Jim's Marketing Blog

Marketing tips and ideas to help you grow your business

For every promise, there’s a price to pay

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Here’s a question for you:
Why do millions of people own exercise machines, which they used for a week and then packed away somewhere, never to be used again?

The answer is simple, yet it contains a valuable lesson.

The reason people bought those machines, is because the ‘perfect’ people in the TV commercials advertising them, promised 6-pack abs in weeks with just 3 minutes of fun exercise a day. Why did the marketing team behind that machine promise those amazing results in just 180 seconds a day? Because they know that the average person wants results without the pain.  They want the washboard abs, just so long as they can still eat crap and avoid exercise for the remaining 23 hours and 57 minutes of each day.

In business, I see examples every day of people who want the results, without paying the price.  However, as my mentor, the late great Jim Rohn used to say; “for every promise, there’s a price to pay.” In other words, if we want a particular end result, we need to take the actions required to get that result first. We need to pay the price in advance.

  • Want marketing that works, so that your business thrives in 2010? Stop relying on generic, free advice to grow your business.
  • Want better cash flow?  Hire a better accountant.
  • Want people to spread great word of mouth publicity about your business? Make your business worth talking about.

This really is nothing more than common sense – yet the failure to apply it is putting people out of business, every hour of every day.

Paying the price in advance

If there’s something, which someone wants from their business in 2010, that was missing in 2009; they have a decision to make.  They can either decide to start paying the price for success or they can continue to count the cost of failure.

Is it time to ask for the sale yet?

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Today, I would like to share some ideas with you, about the importance of timing in the sales process.  The idea for this post came to me, whilst standing in a queue last night buying some milk!

While I was waiting to be served, I noticed that the shop had some pumpkin shaped, Halloween chocolate on a shelf, with the price heavily reduced.  Although the chocolate was still within its sell-by date and would have tasted exactly the same as it would have on Halloween, who wants pumpkin shaped, Halloween chocolate in December?  No one! Even with its price discounted by 75%, it was stuck on the shelf unsold.  That’s because it’s moment had passed.

Here’s the thing: The sales process is time sensitive.  If you have a prospective customer, who is thinking about buying from you and you ask for the sale before they are ready – you will lose the sale.  Equally, if you wait too long to ask for the sale, you will also lose it – because their interest has cooled. They are no longer a hot prospect!

Think of the sales process as being like a saucepan of cold water placed on a hot stove.  The water starts off cold, then it gets warmer and warmer until it reaches boiling point.  In business, that’s the point where the prospective customer is most likely to buy from you.  When we turn the stove off, the water quickly stops boiling and cools, until it reaches room temperature.  In sales, every degree in heat that’s lost, makes it less likely that you will get the sale – Until you have zero chance because they have gone elsewhere or are simply no longer interested.

Here’s what 23 years in the business tells me

In my experience, the majority of companies wait too long, rather than ask too soon.  I’ve lost count of how many times people have told me that they didn’t want to rush the prospective customer into making a decision – only to find that when they finally did ask for the sale, the customer had gone elsewhere!

In your business, you need to identify precisely at what point in your negotiating process, your prospective customers are at their hottest.  That’s the point where you need to ask them to make a decision. Not before. Not after.  Get this right and you will massively increase the number of sales you make.

Have you figured out when your prospects are at their hottest? Do you have any tips on how to get the timing right, that you would like to share?  What do you think?

3 ways to quickly improve your results

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Here’s one of the best pieces of advice anyone ever gave me:

Don’t just learn from your own experiences; learn from the experiences of others.

Learning from the experiences of others, is also one of the most effective (and fastest) ways to grow your business successfully.

That’s because:

  1. It’s a LOT less expensive to learn from the mistakes of others.
  2. By emulating their success, you can massively accelerate the development of your business.

The challenge here, is that in order to learn from others, you need to become a skilled observer.  However; whilst most business owners and marketers are excellent at general observation, they are very poor at detailed observation.

Here are 3 simple ways that you can improve your commercial observation skills:

Step 1: Learn from the right people and companies

Sometimes, people in business are less than 100% honest with the claims they make about their commercial achievements.  If you then try to emulate them and they are actually going nowhere, it’s going to be a total waste of time.  You will, unknowingly, be copying a model of failure.  I see this a LOT more often than you might think!

For example, I know a marketing guy on Twitter, who has tens of thousands of ‘fake’ followers. If you were to replicate how he uses Twitter, thinking it would build you a valuable network, you would fail.  He actually used software that mass followed, then unfollowed hundreds of thousands of random twitter accounts. He then attracted tens of thousands of auto-follows – from people who automatically follow anyone who follows them.  The day Twitter stopped that from working, his follower numbers stopped, then started shrinking!  However, his follower count is still measured in the tens of thousands, which will fool many into thinking his approach works.

So, never just assume that someone is succeeding with something.  Before you seek to emulate someone’s success, check them out as thoroughly as possible.

Step 2: Be selective, because what works for some may not work for you

Just because something works for one person, that’s no guarantee it will work for someone else.  A great example of this is Seth Godin’s blog.  Seth decided to switch comments off – so his readers could no longer comment on his posts.  As a result, if people want to discuss Seth’s posts, they need to do so on services like Facebook, Twitter etc – which helps Seth reach even more people. A stroke of pure genius!

