Jim's Marketing Blog

Marketing tips and ideas to help you grow your business

Why bloggers post every day – Part 2

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Do you write a blog?

Are you thinking about blogging or taking your blog more seriously?

In either case, I believe you will find this post really useful.

As regular readers will recall, I wrote a post last month about the results I have seen, since I increased the frequency of my blogging from around 1 post a week to 6 or more posts a week.  This is part 2 of that post; Why bloggers post every day.  I suggest you read part 1 before you continue, as it contains some very interesting findings, which could really help you!

However, since writing that post I’ve noticed another interesting development, which I want to share with you.

More visible, more mentioned

It’s now a month since I started blogging almost daily and in addition to the results I covered in part 1 of this post, I am now starting to see a significant increase in the number of times that this blog get mentioned.  These mentions range from people citing this blog (or me) in their blog posts and articles, through to an increase in the number of times I see the blog and myself mentioned across Twitter, Facebook, forums and newsletters etc.

Why is this happening and what can we learn from it?

As I said in part 1 of this post, there was a significant growth in reader numbers here, as the frequency of my posts increased.  A larger reader-base obviously gets your blog and your name on more peoples radar.  The more people aware of you and what you do, the greater the chances are that you will get mentioned.

Of course, this then alerts new people to your blog and your work, increasing the size of your readership and thus the process feeds itself.

Here’s something special

By getting good quality information in front of people regularly, I believe you also become a more integrated part of your readers daily experience.  Many readers will position you very differently too.

You, (the blogger) become a regular part of their working day.  Your blog becomes a growing repository of answers and ideas, a knowledge-base that your readers can rely on. If you can understand what’s happening there, it’s so powerful that it’s almost magical.

Share your experiences

Do you tend to subscribe to blogs that are updated more regularly or less regularly?

How often do you think a business to business blog should be updated?

If you are a blogger yourself and you have either increased or decreased the frequency with which you post, what kind of feedback have you seen?

Please join in the conversation and share your feedback!

All you need is a laptop and a phone line

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I was speaking with the engineer who came to fix our heating system yesterday.

As I made him some coffee, he asked me what I did for a living, so I explained a little about what I do.  Afterwards, he said;
“So, you run an marketing business, with clients all over the world, and all you need is a laptop and a phone line? Wow!”

I then replied;
“So, you fix complex electronic control panels for advanced heating systems and all you need is a bag of tools? Wow!”

It takes more than tools

Thanks to the Internet, there are more free or inexpensive marketing tools than ever before.  Anyone can set up an account with; Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, WordPress or Blogspot etc.  However, very few small business owners or entrepreneurs achieve significant, tangible results from their investment in these tools.

Here’s why: They only take step 1, of what is a 2 step process.  Once you have mastered the mechanics of the tools, (how they work), there’s a second step required.

You need to study how to use the tools you have selected, in order to generate bankable results.  Very, very few people have a strategy for transferring; followers, fans, retweets, connections, readers etc, into paying clients or customers.  I include social media gurus here, most of whom seem to rely almost exclusively on speaking at conferences for their income – Few of whom, surely, want to spend so much time away from their home each year.

Sadly, there’s no generic piece of marketing advice I can give you, that will provide you with the correct marketing strategy for your business.  That’s because  your strategy needs to take many factors into account, which are specific to you and your business, in order for it to work.

For example, when a new client joins my marketing service, our entire first marketing session is a fact-finder, where I ask them dozens of questions about their business and what they want to achieve.  It takes hours!  However, armed with that fact-finder information, I can develop a powerful marketing strategy for them, based on taking them from where they are today, to where they want to be in 3/6/9 and 12-months.  Then, I work with them every week for a year to make that happen.  Between us, their competitors don’t stand a chance!

Here’s the bottom line: If the purpose of your marketing activity is to generate bankable results, (rather than followers, retweets and fans, etc), and this is not happening, you must change your strategy.  Don’t become one of the masses, who mistakes movement for progress.  Hard work alone is not enough.

