Jim Connolly Marketing

Focus on results – NOT hits!

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One of my favourite sayings is; “start with the end in mind.” In other words, make sure you know what your outcome is, before you decide to take action.

I was thinking about this earlier, when I received an email from a reader, who had just realised that the time and money she had been investing in marketing her website and blog over the past 18 months, had been pretty much a total waste of time!

Yes, she had seen ‘traffic’ into them increase from zero to around two thousand unique visitors a day – but it hadn’t generated anything tangible for her or her business.  In fact, it had actually hurt her business; because her time spent blogging, online networking and doing SEO had limited the amount of chargeable work she could do for her clients.

Marketing goals

This lady’s original marketing goal for her website and blog, was to showcase her skills as a business finance expert to a new audience and then convert some of these readers into paying clients.  However, she became so focused on producing regularly updated content and getting her Search Engine Optimisation ‘just right’ that she was using these numbers to track her success – rather than the actual number of new clients and enquiries she was getting.

This is a common scenario, when someone gets so involved in the mechanics of a marketing activity, that the activity itself becomes their goal – rather than a tool to help them reach their goal.

Taking stock

marketing results outcomesIf you have a commercial website or blog, how focused are you on the tangible or bankable results you get from it?

I am not talking about hits, metrics, comments or subscriber numbers – I’m talking about actual, business results, what your accountant would call your ROI (return on investment).

Here are some examples of questions we all need to ask ourselves, if we invest our time and/or money on a website or blog:

  • If your site/blog is there to generate enquiries for your business – how many is it generating each day and what quality are they?
  • If your site/blog is supposed to be generating advertising revenue, how much money is it making for you each week?
  • If your site/blog is supposed to be positioning you as an authority in your area of expertise, how many more calls are you getting from newspapers, trade publications and the media – wanting your opinions?

It does us all good from time to time, to take stock of where we are and to ensure that everything we are investing our time, money and energy in is actually taking us toward our business goals.  Otherwise, we run the risk of rowing our boat REALLY hard in the wrong direction and suddenly wondering why we are in the wrong place after all that hard work.

The Seth Godin blog strategy

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I wrote a post a while ago, where I asked why Seth Godin was not using Twitter, to ‘tweet’ with his many fans and why he banned comments on his blog.  Seth was generous enough to come over to my blog and (ironically) leave a comment.  Whatever you happen to think about Seth’s position in not allowing comments, one thing is certain – his strategy works well…. for him!

But, could the same strategy work for a non-celebrity too?

Seth Godin’s blog comment strategy

Seth’s decision not to allow people to comment on his blog posts, means his readers have only one alternative, if they want to discuss or debate what they have just read.  They have to take that debate to; digg, FriendFeed, stumbleupon, facebook or twitter etc. Seth provides easy links below each post to encourage this and make it super-easy to spread his superb content.

The end result is that new people, who have never heard of Seth Godin or his excellent blog, (but who use one of those social bookmarking / social media services), will find him!

Although Seth has an alternative reason for banning comments on his blog, his strategy is perfect for a well known celebrity.  It helps drive a massive amount of NEW people to his work and requires a fraction of his time; as he has no comments to filter or respond to.

Why Seth Godin’s comment strategy wouldn’t work for us

Because he’s famous, Seth avoids the one pitfall, which you or I would have if we banned comments on our blogs – Being slammed for failing to connect with our readers! Famous people who blog, don’t actually have readers – they have fans!  Readers and fans are completely different.

Seth’s fans, for example, are used to paying in order to read his books, which is a one-way experience – just like his blog.  He produces material – they read it – end of story. Equally, fans are far MORE likely to want to connect with Seth, by being seen to be forwarding his work on their social networks.

Could you or I use a version of Seth’s strategy on your blog?

I think that most bloggers can use a version of Seth’s approach; by occasionally closing comments on selected posts.  This might be particularly effective if the post is either controversial or makes a significant announcement (or both!) The effectiveness of this strategy will depend on a few things, including; the number of readers your blog has, how many of them are actively using social bookmarking services and how easy you make it for people to share your posts.

