your activities and focus them on finding and attracting quality prospects to your blog.
How to Find Your Prospect’s Social Watering Holes
Finding prospects is a different game.
By nature, prospects don’t want to be found. They lurk in the shadows only making an appearance when they can’t afford to stay anonymous anymore. When they do step into the light they sign-up for email newsletters, register for webinar, or put you on the RFP list. Retweeting, commenting, and liking isn’t their style.
Like a lion on the Serengeti your best bet is to find watering holes, where your prospects gather to network, trade advice, and share resources. The watering hole location is different for every industry and prospect type:
- C-Level Executives read top-shelf trade publications dedicated to their profession. Sites like the Harvard Business Review is a likely watering hole. Comments and guest post gigs can give you instant visibility with this crowd.
- Passionate hobbyists hang out in niche-forums where they exchange tips and compete for social credibility. Joining these forums and being a resource for new members while discreetly promoting your expertise is a winning strategy.
- Micropreneurs and service professionals like attorneys, home appraisers, coffee shop proprietors and insurance agents often run in packs. You can spot them congregating around LinkedIn Groups or following one-another on Quora. Answering questions on LinkedIn, creating niche-specific twitter lists on Listorious, and hosting free webinars never fails to attract their attention.
It Will Be Tough (but profitable)
By the way, if you blog solely for pleasure then hang out with whoever you wish.
But, If you need to show results for the time you spend on the social web then get serious about sitting with your prospects.
Make sense? What are your social business strategies for finding and attracting prospects?
Stanford Smith obsesses about how to get passionate people’s blogs noticed and promoted at Pushing Social, except when he’s chasing large mouth bass.
How to grow your blog like a Fortune 500 company
Aug 17th
By Srivinas Rao, Contributing {grow} Columnist
If there’s one exercise that continually causes my blog to grow, it’s conducting a quarterly review. If you want your blog to turn into a business you have to treat it accordingly. Fortune 500 Companies do quarterly reports, so why not model some of their best practices?
Why You Should Do This
As bloggers we’re often caught up in the day to day activities of writing posts, commenting on blogs and interacting with people across various social media channels and it can feel like we’re not accomplishing much. We have a tendency to focus on how far we have to go rather than looking back at just how far we’ve come. The process of conducting a quarterly review will motivate you to keep charging forward because you’ll get a very clear look at just how much you’ve accomplished. It will also give you insights into what worked, what didn’t work and what you can do differently.
The Review Process
Conducting a review is something you should expect to spend a few solid hours on if you want to get the most value possible out of it. The review can be broken up into 3 main categories: traffic+subscribers, revenue, and projects.
Traffic + Subscribers
Traffic is the biggest concern of many early stage bloggers and you should remember that not all traffic is created equal and that quality always trumps quantity. That being said reviewing your traffic on a quarterly basis can give you some deep insights into things you can do differently to increase it.
1. Compare to the Previous Quarter:
Perhaps the most important thing to consider when it comes to traffic is that you are showing a pattern of growth. If you do a comparison and your traffic has declined, then you’ll need to think about what might be the cause:
- Are you posting enough?
- Are you building the right relationships?
- Is your content worth sharing?
- Do you need to write more guest posts?
There are a number of factors that could cause your traffic to decline or increase. Choose one area to improve and stick to it over the course of the next quarter.
2. Look at Referral Traffic:
Take a look at where your referral traffic is coming from. You’ll notice that you get much more traffic when you guest post on certain blogs. If that’s the case reach out to the author of the blog and ask if you can be a guest contributor again. Connect with the readers of that blog by visiting theirs.
3. Look at Subscribers
After two years of blogging, all I can say is that your email list is gold. Every successful blogger will tell you “the money is in the list.” While RSS subscribers are nice and bring people back to your blog, I’d recommend shifting your entire focus to your email list. Many of us neglect our lists because we’re writing so much content for our own blogs. While the numbers are important, what you need to concern yourself most with is a pattern of growth. If you’re not seeing growth, then you’ll want to make some adjustments. Below I’ve suggested a few ideas to improve your email list.
