Jim Connolly Marketing

Useful marketing tip

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One of the most powerful ways to develop your business, is to focus on being useful.

Here are just a few examples of what I mean:

  • Useful service providers retain their clients or customers for longer.
  • Useful blog posts and newsletters get read and shared the most often.
  • Useful videos attract more viewers.
  • Useful people attract more contacts and build larger, stronger commercial networks.
  • Useful websites get linked to the most.

‘Useful’ beats ‘demanding’ every time!

Typically, we see people trying to build their business by asking for help, rather than being useful. They ask us to; share their links, ‘like’ their Facebook page, follow them on Twitter and recommend them to our friends, etc.

All of these things are far more likely to happen, if we are consistently useful rather than continuously demanding.

A useful tip

Take a look at any area of your marketing, which is under performing. Now, look for ways to make your marketing messages and interactions around that area, as useful and helpful to others as you can. For example, if you want a larger, more targeted following on a social network, focus on being as useful to people in your niche with your social networking as possible. Offer ideas. Suggest useful resources. Connect people. No, you’re unlikely to see thousands of people immediately flock to you, but over time you can expect to make meaningful progress.

In short: If we want to be regarded as a valuable asset for our clients and customers, we need to consistently look for opportunities to be useful to them.

Twitter buys Posterous!

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Hot on the news that Posterous has been acquired by Twitter, I have a question for you:

If you were renting a house from someone, would you pay to have a luxury swimming pool built?

The obvious answer is NO. It would be crazy. You’d be paying tens of thousands for something, which you may only get a few months use of. The home owner could kick you out right after the pool has been built and paid for. You’d also be paying to increase the value of the home owners property, not your own.

There’s nothing for you, in a deal like that.

Posterous acquired by Twitter

It was announced today that Posterous has been bought by Twitter, in what analysts see as a talent grab. In other words, the Posterous team are joining the Twitter team, in order to work on Twitter’s development. Twitter is interested in the people, not the Posterous product.

Twitter, Posterous and that swimming pool

Many people, including a lot of small business owners, decided to use Posterous as their blogging platform.

  • They invested time creating content on their Posterous blog.
  • They added the Posterous address to their marketing literature.
  • They encouraged people, including prospective clients, to connect with them on Posterous.
  • They spent money on premium Posterous products.

They will wake up today, to learn that they are likely to need to move to a new platform soon. They now have valid concerns that Posterous may be either canned, or as happened when Facebook bought Friendfeed, left to fade away as the team focus on their new project.

Posterous Users are rightly concerned

This comment from the Posterous post, which announced Twitter’s acquisition is in line with many similar comments and observations:

Your FAQ is littered with “We’ll give you ample notice before any changes or disruptions to the service and we’ll provide specific instructions for exporting your content” But you don’t provide any clear dialogue on the future of the service. Your FAQ makes it sound like you are shutting things down, but very indirectly. Can we get a more clear answer?

The person leaving that comment clearly has concerns that all the value he has created there will be lost. He knows it’s now out of his hands. He wants answers. Maybe he needs answers. However, he built his swimming pool in a house he was renting and as a result, he has no control other than to export his data today and do what I believe EVERY small business owner should do: Build a blog on PROPERTY YOU OWN.

Twitter’s acquisition of Posterous: The lesson?

The lesson here, is that for a commercial blog, you need to have control. Every free platform comes with a cost, an enormous cost for small business owners. The cost of a free blog is lack of control. For example, WordPress.com have suspended and in many cases erased business blogs, which they believed violated their terms of use.

If you are serious about developing a successful, sustainable business blog, which YOU are in control of, you need to pay for a professional solution. I use a self-hosted WordPress blog and I am glad I own it. It generates a 6 figure income for me every year and I’d be very concerned, if I awoke today and found its future in doubt, because of some merger or acquisition.

The cost of owning your own blog is low enough for any small business to cover. You can get yourself a URL (web address) for peanuts, a copy of WordPress for free and some inexpensive hosting for as low as $6 a month. This puts you in control of what could be your most valuable marketing asset. I

It will also ensure you never find yourself in the position of that guy I quoted earlier, and many others, who will wake up this morning wondering what’s going on and expecting the worst.

Social Media: Are you spreading yourself too thinly?