However, for you or I to close the comments section for every post, as Seth has done, is NOT something I would recommend.

Quick blog marketing tip

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Here’s a quick blog marketing tip, to help you reach more targeted readers with your blog.

Focus on people – not ‘traffic’

Take a look at the search terms that people most frequently use, when they arrive on your blog from the search engines.  Then, write a blog post about that subject and you will often attract even more people.  More than this, you will not simply be ‘attracting traffic’ – you will be attracting targeted readers with an interest in your blog’s subject.

So long as the search terms that people are finding you with are 100% relevant to the subject of your blog, even if you see just a small increase in targeted readers, it’s worth it.

I have successfully used this tactic on my tech news blog and seen some amazing results!

I would like to hear from YOU if you have already used this idea and what YOUR experience was!

Why I’m leaving Twitter!

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It’s sad, but the time has come for me to leave Twitter.  At the time of writing this, the three most followed people in England are; John Cleese, Stephen Fry and then me.  I have made some great connections because of Twitter and met a lot of interesting people too.  Twitter has been a great experience for me – BUT it’s time for me to go!

Twitter’s technical problems highlighted one of my own

My Twitter account was one of many to have recently suffered from the dreaded caching error. After 5 days, it was manually fixed by Crystal in Twitter’s tech support team.  This was a blessing in disguise!

For 5 days, whilst my account was waiting to be fixed, I was unable to follow anyone or see who had followed me.  I noticed that I suddenly had lots more extra time each day, so I decided to do some Twitter research! I wanted to know just how long I actually spent using Twitter each day.

I was amazed to see that even during a fairly quiet period, I was investing an average of 2 and a half hours each day!

Even more amazingly, less than half of that time was spent actually ‘tweeting’ with people!

The rest of my Twitter time was spent dealing with the hundreds of Direct Messages I get each day and filtering through the hundreds of people who follow me each day; to see from their profile whether or not to follow them back.  This is an increasingly time consuming problem, as so many people are now doing that follow / unfollow trick, to attract auto follows and make it look like they have lots of followers.

Most of the Direct Messages I get on Twitter are people asking me; ‘please share this link with your followers Jim’ or asking me to look at their blog / website and give them some tips.  I’m also getting stacks of spam sent to me via Twitter’s Direct Message.  This all takes time to review, answer or delete. Yes, almost all of these Direct Messages are from people, who have never tweeted with me or commented here!

The 1000 people on Twitter who connect with me

Although I have over 23,000 people following me on Twitter, I found that only around 800 / 1000 or so are in regular contact with me.  These are the people you see in my Twitter stream and commenting here on the blog.  These are the people, who I built this blog and my Twitter network for.  These are the kind of people, who make Twitter the best social media site / app on the Internet (In my opinion.)

The reason I am leaving Twitter, is that it’s the other 22,000 people, who never connect with me, who require the vast majority of my time!

The sensible thing to do, was for me to find a way to focus all my energy on the people who actually ‘connect with me’  – And that’s what I will now be able to do!

How I solved my Twitter problem

One of my options, was to delete 22,250 people from my Twitter account.  This would take forever and it still wouldn’t stop the flow of new people every day; who follow my account and require filtering. Yes, I could just set up an auto-follow, so every spammer on Twitter could target me, knowing they will get an automatic follow back – but that’s not why I invested my time in Twitter and it would only help with part of the problem.

FriendFeed and Twitter

Thankfully, I have found an excellent way to communicate with everyone, who wants to keep in touch with me – WITHOUT me having to waste all those hours each week on those who don’t!

I have decided to replace what I have been doing on Twitter, with FriendFeed.

Whilst FriendFeed is not as instantly usable as Twitter, it doesn’t come with the same insane focus on followers / following either.  Just like Twitter, you can interact with people without following / subscribing to them.  However, unlike Twitter – on FriendFeed the follower / subscriber thing is far less of a big deal!  There are also no issue with Direct Messages, which ate into so much of my time each day.

