Jim Connolly Marketing

What everyone needs to know about their website or blog!

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What kind of first impression do you create, when people find you online?

I often follow links from Twitter and Facebook to small business websites and blogs.  A lot of the time, these sites look amateur, dated or both.  No matter how good the actual services offered by these businesses are, their shoddy Internet presence means most people won’t take them seriously!  Prospective clients arrive, see a low quality site and instantly build a negative initial impression of that person or business.

Mixed messages

When we say one thing and then do something else, we create what’s called a mixed message.  Mixed messages create confusion, which is the fastest way to lose business or miss a sale.  One of the oldest sayings in marketing is:

“A confused mind always says NO!”

In other words, if someone is asked to make a buying decision when they are confused, they will typically say “no!” and just keep things as they are.  If you promise people a solid, professional service, your website or blog needs to look solid and professional too.  If they find a site that looks cheap or unprofessional, you are giving your prospective clients a mixed message, which creates confusion and loses you business.

First impressions count

First impressions are extremely important in marketing and business generally.  You need to ensure that when someone arrives at your website, they see something which gives a great account of you and your services and positions you in their mind as a professional.  Your site should confirm your promises.  It should clearly show that you have a professional attitude to business.  If it doesn’t, it will be costing you a fortune in missed business and opportunities.

Depending on which survey you read between 85% and 95% of people, will visit the site of a potential vendor, before deciding to do business with them.  This means it’s extremely important that what they find when they arrive at YOUR site, inspires them to feel confident about you and your services.

How I resolved this problem

I resolved this problem, by building this site using something called Headway.  It allowed me to build a site myself, even though I know nothing about code or web designing.  You can see a video of Headway in action, using this affiliate link.  Since moving this site to Headway, I have been able to improve my online presence and have total control over the look and feel of this site.  It’s one of the best commercial investments I ever made and it cost peanuts (about the same as a game for my son’s xbox!)

Alternatively, you can hire a web designer and commission them to build you a site.  If you take that route, I suggest you find a site you love the look and feel of and find out who designed it.

The bottom line: Anyone can have a professional looking website or blog, regardless of their budget.  There’s just no need to lose all that potential business.  This is really important, if you are serious about your marketing results and the image of your business!

The Robot and The Guinea Pig

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Marketing genius Seth Godin made a great point with the title of his book; “All marketers tell stories.”  He’s right.  As small business owners, we each have many stories to tell, as we seek to connect with, inform and of course engage our marketplace.  Our ability to get the message right, so that our story has the desired impact, is pivotal to this.

A great story

My 5 year old son recently wrote a story, called; “The Robot and The Guinea Pig.”  His storytelling contained a number of elements that really impressed me.  His title was very catchy, which is why I used it here.  The story wasn’t too long and it showed a lot of creative thinking.  It’s wonderful to watch him develop his vocabulary and creativity.

I wrote a while back about Earl Nightingale and how he used to talk about the inoculation theory of education. It’s where young adults study, get qualified and then use their qualifications / graduation as a way to inoculate themselves from having to study any more.  I believe that as business owners, we need to adopt a very different approach.  We need to constantly strive to learn more about the elements of our business that matter, and in the 21st century, this includes the ability to create interesting content.

Over on Internet Marketing Jam, I talk a lot about content marketing.  One of the cornerstones of content marketing, is to produce valuable information, (blog posts, newsletters, videos, articles etc) as a way to inform your target market, build your reputation with them as an expert.  You then need to convert them from being a (passive) reader, to being an (active) participant.  You want them to get active, so they; subscribe to your blog, join your newsletter list, email you for information on your services or buy from you etc.

Building your storytelling muscles

With content playing such a pivotal part in the success of your marketing, it makes sense for you to invest as much time as possible, learning how to share your story and earn people’s interest.  For example, we should always bee seeking to improve how well we:

  • Capture people’s attention with our titles and headlines.
  • Inspire people to share our material with their social networks.
  • Compel people to pick up a phone and call us or email us for more information about our products or services.
  • Motivate people to buy from us or hire us.

I genuinely don’t believe that there are any quick fixes to learning how to be a great copywriter, but I do know how you can massively increase how well you write in the medium and longer term.

Are you ready?

Do it – And do it often!

One of the best ways to improve your ability to produce great content, is to practice.  Get your best written material out there and measure the feedback.  Listen to what the marketplace is telling you, something that is especially easy with online copywriting.  You can see, very clearly, how a page on your website or how a post on your blog is working.

Even basic tools like Google analytics will allow you to see how many people read that page and what they do once they arrive.  You can tell how long they stay on the page, and what exit route they take.  You can literally watch how “traffic” flows through your site and see what’s blocking people from getting in touch with you, subscribing to your newsletter or buying from you.

If your content is NOT getting the results you want, make one change and then measure the impact.  By repeating this process, it’s possible to significantly increase your online results and learn how to write the kind of content you need.