That approach works brilliantly FOR SETH, because he’s an international best selling author with millions of fans.  If ‘the average’ blogger tried that same approach, they would anger their regular commenters and probably lose a ton of readers, being seen as arrogant or uncaring.

So, even if you know that something is working for another business or person, think about how likely it would be to succeed for you, in your unique situation, before you embrace it.

Step 3: Learn how to read data correctly

Very often, business owners and marketers will observe a business achieving a great result and totally misread how they did it.  It’s very easy to look at information and come to the wrong conclusion.

For example, if I said that taking medicine is what kills the majority of people, you would rightly think I was nuts!  However, if you look at the data, most people who die were on some kind of medication.  However, that’s because the majority of people who pass away, do so after being ill, and thus taking some kind of medication.

You could use the same twisted logic to say Mary was a bad person and not to be trusted, because she spends her days mixing with criminals – when that’s simply part of Mary’s job as a police officer!

Here’s another example.  Someone recently told me that she tried using the same retweet plugin on her blog, that I use here, but that it didn’t work.  I asked her if it was installed correctly, and she replied that it was – but that very few of her readers used it.  She assumed that the button was what generated the retweets, and not the content.  Of course, the button only makes it easier for people to share what they want to share.

In my experience, the key to becoming an effective observer, is to take time to look beyond the obvious and then to apply good, old-fashioned common sense before taking action.

Over to you!

What do you think? What are your tips to become a better observer? Take a moment to share your ideas with the rest of us.

Warren Buffett and daring to be different!

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This quick marketing tip is all about the marketing power of being one of a kind in a world full of blandness.

One of the many common characteristics of successful businesspeople, is that they have the courage to be different.  I’m not talking about being different just for the sake of it – I’m talking about being brave enough to stand out from the crowd and do what you believe to be right.

I remember listening to Warren Buffett, the world’s wealthiest and most successful investor, explaining how his company made so many tens of billions of dollars. He said: “We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.” In other words, he achieved financial success by not following what the crowd were doing.

Marketing the ordinary

In marketing, we know that the more similar a product or service is to its competitors, the harder it is to market or get noticed.  People don’t talk about the mundane and ordinary – they talk about the extraordinary.  Yet, most businesses within the same industry are almost clones of one another.

Here’s what we see in every town and in every city: We see competing companies offer the same range of services, to the same marketplace, with the same generic promises.

  • You need to be smarter than that, if you want to avoid price or fee sensitive customers.
  • You need to be smarter than that, if you want to attract word of mouth publicity too; because people only speak (or remark) on those businesses that are remarkable.
  • You need to be smarter than that if you want to want an above average business.

Most small business owners don’t really own a business at all.  They have simply bought themselves a job with long hours and a ton of stress.  They don’t look to the future with excitement, they look to the future with apprehension.

The great irony here, is that by taking the easy route and replicating what their competitors are doing and saying, they actually make business (and life) far harder for themselves.  Conversely, by having the courage to be different, business and life become far, far easier.

Who do you listen to?

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As someone who has worked in marketing almost all my adult life, I am a keen student of human behaviour.  You know what?  After 23 years in the business, I am still often amazed at what I see.

Take yesterday for instance

Following the sad death of Jim Rohn at the weekend, I wrote a brief tribute.  After it was published, I was stunned by the number of direct messages I received via Twitter and Friendfeed, from intelligent people, telling me they had never heard of him.

The reason I find this so interesting, is that Jim spoke at over 6,000 events and reached over 4 MILLION people.  He was a true thought leader, who focused exclusively on delivering tangible results.  But what about value? I recall how Jim was once paid a million dollars by a soft drinks company, for a little of his time and some of his ideas.

By way of contrast, you can hire many of today’s Internet famous thought leaders for relative peanuts.

Here’s my point: We all need to be super-selective regarding the voices we allow to influence us.  That’s why I believe it’s important to check from time to time, that we are listening to the right people for what we want to achieve.

Jim Rohn RIP

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jim rohn, jim rohn international, e james rohn,

On 5th December 2009, my mentor passed away.

E James Rohn, known to millions simply as Jim Rohn, was a truly incredible human being. Though we never met in person, Jim’s words of wisdom helped me turn my life around. His work has been a regular part of my life and my business ever since.

There may have been days where I didn’t read, listen to or watch something of Jim Rohn’s, but not many.

I own just about every word Jim has ever published and I believe I have every recording he ever made too.  This was easily the best commercial investment I ever made.

Jim Rohn’s impact on me

When I discovered Jim’s work I was 21 years old, broke and living in a slum. I was financially secure for life just 8 years later. That’s the life-changing impact Jim Rohn has had on me.

Jim’s work was the spark that ignited something, which even I did not know I had.  He showed me, in plain English, with no bullshit, that I could become whatever I wanted to; that my past did not equal my future.

Jim’s advice helped me more than ‘just’ commercially.  In fact, at the lowest points in my life, especially when my parents passed away, Jim’s advice helped me remain sane and kept me moving forward.

Perhaps the strongest testimony to the impact of Jim Rohn’s work, is that right now, all over the world, there are millions of people who are feeling his loss just like I am. That’s quite an achievement, for a farm boy from Idaho.

Photo credit: Jim Rohn International

Why Google means so little to me (and you mean so much!)

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One of the first rules of business is not to rely too heavily on any 1 client or customer, for the majority of your income.  If you do, and that customer goes broke or takes their business elsewhere, you’re in BIG trouble!  Even if that customer just decides to pay you late, it can kill your cash flow or put you out of business.