How to discover what your prospective customers want

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If you want your marketing to succeed, it’s essential that you understand exactly what your customers and prospective customers want.  This feedback allows you to develop your services and market them; with an accurate understanding of what your marketplace actually needs, rather than what you think or hope it needs.

Listening to the marketplace

Sadly, the majority of small businesses get their feedback almost exclusively from existing customers.  And even then, only when there’s a problem or when a customer is delighted with the service they have received.  These extreme ends of the scale are useful, but limited.  They tell you what you are doing well and less well – but they don’t really help you discover what your prospective customers want or need!

Remember: When you develop a product or service that’s the answer to a common problem, which is not being solved effectively by anyone else, then market it well – You can achieve hockey stick sales figures VERY quickly!

I regularly ask my clients for feedback on everything I do.  However, I also ask for feedback from my blog readers, many of whom are prospective clients.  I regularly encourage them to comment on my posts and I often ask for their opinions.  I did this most recently on Saturday, in a dedicated post. I need to know what my readers think I am doing well and what they believe I am doing less well. I need to know what topics my readers are most interested in, etc.  This gives me a clearer picture about what my prospective clients are interested in.  So far, via email, blog comments and Twitter, I have had over 100 people get in touch.

Marketplace feedback

If you genuinely want to be as relevant and valuable to your marketplace as possible, start talking to them and request feedback regularly. Here are some of the things I suggest you look for:

  • Look for problems that you can fix.
  • Look for gaps in the market that you can service.
  • Look for areas where there are misunderstandings regarding your industry, as these are opportunities to educate and inform.
  • Look for areas where your competitors are strong, so you can make your services stronger / more valuable.
  • Look for ways to differentiate your services from what’s already ‘out there.’
  • Look for feedback regarding how well known your ‘brand’ is among your prospective clients or customers.

Those are just some really useful pieces of information, that can help you massively improve the success of your marketing.  However, in order to get that data, you need to ask.

What do you think?

So, what additional feedback would you add to that list?  Please take a moment to share your thoughts with your fellow readers and myself.

Your feedback please

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In order to make this blog as valuable a resource as possible for you, I need to know what YOU want to see here.

Sure, I have analytic tools that let me see the posts that get read and shared the most, but that’s only part of a much bigger picture.

So, with that in mind, I would really appreciate it if you would let me know what you would like to see me do more of on the blog (or less of.)  Am I missing subjects that you would like to see me cover? Let me know.

Please feel free to give as much or as little feedback as you wish on anything related to the blog. If you would rather contact me via email, feel free to drop me an note over at jim (at) jimsmarketingblog.com.

Please help me make this a better marketing asset for you and the rest of the blogs community in 2010.  Your opinions really matter to me.

Thank you!

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!

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?

Highly recommended – Danny Brown’s blog

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DannyLarge-239x300In an age where there are so many blogs, often repeating the same information, it can be a real challenge to find blogs with content that’s worth shouting about. So, when I find one that consistently delivers the goods, I like to recommend it to you.

In the past, I have recommended blogs by; Seth Godin, Robert Scoble, The BBC and Leo Laporte.  Today, it’s the turn of PR professional, Social Media maverick and fund raiser extraordinaire; Danny Brown – From dannybrown.me.

First off, you do not need to be interested in PR to really enjoy Danny’s blog.  His writing style is engaging, refreshing and original.  Danny opts for a bullshit-free approach to blogging, with the occasional use of strong(ish) language; as is often the case when passionate people speak.

Did you notice that I used the word ‘speak‘ in the previous sentence and not ‘write‘?  That’s because Danny’s writing style reads as if he were having a chat with you face to face.  I’ve never spoken with Danny myself, but I feel like I know him.  That’s a skill that very few bloggers possess.  In fact, one of the main reasons I am recommending Danny Brown’s blog to you, is that many of my readers are students of great copy writing and Danny’s copy writing is superb.

The 12for12k challenge

12412k imageDanny is also a passionate fund raiser for good causes all over the world, which he assists via the 12for12k challenge.  The challenge is a BIG one; to raise $12,000, for each of 12 different charities, over a 12 month period.