6 ways to quickly improve your profile

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How do you think people feel about you and your business, when they discover you online?

The reason this matters to small business owners, is that feelings are the key factor in whether someone buys from you or not.  We do business with people we feel good about and avoid people we have a bad feeling about.  We buy things that feel just right and avoid buying things that feel wrong.  In fact, it’s often said that the decision to buy a new house, the biggest single purchase most people will ever make, is based on the way they feel about the house in the first 60 seconds!

Online profiles and the feelings they create

In my experience, small business owners tend to have 1 of the following 2 broad approaches to what they share with the world on their blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin etc:

  1. The first group writes in positive terms about their business and the marketplace.  Even if times are challenging for them, we wouldn’t know because they talk about what they want, rather than what they fear.  Of course, their enthusiasm builds confidence in them and their business, which creates a positive circle of events, as people are attracted to them – Giving them even more to be positive about.
  2. The second group write in largely neutral terms about their business and the marketplace.  However, their lack of enthusiasm fails to inspire confidence in them or their business.  Some seem to confuse being confident, with being boastful.  Others fail to share their positive news, for fear that it may make people resent them for what they have achieved.

6 things to think about

I strongly believe you should be confident enough to get your stars out and show the world your brilliant self.  Here are 6 suggestions, to help your prospective clients get a glimpse of the REAL YOU and how amazing you truly are, when they check you out online.   Use your blog and social media accounts to:

  1. Talk (and write) about what you want, not what you fear.  Prospective clients might not want to do business with someone, if they think that person may be about to go out of business, after reading how bad things are.
  2. Share your successes.
  3. Show your gratitude.  Be fast to thank.  Be first to thank.
  4. Show your willingness to contribute.
  5. Share your uniqueness.  It’s hard to get noticed unless you are willing to step out of the crowd.  Don’t be a human RT  / “like” machine for the gurus!
  6. Showcase other great people.

Never confuse confidence with arrogance.  Have the confidence to share your successes, but also the humility to readily celebrate the beauty and uniqueness of others.

WordPress.com for business: Think first!

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WordPress is, in my opinion, the finest blogging software in the world.  Little wonder then, that the vast majority of the world’s top blogs run on Matt Mullenwegg‘s brain child.  It’s the only blogging software I use and the only one I recommend.

WordPress.com offer a free version of WordPress, hosted on their own servers, which has proven extremely successful, and this free version is what today’s post is all about.

You see, although the free WordPress.com service is amazing, it has significant issues for some business users.

WordPress.com, advertising and you

The main issue is the idea of building your blog, knowing that you do not have the freedom to use it the way you want to.  This is a particular problem for those of you, who would like to make money from advertising on your blog or earn affiliate income; 2 of the most popular ways to monetize a commercial blog.

Even this blog, with just 1 affiliate, would fall foul of the terms regarding a free WordPress.com blog and would be suspended!  This can be a lot more severe than it may sound.  Here’s a direct quote explaining what can happen to suspended WordPress.com blogs:

“If a blog has been suspended for violating our terms, its domain/URL and content will not be returned.” From the suspended blogs page on WordPress.com

You will also be suspended, if you decide to run adsense etc on your blog.  Here’s what they say on the advertising page, in the WordPress.com support section.

Adsense, Yahoo, Chitika, TextLinkAds and other ads are not allowed on free WordPress.com blogs. If you would like to run ads on your blog, one of these options may work for you:

We have a feature called Ad Control that lets WordPress.com bloggers with a lot of traffic (generally 25,000 pageviews/month or more) and appropriate content turn on AdSense and Skimlinks for their blog and split the resulting revenues 50/50 with us.

So, you can actually advertise on WordPress.com, but only if you get your blog delivering 25,000 or more page views a month AND you pay WordPress 50% of the money you make!

If you’re OK about working for years to build that kind of readership, and then giving half your income away, it’s an option.  Why any business savvy person would do that is beyond me.  To have that much traffic and give half your earnings away, just for some free hosting, makes no commercial sense whatsoever.

Automattic is right to charge businesses for a business service

Automattic, the company that owns WordPress, is totally right to charge for what they do, when business users want to benefit from their services.  That’s my point.  If you want to monetize your site with ads then WordPress.com is a paid for service, not a free one.  Equally, there’s no option I can see, to allow you to use your affiliate accounts on WordPress.com – free or paid versions. (If you know otherwise, please let me know including links and I will update the post.)

Vague areas

My understanding is that you are allowed to mention your business on a free WordPress blog and even mention special deals you have, but there seems to be a great deal that’s unclear about what WordPress consider appropriate and inappropriate.

For example, in a section on WordPress.com regarding the types of blog you are not allowed to have, they actually mention pyramid selling and MLM in the same sentence, and seem unaware that one is a legitimate business whilst the other is illegal in most countries.  Putting these in the same category is also rather insulting to those working hard and ethically in Multi Level Marketing, and makes it hard to see how an MLM business owner could use the platform and stay within their rules.