- One simple thing that will help you to improve your newsletter is repurposing content from your archives. Most blog archives are sitting around collecting dust. You can take 5-6 of your best blog posts and make them the content of your autoresponder sequence.
- Interview somebody well known in your niche and give away the interview as a bonus for signing up for your newsletter
- Create a free e-book. But make sure it is just as good as something people would pay for. If the things you provide for free are of no value then it’s unlikely anbody will buy from you.
Projects
I usually have between 2-3 project goals every quarter. Here are some sample projects that you could work on over the course of any quarter
- A Guest Posting Campaign
- A free E-book or Manifesto
- A course or product
In the review process you really want to make sure that you have made some progress on at least one of your projects. If you’ve made no progress on any of your projects from the previous quarter, you might want to consider taking some of them off your list.
Revenue
The final thing that I tend to review every quarter is the revenue that I’ve generated. The best way to do this is to break up the revenue by categories. For example you may generate revenue in the following ways:
- Consulting
- Products
- Advertising Revenue
It’s important to break this up into categories so you can get a sense of what efforts are giving you your highest ROI. This helps you to prioritize your revenue generating efforts.
Setting up Your Quarterly Marketing Plan and Goals
Don’t have Too Many Goals
This might seem counter-intuitive, but the more goals you set the less you seem to get done. The list will seem so daunting that you’ll never take any action towards the goals on the list. That’s why I recommend you set less goals. If you happened to get those goals done you can always add more to the list later in the quarter. Set 1-2 Goals in Each Area.
Traffic + Subscriber Goals:
Traffic and subscriber goals are interesting because the end result is really not completely in your control. All you can do is take certain actions to move in the direction of your goal. That being said, I think it can be quite valuable to set a traffic and subscriber goal since it’s keeps you focused on how to grow your audience. For example, you could set a goal of reaching 1000 total subscribers by the next quarter if you are at 500 now. The real value is not reaching the number itself, but learning how to reach it. Once you’ve done it once, you can repeat the process and grow by another 1000 subscribers. Just have a target to aim for over the course of a quarter.
Project Goals
I recommend that you make it a goal to complete at least one project every quarter. Rather than set a number of different project goals and scatter your effort, focus on one and make it your mission to finish it. If you want to write an e-book or launch a product make that your project for the quarter. As I said before, you can always add more projects when you complete one. In fact if you have less things on your list and complete them you’ll be motivated to keep moving forward.
Revenue Goals
When you set a revenue goal, set something that you think is actually achievable. Chances are that if you are a beginning blogger you are not going to make a million dollars by the end of the quarter. Setting that kind of goal and not meeting it will only frustrate you. Once you start with a number in mind, you’ll be able to start brainstorming the different ways that you’ll hit your revenue goal. It could be a combination of the following:
- Product Sales
- Consulting
- Speaking
- Advertising Revenue
If you have an opportunity to capitalize on low hanging fruit, then do it. Even if it is not a lot of money it will give you the confidence to keep going.
Deviate from Your Plan (when it makes sense)
One final caveat I’d like to add is that you shouldn’t be afraid to deviate from your plan. Opportunities will arise, your business will go through changes, and certain actions will make more sense than the ones you originally planned out at the beginning of the quarter. If you’re too stubborn about your goals, you might miss out on fantastic opportunities. For example, if somebody comes to you and asks you to partner with them on a product launch, be open to that because it could lead to many other things in the future.The quarterly review might be a time consuming process, but it’s a very worthwhile one. It will give you a tremendous amount of insight into the growth of your blog and if you act on those insights your blog will continually grow.
Below you’ll find links to sample monthly/quarterly reviews from my blog and two others that I think do a fantastic job of breaking down everything they’re up to.