Everyone knows that it’s far better and a lot less risky, to have a wider spread of business.

Or do they?

For some reason, when it comes to the Internet, it seems many site owners and bloggers focus the majority of their efforts on just one form of traffic development; search engines.  Then, the vast majority of that is focused on just 1 search engine – Google.  As a result, some people are now very dependent on Google traffic.  Many invest a staggering amount of time and effort doing everything they can, to keep Google happy.

Even the most read sites on the Internet can become extremely dependent on Google.  In a recent blog post, Darren Rowse from problogger explained that he almost went out of business, when Google decided overnight, to cut his traffic (and thus his sales/leads) by 30%!

I believe it’s insane to allow any 3rd party to have that much control over:

  • Your sales
  • Your leads
  • Your enquiries
  • Your income
  • and maybe even your business’ future

Whilst I recommend that every business invests in professional Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), I ALSO strongly suggest that you consider investing in alternatives too.  Why? Because the results can be amazing AND it removes your exclusive reliance on search engines.

For example, although this blog is currently ranked one of the top 100 marketing blogs in the world by Adage, just a small percentage of my traffic comes via search engines.  The vast majority comes from people, via social media (more on that in a moment.)

SEO, social media and your Internet marketing mix

When I started this blog, I decided that Google was NOT going to play any deliberate part in the blog’s development.  I do NOT recommend others follow this path, it’s not the right move for the vast majority of people.

Why did I do it? Because as someone from a traditional marketing background, I wanted to use a form of marketing for the blog, which was not so reliant on Google.  I elected to use a strategy, which used a number of social media related activities. The idea was (and still is) to provide my blog with a much wider spread of human-powered, marketing options.

I use some basic SEO here, like tagging posts so that it’s easier for search engines to correctly identify what my posts are about.  This takes seconds to do.  However, I do not deliberately use Google friendly key phrases or key words – I don’t even have a sitemap!  I also do zero off-site SEO.  If Google stopped sending people here tomorrow, it would have very little impact on the development of this blog. Chris Brogan claims to have gone 1 step further than me, and says he does no SEO on his blog whatsoever! That’s incorrect, as his theme is optimized and he has requested people to link to him – I think he means he doesn’t keyword stuff. Ignoring SEO completely is at best, a little blinkered.

Here are just some of the ways that people, via social media, have helped me generate targeted traffic to this blog:

  • People share my blog posts on Twitter. I use Twitter most days and have connected with a some great people. Some of them are kind enough to share posts on Twitter, if they find them interesting.
  • People use sites like Facebook, Delicious, Stumbleupon and Digg etc to share blog posts. For example, this 1 post gets hundreds of views every week from Stumbleupon users.
  • Fellow bloggers link to posts here, which alerts their readers to this blog.  Some bloggers link to the entire blog.
  • People have mentioned the blog in podcasts.
  • I link to this blog in my marketing newsletter; which helps new newsletter readers discover the blog.

Because SEO is very much the secondary focus of the blog’s development, I focus on optimising my posts, so that they are as attractive as possible for people.  I have to admit that as a writer, I find it far, far more natural to write for people, than to alter my writing style, so that there are key phrases and words scattered strategically – to attract Google’s attention too.

It’s wise to combine great copy writing with powerful SEO.  Particularly when writing copy for a website, as opposed to a blog, the combined SEO social media approach is extremely valuable.

Love SEO – but give social media a hug too!

Do not misread this post and think for one moment that I am suggesting you ignore SEO.  That would be wrong.  I am not saying that at all.  However, I AM saying that all site owners and bloggers should spend some time exploring additional ways to generate targeted traffic. Keep up with your SEO, but seriously consider adding a little people-power to your Internet marketing mix!

Can I have your attention?

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It amazes me that there are still businesspeople, who have not figured out that there’s a right way and a wrong way to grab someone’s attention.

For example, I’ve been emailed this morning by 2 unrelated companies.  Both wanted me to write a review here on the blog, about their service.  Each email consisted of a poorly written, cut-and-paste sales pitch.  Both senders thought that the best way to grab my attention, create a great initial impression and inspire me to blog about them, was to spam me.

Attention grabbing

If you walk up to a stranger at a networking event, you can quickly grab their attention by simply poking them hard in the chest with your index finger.  However, this is not going to be the kind of attention you want.  Spammy emails are just like that! They may gain someone’s attention, but only to alert them that the sender is a spammer.  That’s not the kind of attention any business wants to attract.

Now, if one of the companies that spammed me earlier had actually took a moment to market their service to me correctly, I might have checked it out. If, for instance, either of them had followed me on Twitter and then tweeted to me, I would have definitely checked out their website.  This would have presented them with a window of opportunity, to make a great impression.

Attention grabbing – Done right

  • Seth Godin didn’t spam me and ask if I would write a review about how brilliant his marketing blog is – but I did!  Seth’s blog was mentioned on a radio show I was listening to years ago.  I read it and was hooked.
  • The reason I bought a Samsung when I was shopping for a netbook, is because there were universally excellent reviews for the NC10 all over the Internet, from trusted sources.  I even mentioned the netbook in a blog post.
  • When Danny Brown told me how great the Headway (affiliate link) wordpress theme was, I had to check it out.  Within 15 minutes of reading about it, I had bought it.  A few hours later, I had it installed.  A week later, I became an affiliate; the first product I have ever been an affiliate of!