You can find out more about the 12for12k challenge by visiting their site.

So, why not take a look at Danny’s blog and see what all the fuss is about?

How to avoid bad marketing advice online

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I received yet another email this morning, from someone who’s lost a lot of money, after taking bad advice from a marketing blog.  This seems to be a growing problem, as more and more small businesses look for free advice online, in a bid to help grow their business.

So, to help you (or your clients / friends) avoid making the same kind of costly mistakes, here are a few tips to help you spot the fakes. 

Please share this post on your favourite social networks, as it’s really important that as many people as possible know about this.

Marketing blogs: What to watch for

If someone claims to be an expert at marketing and he or she can’t even market their own blog – stay well away. Because it’s so easy to fool traffic sites like Alexa.com into showing you get thousands of visitors a day, you need to look for more obvious signs that a marketing blog is valued by a large reader community.

A great place to start is by looking at the number of comments it gets.  Marketing people, even very average ones, know how to build a blog that attracts comments on every post.  If you spot a marketing related blog with no comments or very few, it shows the person behind the blog does not know how to market the blog correctly.

It’s also worth checking to see if their blog is listed or ranked by a respected, neutral, third party.  This blog, for example, is ranked on what many consider to be the most influential in our industry, the Adage Power 150 – that’s their badge you see on the lower right hand side of the blog.

Testimonials are easy to fake: What to watch for

Look for proof that the marketing expert actually works with REAL people and companies!  Testimonials are easy to fake. So, look to see if the marketing expert is talking about the companies or people they work with or the projects they are working on.

For example, if people want to check me out, they can see me write about clients I am currently working with AND they can see me openly tweeting with clients and former clients too.

Does the marketing expert exist in the real world?

Fake marketing ‘experts’ exist only online and in their imagination.  The genuine marketing professionals you encounter online, are like any other REAL business. They will happily provide you with their FULL contact details; that’s their physical address and a land line phone number.  We WANT people to call us and write to us.  Always be extra cautious if a marketing ‘business’ only operates behind a website, a ‘box number’ and a Skype or mobile / cell phone number.

This is where YOU come in!

Those are just a few, very basic steps you can take to avoid bad marketing advice.  I would really value YOUR suggestions.  What are your tips for spotting the fakes in your industry?

Please share them here and make this post as valuable as possible for your fellow readers.

UPDATE:
This post from my ideas blog, covers another tool you can use, to identify how many people link to a particular website / blog.

Blogging from the bathroom!

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$10,000 for 5 weeks work – blogging from a bathroom!

I was just reading a great post by Jack Neff on the AdAge.com blog, about a blogging gig being offered by Procter and Gamble; the owners of the Charmin toilet paper brand.  It seems they are offering five bloggers the chance to earn $10,000 for five weeks work.

Apparently, the bloggers will be expected to “greet and entertain bathroom guests and blog about their experiences” at Charmin’s restrooms on Times Square, New York.

The marketing power of blogs

Amid what seems like a pretty light-hearted story, rests a really valuable marketing lesson.  You see, although Procter and Gamble will be paying these 5 people a total of $50,000 for their blogging – the story has already generated way more than $50,000 worth of publicity for the Charmin brand.  This $50,000 sounds like a lot of money, but is peanuts in relation to what multinationals spend on their marketing.

Because the bloggers will be writing about the event for over a month, the story will ‘develop legs’ and have a bigger impact over a longer period than more typical, more expensive but less creative marketing ideas.  This really is an excellent example of creative marketing and Procter and Gamble’s marketing team deserve a massive amount of credit.

Their decision to choose blogging as part of this promotion, serves as yet another indicator of how big brands are realising the marketing power of blogging.  I think this $50,000 investment will be money well spent!

What do you think?

Twitter junkies and social media addicts

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word picturesI’m sure you have heard it said many times before; “people think in pictures.”

In written marketing, the words we use have a massive impact on the kind of mental pictures we paint in the minds of our prospective clients or customers.

These pictures help shape how people feel about us and those feelings have a major role in whether they decide to; trust us, buy form us, recommend us etc.

