Jim Connolly Marketing

Marketing tips and ideas to help you grow your business

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!

Quick marketing tip

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Here’s a quick marketing tip, which has helped thousands of people to massively improve their sales results.

One of the most common marketing problems businesses have, is reaching the right people at the right time. You need to get YOUR message in front of people, at the exact point where they are extremely interested in buying your kind of product or service.  So, how does it work?

Marketing, word of mouth and a recommendation too!

This quick marketing tip is all about identifying the people, which your prospective clients contact before they are about to purchase your kind of product or service – and getting these people to recommend you.  This means you not only get a supply of sales leads from extremely hot prospective clients, you also get to benefit from the power of a referral too!

Example:  Although this process works for business to business providers and in many different industries, for this example, let us assume that your business supplies and fits wall and floor tiles.  You would start off by asking yourself; “what do people do just BEFORE they get their bathroom or kitchen re-tiled?”  Well, in some cases, the person will have just experienced a flood etc and called in a plumber.  Equally, they may have got a plumber in to fit a new bathroom suite and now require the floor and walls re-tiled.

So, you would contact the plumbers, who work in the areas and the kind of homes you want to work with, and offer them a standard referral fee for every piece of work their referrals generate for you.  Obviously, you would show them some examples of how brilliant the quality of your work is, so they knew they were recommending a high quality service.

What kind of businesses can use this marketing tip?

I have seen this simple idea work wonders for; web designers, accountants, hotels, marketing consultants, recruitment companies, trainers, insurance providers, lawyers, hosting companies, maintenance providers, PR firms and stacks more.

By being selective about who you get to recommend you, you will also be able to attract work from the ideal profile of client or customer for your business too!  This is a great way to attract excellent quality, highly targeted leads – Without wasting a penny on ineffective advertising. You only pay when a lead becomes a piece of business, making it one of the most profitable forms of marketing out there.

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!

Is your marketing exposed?

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One of the secrets behind the most successfully marketed small and medium sized businesses, is that they utilise more forms of marketing than their less successful counterparts!  In my experience, ‘the average’ business will use just two or three different kinds of marketing – yet the most successful businesses will be benefiting from eight or more.

Compound marketing leverage

By developing a marketing strategy, which leverages many complimentary forms of marketing, you start to build a ‘compound marketing’ effect.  This is where the results you get for your combined efforts, are far, far greater than they would be; if you had done each activity in isolation.

Also, by relying on a number of different forms of marketing, your business’ future is far more secure.  I interviewed a businesswoman once, who relied on an advertisement in an industry magazine for almost all her new business. A competitor then started advertising in the same publication.  Overnight, her sales and enquiries dropped by more than half and she eventually went broke!

If you currently rely on just a small number of marketing activities, no matter how effective they currently are, make sure you are not too reliant on any one of them and always look for new ways to get great results.

Over to you

What forms of marketing have been the most (or least) effective for YOU? Share your experiences with a comment below!

A residual income & stacks of kudos

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When I wrote and published my Motivation Master Class audio series, I did so because I knew the product would be a success.  It has generated a very nice residual income for me over the past 3 years and helped thousands of people, spanning 4 continents, to achieve some great results.

Once the audio series was written and produced, I was able to refer to myself in my marketing as Jim Connolly; author and marketing coach.  You might (or might not) be amazed to know what an immediate, powerful impact that had on my marketing results. Response rates improved across the board.  I also found that I was able to easily get guest spots on the radio and to have my articles published.  The Business Editor’s of newspapers were keen to give me write ups in their business pages – and all because I decided to put some of my knowledge onto CD’s.

Two good reasons to get that book of yours on paper

These days, many people with a specialisation decide to write an ebook.  These are usually given away for free, though some are sold.  Whilst this is great, it’s becoming increasingly common.  In other words, telling people you are the author of an ebook has a lot less impact, than being the author of a hardback or paperback book. That’s because anyone with a computer and some free software can publish an ebook.

However, only a tiny percentage of people (and a microscopic number of your competitors), will have been published as the author of a traditional, softback or hardback book.  The good news is that now, you can self-publish a book for very little and benefit, the same as me, from; a new income stream and a stack of kudos!

How?

There are a number of websites, which will allow you to produce high quality hardback or paperback books in extremely small numbers (or huge ones).  Try a google search for “self publishing”.  Lulu.com is probably the best known of these self-publishing websites.  So, if you just want to produce 10 or 50 paper-based copies (just to get you started or test the market)  – Now you can!

A new income stream or career?

There could be a huge public demand for your book – and a great way to find out is to get it ‘out there!’  I sold copies of my audio program all over the world and made a lot of money with very little effort.  I know a large number of my readers are specialists in their area of business, just like I am with marketing.  However, I also know that many of my readers are not professional marketers – but you don’t have to be.  Many of these self-publishing sites will even help you market your book, if you want them to.  They will also deal with things like distribution.

I’m not suggesting this is ideal for everyone.  I would only suggest doing this if you genuinely believe your book will be of interest to people – the idea is to produce something of value, with potential to become a profitable income stream for your business. The kudos of the author title, whilst powerful, should be secondary.