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People often ask me, why I am only active on 2 social networks – Google+ and Twitter.

The answer is that with only so much time available every day to connect with people on social networking sites, I had a decision to make. I could either have 2 highly valuable social networking assets or join another 6 or 8 and have a diluted presence.

I think of it like this:

  • If you have just enough coffee to make 2 really good cups, then spread it out across 10 cups, you end up with 10 bad tasting, weak cups of coffee.
  • If you have enough time to be relevant on 2 social networks, yet you spread that time over 10 different social networks, you end up with 10, weaker, social networking profiles. You end up automating. You end up cross posting the same stuff everywhere. You end up vaguely relevant on 10 networks, rather than directly relevant on 1 or 2 networks.

For example, I currently have almost 12,000 people connected with me on Google+, which puts me in the top 1% of users, based on my number of contacts (circles). It’s a network, where I have developed some high quality connections with lots of great people and learned a lot too. Now, if I was also having to spread my time across Facebook, Linkedin, StumbleUpon, Digg, Pinterest, Tumblr, Reddit and Mixx etc, I would have a series of diluted presences. I’d be weak in many areas, rather than relevant in 1 or 2.

Getting the most from your Social Networking time

Yes, if you have a lot of spare time each day, you can be relevant on more networks than me. However, if you run a successful, growing business and time is in short supply, as it is for most people reading this, I believe you will get a far better return from focusing on relevance rather than volume.

Avoid these 4 common blogging errors and watch your results quickly improve

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When business bloggers come to me for advice on how to make their blog more valuable, there are 4 tips I seem to give more than any others. Here they are, for those of you who want their blog to deliver better results. I hope you find them useful.

Get readable

No matter how valuable your content is, it will fail to achieve anything like it’s full potential, if it’s too hard for people to read. The 2 most common readability issues I see, are font size and column width.

Many sites use very small font sizes, which are just too small to be easily read. This is a fast way to lose readers, needlessly. There’s nothing to gain from using tiny fonts, which are almost impossible to read on anything smaller than a 22 inch monitor. The reason every popular website uses a readable font size, is they know the importance of having the main content comfortable to read on smaller screens.

For reference, this blog uses a Arial as my font, set at 16px.

Similarly, studies have shown that people find it a lot easier to read narrower columns of content, than wide columns. Many popular child themes fail to take this into account, which is why there are so many W–I–D–E column layouts out there.

In my own testing, I discovered that once I go beyond 95 characters across (including spaces) in a blog post, fewer people read through the whole page. Many people say you should stick below 75 characters, but using a large clear font, as I do, you should be perfectly fine up to around the 95 character mark.

If your current child theme doesn’t make it easy for you to reduce the content column width, either learn how to code it, pay someone to code it or use the theme I use here, which gives you 100% control over fonts and columns with the click of a mouse. It’s called Headway and that is NOT an affiliate link – It’s just an amazing piece of software that gives you the control you need, over your blog.

Have a call to action at the bottom of your content

If someone has just read all the way down to the bottom of a page or post, it’s because they were interested in the content. It engaged them. It earned their attention and their time. You now have an interested person, whose eyes are right at the bottom of your post.

THAT is the point where you should ask them to take action!

I use that approach here and it works extremely well, generating leads and inquiries all day, every day. Just remember to keep the call to action short and link directly to the conversion page. This may be a page that sells your products or services. It could be a newsletter sign-up page or maybe a link to subscribe to your blog via RSS. You decide what you want your readers to do, then put that call to action right where interested eyes will see it.

Don’t write anything just to publish something

This one goes against the traditional idea that you MUST publish something every day, even on days where you have nothing worth sharing. Despite what many people think, I don’t publish posts here every day. I usually publish 4 or 5 times a week on this blog, only very occasionally 7 times a week.

I use no blogging schedule other than this: If I have something useful to share here, I publish it. Useful is the key word.

I do recommend you publish at least once a week on a business blog(twice is better), if you want your blog to remain on your reader’s radar. However, there are no prizes for publishing anything, just so you can publish something. If you have something useful to say, share it. If you can’t find anything useful to say at least once a week, spend more time listening to the needs and opportunities of your marketplace and write about that. Keep informed of the latest news and trends affecting your marketplace, and write about that.

NOTE: This article has some great tips on how to write useful content.