The bottom line is this: If you want people to write positively about you, recommend you and buy from you – don’t poke them in the chest.

6 Marketing tips – Good timing!

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Great marketing and great comedy have at least one thing in common: Great timing!

Of course, the opposite is also true.  A comedian with bad timing isn’t very funny and poorly timed marketing isn’t very effective.

With this in mind, here are SIX timing-related marketing tips, to help you improve your results.

Marketing your events

If you are thinking of hosting any kind of event, Google the date you have in mind and check if anything that’s likely to cause a problem is happening on that day. I spoke with a UK based business owner once, who unknowingly picked (and advertised everywhere) the same date for his company’s open evening, as England’s opening game in the football World Cup Finals.

The end result? He was the only person there.

Planning your marketing

The time to start planning your marketing strategy for 2010 is NOT the first day of January – it’s NOW!

Just as you wouldn’t wait until the day you set off on a round the world trip, to start booking accommodation and flights, the same applies when planning your marketing for the year ahead. Leave yourself enough time to plan ahead properly.

Mail shots & follow-up phone calls

If you are sending out a mail shot, which you intend to follow-up with a phone call, send the mailing so that it arrives on a Tuesday.  This way, you can make your follow up calls on Wednesday and Thursday.  If your letter arrives on a Friday there will be a weekend between your prospective customers reading your letter and you making those first follow-up calls.

That’s a long time for your prospective client to remember your letter. Equally, you don’t want to be making follow-up calls on Monday mornings; when your prospects are often at their busiest.

Industry specific timing

There are times of the year where it’s pointless marketing to certain industries and professions.  In the UK, for example, the accountancy profession is extremely busy in January.  As a result, you are far less likely to be able to meet with or even speak on the phone with accountants in January, than you would be in February, March etc.  Of course, US based accountants are busiest on the lead-up to the 15th April rush.

Companies selling training courses and seminars usually find it harder to fill venues during the summer holiday months, than the rest of the year.  That’s because organisations are much less likely to send employees away for a day, when they are already short of people because of holiday cover.

The key thing here is that whatever industries or professions you target with your marketing, make sure you are aware of their busiest months and focus your efforts accordingly.

Email marketing

Whenever possible, I strongly recommend you avoid sending out your email-based marketing on a Friday afternoon.  If your email isn’t picked up that afternoon, it will be stuck in the bottom of their inbox, under a whole weekend’s worth of junk mail, when they check their email again on Monday morning.  This makes it unnecessarily hard for YOUR email message to get noticed.

You have an entire working week to send out your email marketing, so even if it ‘just’ helps your response rate by 10%, it’s got to be worth avoiding Friday afternoons.

Investing your marketing time correctly

My final time-related marketing tip is simple: Don’t waste major chunks of your marketing time, on minor things.  There are only so many hours in a day and only so many of those, which you can invest in your marketing.

For example, I see people waste weeks researching what type of email software to use – and then use it to send hastily written marketing emails.  That’s all wrong.  I see people wait months before they start blogging, doing hundreds of hours of ‘research’, and they still end up repeating the exact same mistakes that most new bloggers make.

Don’t let this happen to you.  Use your marketing time as effectively as you can.

Okay – now it’s your turn

What do you think?  What time-related marketing tips do you have? Share your feedback!

Mouth-watering marketing

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I just want to quickly share something valuable with you, which happened to me a couple of days ago.  It’s a simple, yet powerful example of how extremely persuasive words can be, when we use them to create strong, mental images.

I’m writing this post just after returning home from a delicious lunch with my wife and son.  We went to a small local place, where the food and atmosphere are always good.  After we finished our food, the waitress asked us if we would like some dessert.  I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, but decided to ask what was on their lunchtime dessert menu anyway.  Here’s what she told me:

“This afternoon Jim, we have a mouth-watering strawberry cheesecake and some freshly made profiteroles in a delicious, smooth chocolate sauce, which melts in your mouth.”

She listed several more options, but to be honest, I was already sold by the time she reached the freshly made profiteroles.

The marketing power of words

Here’s the thing: We all had dessert, even though we hardly ever eat dessert at lunchtime.

So, why did we have dessert?

Because it sounded delicious, before we even saw it!  The mental pictures she painted in our minds, as she described each dessert, took them from being items on a list and turned them into tastes in our imaginations.  If she had simply read us a list of dessert choices, I know we would not have had any.

Take a moment to look at the copy (wording) you currently use for your marketing.  Are you painting inspiring, compelling mental images with them?  Are your marketing messages motivating prospective customers to; buy from you, recommend you, call you, email you, subscribe to your mailing list etc?

If not, it’s highly likely you are simply giving details of the benefits your services provide. I know you have been told that you should sell based on benefits, but you need to make those benefits come alive.

Your written marketing needs to jump from the page or the computer screen and produce the motivation required for the reader to take action!

Quick marketing tip

Copy writing is one of the master skills of successful marketing.  If you are serious about making regular, high quality sales or filling your client base with brilliant clients, I strongly recommend you make 1 of the following 2 investments.  I recommend that you either invest the time required to learn how to write effective marketing messages OR invest the money required to hire the best marketing copy writer you possibly can.

By relying on pedestrian marketing copy, you simply place a very low, uninspiring ceiling on your business’ potential.

What’s your take on this?  Share your feedback or experiences of great (and not so great) copy writing, with a comment below.