- The Smart Passive Income Monthly Reports
- Think Traffic Monthly Reports
- The SKool of Life Quarterly Marketing Plan Q2 Review
How do you manage the long-term goals of your blog?
Srinivas Rao is the host and co-founder of BlogcastFM, a podcast to help you take your blog to the next level. He also writes about personal development at The Skool of Life. You can download his free webinar on the 7 Pillars of Blog Traffic.
My blog is my gun.
Jul 28th
Over the past year I have had the pleasure of getting to know Alvin Tatum as a Twitter pal and {grow} commenter. I love his blog and am sure you will agree that you probably have not read about blogging from the perspective of this guest post!
By Alvin Tatum Jr.
“This Is My Blog. There are many like it, but this one is Mine.”
If you’re familiar with this line you know I’m making a play on words from the movie “Full Metal Jacket,” but it’s actually the opening line to the Rifleman’s Creed. Through my own personal experience however I learned how true that line is (“This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine”) and how you can apply it to your blogging life.
My Background
My name is Alvin Tatum Jr. and I’ve been in the United States Navy for almost 17 years where I serve as a Weather Forecaster. In 2008 I began a tour to Baghdad which really gave a new meaning to the term “a fish out of water.” Typically sailors don’t find themselves in sand, but there I was preparing to go into the heart of a war zone to provide weather support to the Army’s top brass. First I would have to make a detour to Basic Combat Training in South Carolina. There my best friends would become an M16 and 40 pounds of body armor. My enemy? The unrelenting August heat.
In the Navy not everyone is required to carry a weapon, but for the next eight months I would have an M16 by my side 24/7. I had to become intimately familiar with it. I had to learn how to break it down and put it back together. Most importantly I had to learn how to fire my M16 from various positions, and learn how to shoot targets up to a quarter mile away. Thankfully I wasn’t expected to learn these skills overnight and I had about 4 weeks to master them. By the end of training I could take it apart and put it back together like a pro, and the “Rifleman’s Creed” resonated with me all to well. This brings me to a few points about life … and blogging.
Get Mentally Prepared
(This is my blog)
Whether you’re in the military or just an average Joe, at some point in life we all have to prepare ourselves for something difficult. It doesn’t matter if it’s personal or professional, the first step in any challenge is to move forward. Procrastination is mental not physical. If you want to achieve your goal then you must get your mental house in order. Going to war takes a lot of mental preparation. Blogging is not war, but don’t let the mental process become a battle within yourself.
Be Original
(There are many like it)
My trip to Iraq required a lot of time and training, but it came from people who had already traveled the road. Look at your niche and do the same. Become familiar with it, be able to break it down and know who’s who and what they do well. This will help you find your aim and the position that’s best suited for your talent.
Quality is King
(But this one is mine)
Quality only comes from hard work, determination and preparation. I needed all of these traits to accomplish something I’d never done in my military career, and blogging is no exception. You must have all three of these traits to be successful and know the Core Values of Blogging. Quality is not necessarily showing up in the numbers either. You will come across all kinds of information that will sell you on fast success. More followers, more comments, more traffic, but it’s all a facade.
At the end of my training my M16 wasn’t just a gun it became a part of me and I felt naked without it. Your blog should be an extension of you. Most importantly it has to be yours and provide your readers with a level of intimacy that will lead to an inseparable relationship.
In war and in blogging it’s not how many rounds you fire, it’s how many you hit on target.
Alvin Tatum Jr is a husband, father, and 17-year Navy veteran who loves blogging about technology. His site is maddencorner.com.
You’ve picked the wrong goal for your blog
Jul 17th
Nearly every day I receive some variation of this question – “How do I drive more traffic to my blog?” I would go as far to say that there seems to be an obsession with traffic among bloggers.
In my opinion, this is the wrong question to ask if your goal is to build and sustain a successful personal blog. In fact, the pursuit of traffic may actually be working against your success.
Picking the right measure for success is vitally important because it should drive all of your blogging efforts. For the sake of this post I’ll assume most people reading {grow} want to build a blog community that will enhance their personal reputation, business opportunities, and financial gain.