With many, many businesses now embracing social media and putting an increasing amount of information into the public domain, here’s a question to ponder:

“Have you ever stopped to think about the kind of pictures you create in the mind of your prospective clients or customers, when they ‘check you out’ online?”

Social media junkies and Twitter addicts

I’m a passionate user of social media.  I’m also excited about the opportunities available via social networking sites.

What I am not is “a social media junkie” or “totally addicted to Twitter / FaceBook etc.”

I notice lots of social media users, using terms like those above, in their online profiles.  I’m certainly not suggesting that using these phrases will somehow confuse people into thinking that the profile belongs to a junkie or an addict. I am, however, saying that there’s little to be gained by someone suggesting (even tongue-in-cheek) that their use of social media is out of their control.  From a marketing perspective, it’s far better to leverage your profile, so that it’s working 100% for you!

Remember – It’s not just people who use the services who can see your profile.

Your Twitter profile on Google

If you are a Twitter user, when someone does a Google search for your name or company name, your twitter profile is usually on page one. Here’s an example, using a Google search for my name.  Notice that it gives my full profile on Google, without anyone having to even visit Twitter to check me out.

jimconnolly google

Of course, this means if you maximise the positive impact of your Twitter profile, there’s a superb opportunity to have it working for you far beyond the reach of Twitter.

When someone checks you out, make sure that your various online profiles show how totally brilliant you are and what a fantastic investment you are.

Marketing that makes you cringe

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This week, I have already received several, ineffective “old school” marketing messages, based around the same tired, generic format.  I wonder if you get these sales pitches too?

The person introduces themselves to you and then asks, “how can I help you?” The subtext here, is that the person wants you to believe that they are offering this help out of the goodness of their heart and not as part of a commercial transaction.  Money, prices or fees are never mentioned – Just the mysterious offer of help, from a stranger who knows nothing about you or your business or your needs.

They want you to think of them the way you would, if your car had broke down miles away from anywhere and they kindly stopped to offer you a lift.

Of course, in this case, they were not just driving by – you were deliberately targeted for marketing purposes. They know and you know that in reality, they are actually looking to make you a customer.

Like most people, I cringe when someone tries to market to me under this kind of false pretence.  I also wonder what they believe they will achieve, by starting off a commercial dialogue, with both parties aware that there’s an unspoken, yet blindingly obvious ulterior motive in play.

If you want to help someone, that’s great. If you want to market to someone, that’s great too. But please, don’t pretend to be doing one thing when in reality, you are doing the other. The marketplace is not stupid.

Marketing advice

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I was looking at our search analytics yesterday and saw that a number of people found this blog, searching for the phrase marketing advice, using google.

I entered the phrase into Google and saw that I was on page 1 of google.com.  As I write this, I’m still on page 1, though this will change – possibly by the time you read this. See below:

marketing advice

Is Google getting smarter?

Although I use meta tags for each post and title tags for some posts, the copy writing here is not deliberately optimised.  In other words, I write exclusively for humans and not to keep search engines happy.  Even so, google has been able to identify that there’s lots of marketing advice on this blog.

This confirms what many experts have told me; that the easiest way to optimise a site, is to stick to your topic and make it as valuable as you possibly can.  After all, the content on your site is what encourages people to link to you. These links allow new people to discover your site – But they are also used by google as a way to ascertain the value of your content.

Any good search engine optimisation (SEO) expert will be able to help you get more targeted traffic to your site. In my opinion, every business these days should have a budget for professional SEO. However, it’s comforting to know that by focusing on good quality content, you can still achieve page 1 rankings for valuable search terms.

Inspired marketing

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If someone has a piece of your written marketing in front of them right now, will they feel inspired to take action?  Will your marketing message compel them to call you, email you or visit you?

Written marketing

I am in the process of writing an article for my next marketing newsletter.  It’s all about how to make your written marketing more powerful.  Copy writing is one of the most overlooked areas of marketing within small and medium sized businesses.  They will often invest thousands in a great website, an advertisement, a mailshot or a brochure – only to blow it all by writing their own, uninspiring copy.