This is marketing madness!

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Here’s a great example of how bad marketing can not only result in you making fewer sales – But actually LOSE you existing customers too!

As you read this post, the owner of a small web hosting business is wondering why so few people have responded to his latest marketing email.

In his marketing email, which was forwarded to me by a reader, he explains that over the Christmas holiday period, the load on his servers increases and this means people’s sites will load really slowly. To frighten his customers still further, he explains that the server speed could be too slow for their customers / clients / readers to bother with.  It could screw up their business and make them look bad. (Ouch!)

Sounds horrible right?  Well, the email goes on to paint a picture of increasing doom – Until he asks his customers to consider upgrading their hosting package, claiming that the new, more expensive package, will deliver a reliable service.

Marketing madness

Can you spot the problem here?  This guy has just sent all his customers an email, which tells them the servers he has placed their sites on are overloaded.  However, on the page of his website, which sells the package that he now says is unreliable, he says the total opposite.  In fact, he makes a number of very bold promises about the reliability of the servers he uses.  I have never heard of this hosting provider, his services might be great – but that’s not the point!

Not only has he just informed all his customers that he put their sites on overloaded servers, they now know they can’t trust his company’s marketing promises either!

In a shockingly bad effort to up-sell his clients onto a 400% more expensive package, he has actually massively damaged their opinion of the current service they receive from him.  They will now be worrying about the problems that he has forecast for December and some will be looking for a reliable alternative to him and his false promises!

It’s madness for someone to try and scare their customers into upgrading, by claiming that the service he previously sold them is not what he promised.  It’s also just plain stupid to tell lies to your customers.  This up-sell approach does nothing, other than damage the provider’s reputation and alert the customer to change provider.

Marketing an upgrade to your customers or clients

If you want to encourage existing customers to upgrade from one level of service to the next, you need to demonstrate huge, additional value in the upgraded service.  You create a vast difference between their current service and the upgrade, by massively increasing the value of the upgrade – NOT by telling them that what you already sold them is crap. You need to pump so much value into the upgrade, that they would be nuts not to use it.

This value focused approach makes the upgrade process less of a risk for the customer and enhances their experience of your business.  They get to see you as being able to grow to meet their demands.

Your turn

What do you think of the approach used by this hosting company?  Have you seen examples of it before and did it encourage you to spend more money with them?  What do you think when a provider bad mouths the quality of their own, entry level services?  Share your opinions with us.

Why bloggers post every day!

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Ever wondered why some bloggers write blog posts every day?  Well, I did too – So I tried a 14 day experiment, and I am going to share my results with you.

Usually, my blogging schedule is erratic; often just a handful of posts in a month.  However, as regular readers will have noticed, I have been updating this blog with fresh posts every day, for the past 2 weeks.

Why?

I wanted to measure for myself, just what the value to a blogger is, of updating their blog every day with new posts.  I assumed (rightly as it turned out) that 2 weeks would be a long enough period, for me to get some worthwhile data for you.  The results have been VERY interesting!

In brief, here’s what I have found:

RSS Subscribers

One of the biggest differences (in percentage points) has been the increase in new RSS subscribers to the blog.  New subscriber numbers are up an amazing 400% on the 2 weeks previous!  I was expecting to see some increase, but this was far, far higher than I imagined.

Blog Comments

The number of comments per post varies all the time, literally from post to post, making it very hard to measure over such a short period.  Equally, comments are often added to blog posts weeks, months and even years after a post is written.

Comments in total during the past 14 days are up by around 300%.  This is less impressive than it may sound, as there were many more posts for people to read and thus comment on than usual.  Also, regular readers have been visiting the blog more often and sharing posts with their friends more often, which increases comment numbers.

This leads me on to the biggest difference I have noticed with the comments, over the past 2 weeks.  The biggest (and most interesting development for me), has been the number of new people commenting here.  I have seen a lot of new commenters, many of whom have said that they have only just discovered the blog.

Blog traffic

The number of unique visitors here increased by just under 30% during the 2 weeks.  That’s a significant increase, especially as most of it came over the past 5 days.

Interestingly, the number of page views here increased massively.  This seems to be from new visitors having a look around and established readers visiting more often, in line with the number of new posts.

There’s no doubt whatsoever that daily blogging, even for a relatively short period of time, has significantly increased ‘traffic’ into the blog.

Conclusion

The biggest revelation for me has been how much fun I’ve had! I have REALLY enjoyed putting the posts together.  More than this, the increased activity on the blog from commenters and those discussing posts on Twitter, has been amazing.  The whole ‘atmosphere’ of the blog has been improved in every way.

However, it is very clear from the significant increases across the board, why so many bloggers post fresh content every day.  Daily blogging has improved literally every metric I have measured – not just those mentioned in this brief post.  It’s also improved areas that are far harder to measure, like making the blog a lot more ‘alive’ and vivid.  These things are harder to plot on a chart than RSS subscribers or traffic, but they are massively valuable to anyone who genuinely cares about their blog and it’s community of readers.

My dilemma

I strongly believe that the only time to write a blog post is when the writer has something VALUABLE to say, which is worth sharing.  I don’t believe in having a blogging schedule. As a professional writer, I have found it relatively easy to publish fresh content each day – but what about the quality of that content?