In his remarkable classic (and one of my favorite books) Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t, Jim Collins articulates this better than I ever could. He describes how choosing the right metric is absolutely essential to creating sustainable success in a business. It drives laser-like focus and an activity level driven toward that goal. The same goes for blogging.
The myth of blog traffic
If you really want to build community, is it smart to focus your precious time on driving traffic? Spend some time with the Google Analytics for your blog. Click around on the statistics from people who are new visitors — “traffic” that arrived via search. How much time did they spend on your blog? Probably an average of 0.0 seconds right? How many page views? The same. It’s traffic, but it’s empty.
Have you ever had a post go viral — that special day that drives the massive traffic that everybody seems to want? What were the results? Did you get any new subscribers? A surge in comments? Probably not. In fact in my experience, other than a spike in daily “traffic” the result in terms of new readers is zero. Last summer I had one post average 10 hits a second and a week later my blog subscriptions were LOWER. My point is, a focus on traffic and hoping that a post will catch fire is probably an ineffective way to build blog community in the long-term.
The alternative metric
Now look at the statistics of the people who are return visitors to your blog. These are the people who love you and are engaging with you. You are on your way to creating powerful business relationships with them. They are the good folks who will help you grow organically.
Does it really make sense to place most of your effort into driving a continuous stream of strangers to your blog? Seeking “traffic” generates tourists to your blog. Focusing on content and your readers generates residents for your blog.
If you’re a “solo blogger” like me — balancing blogging with family and worklife – where you spend your time is a big decision. If your goal is to drive “massive traffic,” you are probably expending effort on:
- SEO keyword research and tools
- Writing posts that are keyword heavy that are most likely to catch a wave of search visitors. By definition, if you are focused on keywords you are probably writing about the same things as everybody else.
- Promotional efforts focused on the low probability that your post will catch fire
If you concentrate on serving the people who read your blog in a way that will encourage them to come back, you would spend your time on:
- Unique and refreshing content no matter what the popular keywords are.
- High engagement with people who comment on your blog today.
- High connection on a personal level — including email, phone calls, and visits – with individual bloggers and commenters who would likely enjoy your blog and become regular readers.
You can see that there is a dramatic difference in approach. And there will be a dramatic difference in results.
Spending time trolling for readers who might stick around based on a chance meeting with your site is blogging alchemy. The real gold is produced by nurturing relationships with devoted readers who will carry the message of your blog to their friends organically.
Steady gains mean a sustainable community
On a daily basis, I have no idea how much traffic is coming to my blog, but I can always tell you how many return visitors came back that day. Driving that number up over time is helping me focus on the right value-adding efforts that build a strong community that will be generating valuable business benefits. And believe me — this is a very sensitive metric. When I write great posts, people come back. Focusing on this number teaches me how to create a better blog for everybody!
If you adopt this slow and steady approach, at some point, you’ll reach a tipping point where enough people are spreading the word, and their friends are spreading the word, that you begin to see ALL your numbers start to go up.
If you have a corporate blog, I recognize that your goals may be more focused on specific lead generation and maybe SEO does make a lot of sense. But if you’re like me — trying to build meaningful business relationships — think about taking care of those return blog visitors as your first priority.
Are you serious about building a loyal community? There are no SEO shortcuts or silver bullets. You have to build a blog community just like you build your customer base — one person, one connection, one relationship at a time. And that starts with correctly identifying your goals and how you are going to spend your time.
So what are you waiting for? Let’s get to work!
What’s working for you? Community? SEO? Or both?
Note: The link to Good to Great is an affiliate link.
Welcome to {grow}
You’re in marketing for one reason: Grow.
Grow your company, reputation, customers, impact, profits. Grow yourself. This is a community that will help. It will stretch your mind, connect you to fascinating people, and provide some fun along the way. I am so glad you’re here.
-Mark SchaeferFollow Mark
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