A professionally written marketing letter, advertisement or website can out perform one written by a keen amateur by thousands of percent.  I’m not talking marginal differences here.  For example, this blog generates more enquiries in one day, than many sites with more traffic will get in a whole month.

Fortunately, it’s really easy to measure how effective your existing written marketing is; simply by measuring your results.

Unfortunately, a lack of results is not usually enough to motivate a business owner to have their copy written professionally.

I spoke to a web designer recently, who designed a £17,000 website for a client.  Unbelievably, the client was happy to spend all that money on a new website, but refused to pay for a professional copy writer!  Three  months later, his client has had four email enquiries via the site and not a single phone call.  This, despite the fact they have very effective search engine optimisation (SEO) and get a lot of targeted visits each day.  When my friend asked the site’s owner why she didn’t have her new site copy written by a professional, she told him; “the cost would probably be too high.”

Clearly, she can afford the cost of losing tens of thousands of pounds worth of new business though!

When I speak with business owners, who are getting poor results from their marketing, they always blame outside factors.  They will blame the economy (even when times are great), the marketplace, the time of year etc. 

It never crosses their mind that the reason they are going nowhere, is because their marketing is ineffective!

By the way, these are the same people, whose mailshot letters you throw in the paper bin and whose advertisements and websites you ignore.  They honestly believe that YOU are the reason they are failing; not thinking for one moment that their pedestrian copy writing and amateur marketing might be to blame.

Inspirational marketing

We have to remember that our prospective clients are not idiots.  Today’s consumer is better informed than ever before.  They see ‘average’ marketing all day long; it just washes over them.

To motivate someone to become a client or customer, we need to capture their attention and then inspire them.

Don’t copy your social media guru

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I’m a marketing man, not a social media expert. However, because some social media tools are excellent for helping small businesses market their services, I’ve spent years studying the marketing potential of social media.

Here’s an important observation I would like to share with you.

Don’t copy your social media guru

It’s all about why you should not necessarily use the same social media strategy, as your social media guru.  Whilst their advice might be superb, simply copying what you see them do, is not always the right thing to do.

Let me explain.

In my experience, most social media professionals make their living selling a mixture of; books, downloadable products and ads or sponsorships on their blogs. Some of the better known social media figures also offer seminars / workshops internationally too.  Unlike most of their readers, they are not geographically limited in what they provide. Someone buying their latest book or eBook in the same street is no different from someone making that same purchase, on a different continent 10 time zones away.

If you run a business, which provides services (or sells to) a particular geographical area, you are going to need a far more geographically targeted approach to your use of social media.  You will need to focus your efforts in a way that attracts and develops opportunities in the area that’s of commercial interest to you.

For example, if you are an accountant or lawyer, it’s unlikely that you will be seeking business leads or referrals on an international basis.  Apart from anything else, your qualifications will restrict what you can offer internationally.  If you work in insurance, your products may have geographical limitations too.  Same again if you operate a franchise business, with a set territory.

Tools like LinkedIn, Twitter, FaceBook and FriendFeed are known for making it possible to easily develop an international network of contacts.  However, they also make it possible to search for (and connect with) your target audience too – people where you do business.

Your social media feedback

I know that a lot of my readers are big users of social media, some with great success!  If you have developed a social media strategy, which has a geographical element, or you have any tips for a more regional approach to social media; please share it with your fellow readers and myself.

I look forward to hearing from you.

2 things I didn’t know yesterday!

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Here are 2 things I didn’t know yesterday, which I wanted to share with you.  If you have anything you want to add, please do so – it’s always great to get feedback.

Twitter unfollowing trend is set to continue

Since blogging about Robert Scoble unfollowing his Twitter followers, I have had a lot of feedback.  As well as the comments on the blog, I have had people emailing me, a few people calling me and even a blog post featuring me.

I’ve been told we are going to see some more well-known Twitter users doing the same as Scoble, over the coming days and weeks. Maybe even sooner!