I see zero point in posting dross occasionally, just so that I don’t miss a day!  That material will live on the Internet forever, with my name attached to it. My 4 year old son will see it when he’s older – I don’t want him thinking his daddy writes pedestrian, generic bullshit occasionally, because I’m a slave to some self-imposed, daily blogging schedule.

I occasionally read posts by people considered to be GREAT bloggers, which seem ‘pretty average’ at best.  The thing is, these guys are NOT average writers; they are the top of the blogging pile.  I always wonder if the reason I find those posts average, is just that the subject is not of interest to me, or if it’s because the blogger wrote an average post, just to maintain his or her daily blogging schedule.

The bottom line for me, is that by blogging here each day, the value of this blog has improved in every way.  So, I’ve decided to aim for blogging here on a more regular basis than before, but only when I have something I believe is worth sharing with you.  If that’s daily, then fine. If not, then I assure you, you will be missing nothing worth reading.

What do you think?

Did you find any of that data useful or interesting?  What has your experience been?

Photo credit: UnSung

Your 5 step marketing make-over!

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This post is all about how to improve your marketing and it contains links to stacks of great, free marketing advice!

I wrote this today, because I know that many of my readers work really hard and yet fail to get the sales or profits that their hard work deserves.  In the majority of cases, their products and services are great – But they are being let down by ineffective marketing.  So, in this post I am going to give you a quick marketing exercise, designed to get you on the right track.

Here’s a simple 5 step process, for improving the effectiveness of your marketing:

  1. Make a list of every marketing activity you currently invest time and / or money in.
  2. Write down the results you are getting from each marketing activity. If the results can’t be measured for any activity, stop it immediately!
  3. If any activity is on that list purely because it’s something you are COMFORTABLE with or it’s there just because YOU HAVE ALWAYS done it, that’s not a good enough reason. (This is where I find a lot of people are wasting valuable time and money!)
  4. Next, grab your beverage of choice and read the 3 posts linked to below. They will show you some of the most popular and effective forms of small business marketing.
  5. Finally, select the marketing activities that you feel are most suited to what you want to achieve.  Then, spend some time studying how to do THOSE activities correctly and add them to your marketing mix.

Below are the posts I recommended earlier.  The first is a 2 parter, which contains a number of different marketing activities and explains what they are.  The final link will take you to the most popular page on this blog; a list of my top 10 marketing tips for small businesses.

Designing your marketing mix (part 1)

Designing your marketing mix (part 2)

Top 10 Marketing Tips

This is intended as a launchpad, to get you focusing on more effective ways to market your services.  If you want to know more about any of the activities mentioned, remember to use the search box on the right hand side of this blog.

If you found this information and the links useful, please take a moment to share this post with your friends.

How to have zero competition for YOUR business!

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This post is all about how to market your business, without ever having to worry about the threat of competition.

I decided to write this after receiving an email from a reader, Elizabeth, who asked me a great question.  Elizabeth wanted to know why I promote the websites and blogs of fellow marketing professionals.  She went on to say that this seemed, “an unusual way to treat the competition!”

Apparently, Elizabeth was specifically referring to the fact that I often link to other marketing sites and ReTweet interesting posts and articles from other marketing professionals.

In a way, I can understand what Elizabeth’s saying.  It probably seems counter instinctive to most people, when they see me use my network to promote someone, who could be a direct competitor.

However, I see things in a different way!

Marketing and competition

When it comes to growing my business, I don’t operate from the mindset of having competitors.  I operate from a creative mindset.  I focus on making what I do so uniquely valuable, that there isn’t anyone else offering that set of unique skills to the small business marketplace.  You know what? It works really well too! There are some great marketing people out there, but none that compete with me.  They do their thing and I do mine.  Operating from a creative mindset allows me to work without limitations.  For example, I actually market the services of a number of great marketing and marketing-related businesses. Isn’t that brilliant?

I genuinely believe that if any business tries hard enough, it can make its services uniquely valuable enough to never have to ‘worry’ about the competition again.  The challenge, is that most businesses, large and small, look just too similar to the other providers in their industry. As a direct result, they are constantly worried that prospective customers will see the ‘competition’ and then use them.

If they were uniquely valuable enough, they would never have to worry about that.

Marketing your business

Here’s my suggestion for you – something for you to consider.

Look at what your competitors do and re-design your raft of services, your promises and guarantees, to make your offering massively more uniquely valuable.  Market your unique value and show the marketplace how brilliant you are.  Get this right and will OWN your very own hyper-valuable niche. Become the only show in town, for someone looking for YOUR kind of service.

What do you think?

Don’t treat people like numbers!

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Many businesses seem to forget that people are people and numbers are numbers.  As a result, they lose touch with the ‘people‘ side of their business.

Here’s why this is a REALLY bad idea:
It’s People who work for us, buy from us, recommend us and help us – not numbers!

When a business starts regarding people simply as ‘numbers’ on a spreadsheet, customer base or mailing list – it becomes disconnected from those people.  This is madness!

Each client, customer, potential client, reader, follower and contact you have is unique.  These people have feelings. They have good days and bad days. They have ups and downs. They have days where they want to cry with joy and days where they cry with sorrow.  These unique, immeasurably valuable individuals are many things to many people, but they are NOT numbers.

Always focus on the people behind ‘the numbers’ that you use in your business and whenever possible, try to connect with them.  Sometimes, something as simple as a sincere offer of help, a quick phone call or even a smile, can turn someone’s day around.

Will this help you grow your business? Quite possibly.