Make your work easy to share

The content on Jim’s Marketing Blog is easy for people to share. There is a small Twitter and Google+ button at the top and bottom of each post. These are easily the most powerful drivers of share traffic here, so they get prominence. At the bottom of each post, I use the oddly named Twitter, Facebook social share plugin – which actually gives access to Pinterest, LinkedIn and Google+ too. I also recommend sharethis, which gives easy access to over 30 different sharing platforms and allows you to make your preferred ones more prominent (see below).

I have tested a ‘floating share button’, which attaches itself to the side of the screen and follows the page, so your share icons are always in the reader’s view. This was very effective, for those who could see it. The challenge was that many people told me that they couldn’t see it. It wasn’t visible on many tablet devices or any phone I tested it on. It was also invisible on some smaller resolution netbooks. There may be a way around this visibility issue, which you might like to share with a comment.

If you do use this type of sharing system on your site, I suggest also adding a traditional sharethis or addthis set of icons to the foot of your posts, though this can look a little like overkill.

You can’t be outstanding, without standing out!

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Get noticed

What areas of your business really stand out, when compared to your competitors?

Your prospective clients are just like you, in that they are being bombarded with information all day every day. For your product or service to stand out against all that noise, it needs to be outstanding. This takes time and effort, but unless you want to place a very low ceiling on your potential, you have to come forward and command people’s attention.

Does ‘standing out’ really matter?

When I speak with business owners, here’s what I find almost every time:

  • Small business owners want to attract word of mouth referrals, yet most fail to do anything that makes them truly stand out, so there’s nothing compelling for people to say about them.
  • Service providers want to work with the best clients for the highest fees, yet most fail to offer the kind of exceptional or unique service that stands out and attracts the best clients and fees.
  • Business bloggers and newsletter providers want a large, high quality readership, yet most fail to invest the time or expertise required to stand out against the millions of other sites, fighting for the valuable attention of those same readers.

It takes creativity to be outstanding

It takes creativity to stand out, but that’s OK. I have built a site full of free information on how to develop your creativity. I also have a page, which lists every creative thinking article, on one easy to bookmark page, you can visit it here.

One of the most valuable things any business owner can do, is separate themselves from their competitors by creating an element of their business, which stands out against the competition.

  • When you give your clients and marketplace a reason to talk about you, they will.
  • When you offer high quality prospective clients a compelling reason to work with you, they will.
  • When you offer your blog readers a motivating reason to subscribe to your blog (or newsletter) and share it, they will.

However, it all starts with the decision to stand out.

Blogging: It’s all about doing the work

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When it comes to commercial blogging, sometimes you just need to do the work.

Once your blog has been correctly configured, write the best content you can, as often as you can and make it as easy for people to share as you can. Put your work where the right people will see it, social networking sites are great for this.

Then, keep on doing the work.

The software alone is not enough

I often see people who seem to spend more time changing the design of their blog and the plugins they use, than they spend blogging and improving their writing.

The thing is, it’s the quality of our content and the regularity with which we show up with great content, which makes the difference. This is why you can have blogs like ZenHabits or Seth Godin’s blog, which are extremely plain looking and get hundreds of thousands of visitors a month, and blogs that use the latest glossy WordPress theme, which very few people read. Leo and Seth write great content, regularly.

For those who want a bigger, targeted readership for their blogs, there are 2 areas I recommend you focus on.

1. Show up regularly

If people respond well when you write, (i.e they share your posts, link to them and talk about them), but you don’t write very often, increase the frequency of your blogging. Here’s how to write great content every day. The big secret to being able to produce useful content on a regular basis, is to do it. The more you write, the easier it becomes.

2. Show us what you know and what you think

If you write regularly, but people tend not to respond when you write, I suggest you take a look at what you write. People love to read and share blog posts, which offer them some kind of value, either because it makes them think, makes them act or makes them laugh out loud. The best thing you can do is be yourself, rather than try and copy what others are doing. One of the reasons you have not seen me writing about Pinterest or SOPA, is that thousands, maybe millions are already doing that. I can’t add value there. It would be a me too post.

Turn up regularly and do the work. Show us what you know and what you think. Give us a reason to keep coming back for more, to share your work with our friends, and that’s exactly what we will do.