MarketingProfs feature

I wrote a post recently, called; “How to sell against cheaper competitors” and was blown-away to see it used in yesterday’s MarketingProfs newsletter. With around a third of a million subscribers, it was exciting to get the opportunity to reach so many new, great people.

Be an original, like Gary Vaynerchuk

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When Gary Vaynerchuk from Wine Library became an Internet star, hundreds or maybe thousands of people tried to imitate him. Almost overnight, I saw wine expert websites and blogs popping up everywhere.

I started getting followed on Twitter and FriendFeed by wine experts. This sudden rush of wine experts everywhere was incredible – However:

  • Can I name one of those other wine sites for you? No!
  • Can I name even one of the experts behind any of these wine sites for you? No!

That’s because Gary was the  first – or rather, he was the first wine expert to maximise social media.  By the way, I don’t drink alcohol and even I became aware of Gary’s work really quickly – such is his reach and influence. I’m a diet Coke person, which is a pity as Gary emailed me recently and offered to take me out for a beer. (Yes a beer, not wine!)

The power of being an original

I was at a football game earlier this year, when I noticed that there was one person wearing a bright yellow shirt, in an area of the stadium, where they were surrounded by about 5,000 people wearing red shirts.  That one person was more noticeable by themselves, than the other 5,000 people combined.

Just like the person in the bright yellow shirt, true originality stands out.  It commands our attention.

There’s no point in someone trying to be the next Gary Vaynerchuk.  Gary himself only succeeded, because he allowed his own unique style and personality to come through.

So, does this mean that we can’t learn from pioneers? Of course not!  Google was not the first search engine; they actually came to the party relatively late. However, they did have a uniquely valuable approach to search.  It was their unique value that started them on the road to success.  If they had simply copied what AltaVista or Yahoo were doing back then, they would have failed.

If we want to stand out or we want our business to stand out – we need to break away from what the crowd are doing.  Yes, this requires a lot of confidence and courage, but the rewards can be amazing!

More traffic to your site in 2 easy steps!

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If you own a website or blog and you want to dramatically increase the number and quality of visitors you get, you need to encourage people who visit your site, to share what they find with their friends.

Thankfully, we know that when people find material on a website, which they believe will be of interest to their friends and contacts, they are more than happy to forward it to them.  This is why websites like FriendFeed, StumbleUpon, YouTube, Twitter and Digg have become so popular. They allow people to easily share things with their friends.

In order for you to benefit from the viral power of the Internet, there are two things you should consider.

1. Content

Firstly, you need to have content on your site, which is worth sharing.  This means your content has to be better and more valuable than the typical material, which people find on your kind of site or blog.  Many blog owners feel compelled to write ‘something’ every day; indeed many so-called “social marketing gurus” even write posts telling people to do this.  The challenge this presents, is that very few businesspeople have the time required to write new, valuable content every day.

Post only when you have something worth sharing and focus on quality, not quantity.

2. Make it easy to share

Secondly, you need to make it super-easy for people to share your material with their friends.  I use a free plugin for this blog called Sexy Bookmarks, (see below), which allows people to share what they find here, on most popular networksg – quickly and easily.  Just a few mouse clicks and that’s it!

As a result of focusing on what I believe to be valuable content AND making it as easy as possible for people to share it, I get thousands of new visitors from sharing / bookmarking websites every week.

A quick tip!

Take a moment to look at the last few websites, articles, videos, blog posts or whatever; which YOU have passed on to your friends.  Now ask yourself this question: “What was it that motivated you to share that material and how can YOU use that same kind of motivation, to get others to share YOUR content?”

Your answer to that question is a good starting point!

The right choice or the cheapest?

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During a recession, some people are very fee or price focused.

The next time someone tells you that they would love to use your services or buy your products, but they have found a cheaper alternative, ask them a version of the following question:

“If someone you loved needed heart surgery, would you go for the best surgeon you could afford or the cheapest surgeon you could find?”

This type of question is superb for focusing people’s attention on the importance of quality over ‘cheap!’  Obviously, you can use less emotive alternatives to the one used above.  The key is to focus them on the importance of value.