Will it transform the way you FEEL about your business and the way others FEEL about you? Definitely!

Successful blog marketing – 3 things to consider!

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Here’s a quick example of the kind of results that can be achieved with a well-marketed blog.  If you are either thinking of starting a blog or you already have one, but wonder if it’s worth marketing it more effectively, you will find this extremely useful.  It’s based on 3 key areas you need to consider – But first, here’s why I decided to write this post for you today.

I had the pleasure of speaking with one of my long term readers for the very first time yesterday.  The guy’s name is Brent Pohlman and Brent’s the Marketing Director at Midwest Laboratories in Omaha, Nebraska.  During our call, Brent mentioned how he attended a morning meeting that day, for local businesspeople in his part of Omaha.

During the meeting, Brent told the group that he was going to be speaking with Jim Connolly later in the morning.  When he said this, one of the businesspeople there asked;
“Isn’t he that bald marketing guy from the UK?”

Ohama, Nebraska is located in the beautiful Mid West of the United States; 6 time zones away from the small village here in the UK, where I live and work.  Even so, through the effective marketing of this blog, people were already aware of what my name was, who I was and what I did.  What makes that name / brand awareness even more amazing, is that the people attending that meeting were marketing people and business owners; the exact people my work is aimed at.  For those of you, who don’t know, I help market small businesses all over the world.

Now, I have no idea how many millions it would have cost me, to generate that kind of targeted, international name awareness via old-school, paid advertising.  However, I do know what it cost in order to achieve this using the blog.

There are 3 investments you need to consider:

Blog marketing – The FINANCIAL investment

I use a premium WordPress theme for this blog (it’s called Headway and I love it so much I am an affiliate.)  This theme allows me to make all changes to the blog myself and have it look exactly how I want it to, with the functionality I need, without requiring a web designer or CSS expert.

Then, there’s the financial investment for hosting this blog.  However, as I already host 2 other sites with my server people, this one actually costs me nothing.  I recommend to everyone that they get the best hosting they can afford – not the ‘cheapest.’ When it comes to hosting a site, avoid the bargain bucket providers.

Blog marketing – The TIME investment

The biggest investment required for successful blog-based marketing is time.  For example, there’s the time it takes to write the kind of compelling copy (articles/posts) that people will value and want to share. Like many successful blogs, this one doesn’t grow its readership  thanks to Google; it relies on people sharing what they find here with their friends and contacts.  That means the information here needs to be good enough to regularly motivate people to want to share it with their friends on social networking sites, bookmarking sites and via their blogs.

Another time investment that I believe is essential for marketing your blog, is to read other people’s blogs.  I read around 10 marketing-related blogs every day and about 50 others semi regularly.  This is a great way to keep abreast of what people in your industry and marketplace are talking about.

There’s also the time it takes to interact with the people who comment on your blog, and those, who share your content.  If someone comments here, I always try and find the time to thank them.  I do this either on the blog or, if they use Twitter, I will often thank them on Twitter – sometimes both.  There are a few posts here with over 200 comments and one with close to 700 comments, which were impossible to keep up with, but I do regularly connect with everyone who comments here.  The people who comment on this blog and those, who share my content, are of FAR more value to me, than the blog itself.  I can start a new blog tomorrow, but those relationships are pure gold dust!

Blog marketing – The expertise investment

The final investment you will need to consider, is the investment in expertise.  You will either need to invest in learning how to produce inspirational, compelling posts and market them, or you will need to buy that expertise in.  This could have been placed in the time investment or financial investment section – but it’s so important (and neglected) that I wanted to give it special attention.

You see, some of the most interesting blogs out there are among the least read!  The thing is, from a marketing perspective, having a ton of great content on your blog is of little real value, if your prospective clients aren’t aware of it.

You must find out how to create content that will motivate people to; call you, buy from you, visit you, email you, subscribe to your mailing list, etc. You need to know how to inspire people to want to share your content.  You need to find out how to build an active community of people around your blog. You need to know how to make people feel great about you and your business / brand. This requires considerable expertise.

In my experience, most business bloggers decide not to invest in at least 1 of those 3 key areas.  If there’s any 1 area listed above that you are neglecting right now, I strongly recommend you give it the investment it deserves.  Your business will thank you!

5 grand a month, every month & quickly please!

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I received an email over the weekend from the owner of a website, which I want to share with you. It’s a great example of how people think the normal rules of marketing do not apply to the Internet.

The emailer wrote to me, asking if I could just do a quick marketing job for her.

All she wanted was for me to make her website generate $5,000 a month, every month, without her having to do much; because she’s too busy to update it. She went on to say; “I don’t think it will take much to reach my goal,” before asking if I could do all this as a quick, one-off project.

The site this lady contacted me about is over 4 years old and is really dated.  Despite her efforts over the years, her site gets very little traffic.  It also has very few inlinks for a site of that age.  Oh, and it’s competing for business in one of the most competitive, professionally marketed marketplaces on the Internet; personal development.

Even if the emailer threw thousands at advertising (and there was no suggestion of a marketing budget), to make it profitable would require a total overhaul and a VERY effective short, medium and long term marketing strategy.  It would require ongoing testing and measuring (like all successful marketing.)  The bottom line here is that generating a $5,000 per month income, competing alongside some of the best marketed organisations on the planet for every one of those dollars, is not a quick project.