This means I can focus massively more of my time on the ‘social’ side of social media.

FriendFeed will allow me to have proper, threaded conversations with all of those who want to join in or share their content with me. 

I hope to see as many of my regular Twitter pals on FriendFeed as possible; so we can continue the conversation.

However, even if you don’t want to join with me on FriendFeed, you can still find out what I am doing via Twitter!

You will still see me on Twitter, via FriendFeed

Even if you don’t have or want a FriendFeed account – you will still be able to see what I post via Twitter anyway! I am going to keep my Twitter account active; so people who want to, can still follow my stream without having to do anything. One of the great things about FriendFeed, is that it will automatically send all my updates direct via my Twitter account – so anyone following me on Twitter will be able to see them.

This is not one of those; “which is best Twitter or FriendFeed?” arguments. It’s just that FriendFeed is the best option for me right now.

UPDATE:

Over the past 48 hours, I have found that most of the people who were regularly tweeting with me, have now found me on FriendFeed; with others introducing themselves all the time! Thus, I shall not be sending my FriendFeed updates through my Twitter account.

I don’t want to just broadcast via Twitter – Twitter’s supposed to be about communicating NOT broadcasting!

Blog comments

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I have always been a keen reader of blogs, not only because of the actual blog posts – but because of the gold dust you can find in a blog’s comments section.

For example, no matter how knowledgeable a blogger is on his or her subject, there will usually be people reading a post, who can add important additional information.  These comments are often just as likely to provide you with the ideas and information you need, as the original blog post!

Blog comments offer targeted feedback

If you want to know what your target market thinks about something, take a look at what they are ‘saying’ in the comments section of relevant blogs.  This kind of snapshot can provide you with a useful way to spot trends.

It can also help you identify common problems that your potential customers have, which YOUR business could solve for them!

Your blog comments

An excellent way to develop a blog, is to take note of the comments people leave.  It’s a great way to ensure your messages are resonating with your readers and that you are giving people want they want.  Many of the changes here on this blog, have been made in response to comments people have made.

Thank you

I would finally like to say “THANK YOU” to everyone who comments here.  Your feedback is, as you can see, massively valuable to both my readers and myself.

Google and me!

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As any of my regular readers will know, me and Google have a very strange relationship!  I decided to write this blog exclusively for people and develop it’s readership via ‘social media marketing.’  As a marketing professional, I wince when I see blogs, which are clearly written primarily to score SEO points; with the actual readers needs placed second.

So, I decided to develop this blog around a ‘100% human-focused approach’ – rather than writing for SEO and then relying on Google to provide me with a readership.

This saw me break a few SEO rules. For example, I provide do-follow links to people who comment here, even though I was strongly advised NOT to, because it would harm my Google ranking (It didn’t by the way!) I also decided to only write posts when I have something I want to share – rather than posting every day just to keep Google happy with the “regularly updated content” we are often told it needs.

Google rewards quality content

When I announced how I was going to build jimsmarketingblog.com‘s community, a few SEO professionals said that because I was focusing on providing good quality content, Google would actually still provide ‘targeted traffic’ to the blog. They said that Google was getting a lot better at identifying high value content.

After looking at the stats for the past month, I can confirm that these SEO professionals were 100% correct!  Even though I write in my natural style and often don’t blog for a few days at a time, Google now sends legions of people to this blog every day, with very relevant search enquiries.  Moreover, it has given the blog a revised PageRank of 4 (up from 3), after just 4 months of blogging and with me offering do-follow links.

Writing for Google and SEO

The lesson here is that despite what some might tell you, it seems that there is no real need to “write for Google” in order to attract new visitors via their search engine.

My experiences have shown that if a blog is SEO friendly and well written, lots of people will link to it. Once you get the links and you keep your focus on high quality content, it seems Google will figure the rest out!

It also shows the effectiveness of good SEO and the importance of the work provided by SEO experts, like those who have guided me in recent months.  I especially want to thank Gregor Spowart from MMD.