In my experience, it makes a lot more sense for you to simply build a blog, like this one, using the excellent WordPress software, and place it on the best hosting you can afford.  It starts from around $5 a month.  This gives you freedom to build your legitimate online business, your way and retain all your income.  You are also free to use whatever plugins you need, giving you and your readers a huge amount of added functionality.

WordPress.com and you

As I said at the beginning, I love the WordPress software, but believe that their limitations may make their free hosting service a poor choice for some business bloggers and entrepreneurs.  It seems WordPress agrees, as one of the suggestions they offer to people who want to make money from their blog, is for them to do exactly as I suggested and get a self-hosted version of WordPress from WordPress.org.  I also have concerns regarding the vague nature of what a WordPress.com moderator may regard as inappropriate, (thus suspending your account.)  Just look at how they categorised MLM and pyramid selling together.

I would like to know your feedback, regarding WordPress.com as a business blogging platform.  Maybe you believe that their free hosting is worth the price (millions of people do)?  Whatever your feedback regarding this amazing platform, I would love to hear from you!

Let’s work together and grow your business. To find out more click here!

Image: WordPress

Disclosure matters

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I decided to add a disclosure page to this blog.

I assumed that as I seldom link to the only affiliate product I have and the blog’s sponsor is clearly referred to as such, there was little point.

I then saw something that made me reconsider, very quickly!

I was prompted to write that brief page, after reading several disclosure pages on some popular blogs; which had so many caveats that just about anything they wrote could be some kind of paid endorsement.  It was extremely illuminating and I suggest that you check out any disclosure pages on the blogs you read.

My affiliate partner and sponsor

I am an independent blogger, with no cross marketing agreements with anyone.  If I say I think a particular blog or product or service is great, it’s because I believe it.  For example, I was openly recommending my hosting provider, WebFusion, before they started sponsoring the blog.  Five months after going onto one of their dedicated servers, I am still on 100% up time!  It’s easy to recommend something like that, knowing how many people are stuck on unreliable hosting.  I wasted a long time on deadbeat hosts before finding them.  BTW: I get paid nothing if you click their banner, it’s just a link to their site.

With my one and only affiliate, it was a very similar story.  I had been recommending Headway (the WordPress theme this blog’s built on), to people for 6 months, before I decided to become an affiliate.

Even if you have little to disclose, I think it’s a very good idea to put it up there so people can see.

92 reasons to invest in your business blog

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Thursday morning, I checked my email at 7:30, to find that 83 of you had emailed me following Wednesday’s post and a further 9 people had called my office.  The post offered a place on my mentoring program and was not published until 3:45pm Wednesday, making those 92 requests even more amazing.

Your incredible response, both in volume and in speed, confirmed the marketing effectiveness of having a blog.  Yes, like every other form of marketing, blogging only works when handled correctly.  Copying what 99% of sites do, will all but guarantee failure, but for those who decide to learn how to blog effectively, the results can be stunning.  As of Friday morning, I have had a total of 117 genuine inquiries for that single spot on my program.

Based on my fee and typical conversion rate, the small blog post I wrote on Wednesday would have generated at least £90,000 in fee income, if I had an empty client list!

You, blogging, time and money

How different would your client list, income and lifestyle look right now, if you could generate over 100 client inquiries from a post like the one I wrote on Wednesday?  OK, that was a rhetorical question.  Here’s a direct question for you:

“Is that kind of potential inspiring enough to you, for you to commit to invest the time and money needed to make it happen?”

Sadly, very, very few small business owners are willing to resource their blog properly.  Some will invest the time required, but refuse to pay for expert help, even though their blog clearly isn’t generating what they need.  Others will invest in the expert help that’s essential, but refuse to invest the time that’s required.  Many will do neither.

My investment

I’ve invested the time required to write around 800 posts.  That kind of commitment means I wrote for you on days when I was ill and days when I had other deadlines to meet.  But I still turned up.  I have also invested  around £6,000 on this blog so far, though my hosting is now sponsored by WebFusion (that’s not an affiliate link, just a link to their site.)  That’s my commitment so far and I will continue to invest more time and more money.

What next?

If you have a business blog that’s under-performing, get serious about it.  Listen to what your blog is telling you.  If it isn’t generating the results you need, stop!  Invest in some expert help.  There may be one small element you are getting wrong, which when corrected will transform your results.

As Einstein said: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results!” Be one of the tiny minority of small business owners, who does the right things, correctly.  Oh, and if you DO pay for expert help -TAKE IT!

If you don’t currently have a business blog and are thinking of starting one, start off with a commitment to do it right.  If you can’t afford to do it right, save some money, do some research and then launch correctly; knowing what to do, so you start off in the right direction.

Give your blog everything it needs and it will give you all the high quality business you can possibly handle.

Let’s work together and grow your business. To find out more click here!