Internet marketing benefits

There’s no doubt that the Internet and digital communications offer unprecedented marketing, sales and business development opportunities; however, you still need to apply an effective strategy if you want your Internet marketing to succeed.  For example, this blog attracts an average of just over 50 emails for my marketing business, each day (7 days a week.)  It has generated 6 figures in income for my business in the past year –  BUT, this didn’t just happen. It was the result of an effective marketing strategy.

Google announced back in 2008 that it had already indexed over a TRILLION unique URL’s.  That number will have increased massively since then, and it gives you an idea of how many other pages and sites there are, that YOUR prospective clients or customers could be looking at rather than yours.  They may be wasting time on some of those sites or listening to music or tweeting or spending money.  The thing is, you need a strategy if you want to capture their imagination.  You need a strategy if you want them to ‘discover’ you and see how brilliant you are.

Just ‘being online’ is not enough!

Opportunity knocks, even if you can’t hear it!

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Last week, for only the 5th time in 4 years, I offered readers of my marketing newsletter a very special free marketing opportunity.

I told them that simply by sending me their contact details, that 10 of them would randomly be selected to have a free, 1 hour telephone based consultation with me.  The response was amazing.  After all, the newsletter is read by thousands of people, spanning over 100 countries.

I’m writing this post, after calling the first 3 winners to inform them and set up a date for their call.

Winner number 1 was over the moon. He’s been reading my newsletter for 3 years and can’t wait for the call.  He’s entered every time I have made this offer and said that right now, his business could really do with some free, specialist marketing help.

Winner number 2 is another long term reader, who is also a student of my motivation master class.  She told me how she was really looking forward to our call next week.  She is busy getting a stack of questions ready for me, and I am really looking forward to speaking with her.

Winner number 3 had no idea why I was calling her.  She then remembered that her son had entered her details, because she needed marketing help.  She was downright rude to me and to be honest, the vast majority of people would simply have hung up on her.  What she didn’t know, apparently, was that (literally) thousands of people have entered to be chosen for the opportunity, which I had just gifted to her. When she realised the value to her business of that call, her tone changed completely and she was extremely polite.

You know what though?

In 99.9% of cases, this lady would have already blown it with her rudeness and missed the opportunity of working with me, for free, on the development of her business.

There are opportunities around us, all day long.

However, I wonder how many people repel them because of their attitudes?

The X Factor, sneezing & your business

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One of the many things people find really strange about me, is that I don’t watch reality TV shows.  That’s because, as an experienced marketing professional, I know what’s happening behind the programs and they become predictable.

However, I DO LOVE watching how some people respond to these shows.  That’s why, no matter how busy I am, I try and get a look at Twitter when the UK version of X Factor is on.  It’s a lesson in sneezing!

The X Factor: A lesson in sneezing

Like every commercial TV show, the object of this program is to sell advertising.  The more viewers the show attracts, the more awareness and sales it’s sponsors and advertisers will achieve.  This is why shows are pulled off the air when their viewing figures are too low for too long.

For people living alone or with partners, who were not TV fans, watching TV used to be a solitary activity.  However, now that viewers have tools like Twitter, the experience has been dramatically improved and it’s a massive amount of fun too!  If you take a look at Twitter when the X Factor show is on, you will see intelligent people (business owners, lawyers, accountants, jugglers ect) making the same points, about the same performers.

From a marketing perspective, what happens is that these Twitter users become what Seth Godin refers to as ‘sneezers.’ They spread the X Factor virus via their Twitter account – but more importantly, they spread the X Factor virus to the kind of people who are most likely to be sneezers!

How come?

If Bob follows Mary on Twitter and discovers the X Factor show via Mary, he’s extremely likely to follow the show AND tweet about it too, so he can join in the fun!  That’s why the #X-Factor hashtag becomes a trending topic every time the shows on. It’s marketing brilliance and the producers of the X Factor deserve a huge amount of credit.

A marketing lesson

There’s a lesson here for anyone, who wants to grow the readership of their company blog or website.

First the hard part: You need to do like the X Factor producers have done and produce content for your site that will get people talking about you.  Then, you need to make it super-easy for people to share that content, with LIKE MINDED people. If you do those things, your site will have people sneezing like a meadow full of pollen during hey-fever season!

Is it easy? No.

Is it possible? Yes.

General bullcrap

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Thanks to the professional development industry and the unending production line of social media gurus, we are being bombarded with 100% inaccurate, generalised information.

The higher you go, the nicer the people are

I have lost count of how many ‘success books’ I have read, which assured me that the wealthiest people were generally the nicest – that the higher up the ladder you go, the nicer the people become. This is, ladies and gentlemen, total fantasy!

Yes, I have a close, personal friend, who owns one of the UK’s biggest and best known companies and he is a wonderful, kind man.  However, I know many other people equally as successful as my friend, who are ignorant and treat their staff (and spouses) like crap.  The thing is, people are unique; rich and poor alike.  I grew up in a slum and knew tons of people who had nothing – yet were fantastic people.

Social media gurus really understand the value of relationships

Yes, I am sure that some do. But you know what what I see every day? I see social media gurus using their ‘followers’ as free advertising for their latest product / client / speaking engagement.  I am a marketing man – that’s what I do.  Marketing professionals use social media tools as a part of the marketing mix for their clients and themselves. But then so do the gurus.  The key difference? Marketers don’t pretend otherwise.

Your turn

What generalised information have you found to be way too general to be of any real use? Share it here!