While doing some online networking the other day Alan posed a good question regarding generating traffic for his business blog. It’s a common point of confusion with business owners, so for your benefit here’s the question and answer.
Business Blogging Question:
Do you consider blogexplosion/blogazoo/clicker to be quality traffic? From my understanding those visitors are only there to get points to get you to visit their blog. What’s the best way to get targeted traffic to my blog if it’s to promote my business?
Appreciate your coaching advice!
Alan
The Business Coaches Answer:
Aloha Alan,
Your understanding is dead on. Traffic from any type of “exhange” is going to be completely un-targeted. That means lots of eyeballs, but very few qualified prospects from your ideal target audience. This does not make for a very efficient use of your or any employee’s time.
One caveat to mention on un-qualified traffic is if a business person was providing a generic product/service that could appeal to just about anyone. (i.e.: diet, weight loss, etc.) Then unqualified traffic COULD be worth some time. Although we’d advise it NOT be your own time. Generating traffic though exchanges would be a great task to outsource at $5.00 - $10.00 per hour max, or have an intern do.
With that said, understand the vast majority of people are not using blog exchanges to find you or your business. And the same is true for blog specific search engines (like Ice Rocket or Technorati.) They’re going to Google and Yahoo and MSN, and doing searches. So getting top rankings in the organic searches for your targeted keywords should be your primary focus if large amounts of targeted traffic is what you’re using your business blog for.
When you can consistently be in the top 20 of organic search results for strategically selected keywords — you will get the highly targeted traffic you’re after. That’s where your most valuable time should be spent.
Another caveat HERE is…. if you’re in a technology field, then those types of readers will be more familiar with blog specific search engines. That means you’d want to split your time proportionally between gaining organic results in regular search engines and top rankings in blog specific search engines. That means more commenting and interaction with other bloggers.
The most important point on traffic — conversion!
Targeted traffic is great, but what are you directing those visitors to do when they get to your business blog? This is where a lot of business people go wrong in listening to the advice of blogging evangelists in that they completely forget about the proven rules of marketing.
Contrary to what you may have heard, you can proactively market with your business blog. Marketing, blogs, and business are an excellent promotional blend. To be successful just means using influence and persuasion instead of interruption or mass media style marketing.
It’s true that a well planned business blog is a powerful tool for building relationships, opening a dialog, and developing trust with your audience. But you still need to influence those visitors to take the next step in developing a relationship with you. A blog on it’s own is not enough to do that.
At the very least a good starting point is adding a free download offer in the visual hot zone (upper left corner) of your business blog. An offer for something that will benefit a visitor from your target audience. And keep in mind that an offer to sign up for a “newsletter” is not going to be sufficient incentive for people to hand over even their first name and email address.
Add that registration incentive and that will take care of the most important step in moving strangers > friends > customers > raving fans.
Best of luck Alan, enjoy your complimentary copy of Business Blogging 101, and email us if you’d like more help using New Media to market your business.
Deborah Micek is a Business Acceleration Coach. She and her partner have over 8000 hours of experience helping entrepreneurs like you get the profits, performance, and lifestyle you want from your business. She’s a published author (Secrets Of Online Persuasion,) a weekly columnist for the Honolulu Star Bulletin, and professional speaker.You can reach Deborah directly via [communicationcoach@gmail.com].
Discover the fastest, easiest way to unleash the full promotional power of your business on any budget. Get your free preview of the proven New Media system that puts all your marketing on multimedia steroids –BLOG Interactive 360™.
Is blogging for business a serious way to achieve and maintain reliable search engine rankings? Yes! Is (true) business blogging a way to open dialog with your ideal audience, build relationships, and have your prospects and clients market WITH you? Yes! Yes! And yes!
But ask if blogs are the place for proactive marketing, and the answer you’ll get from blogging enthusiasts and blog evangelists is — absolutely not! And that’s why this next filter is dedicated to these dangerous purveyors of online advice.
Blogging for business, Filter #4: Beware the blogging evangelists and enthusiasts
Don’t get me wrong, Deborah and I are passionate about the market-equalizing power of blogs and New Media, especially for small business owners. That’s why we wrote the book Secrets Of Online Persuasion. But there’s a difference between the utilitarian passion of a business owner and the idealistic rantings of a digital socialist who advocates the eschewing of any action or activity that has even the hint of capitalism or profit. That, unfortunately, is the poisonous blogging advice that so many of the long-time blogging enthusiasts out there advocate.
The key to this filter is understanding the terms “enthusiasts” and “evangelists“. As I detailed in Part One of this series — you always need to be looking at where so-called “advice” is coming from.
In this case, upon analysis we see that most blogging enthusiasts and evangelists are people who have a regular job. They blog part time. Some do it for fun. Some for release. And others just to have their opinion heard, even if it’s only by a few dozen friends. And that’s all find and good — IF they would keep their “long time blogging” opinions to themselves.
Why is their advice so dangerous for business owners?
First off, because none are business owners. None of them know what it is to need to make sales to keep the lights or heat on. None of them know what it’s like to get and keep a certain number of customers each month or else face losing their home mortgaged to the hilt to finance the start-up of a dream. And none of them ever lost any sleep worrying about how payroll for people in their employ might be met on a particularly tight week.
A poverty of business experience allows blog evangelists and enthusiasts to spew ideological anti-capitalist guidelines
With complete poverty of experience in these and many other business areas, blog evangelists and enthusiasts can afford to spew anti-capitalist ideological guidelines. They promote rules that all but threaten burning at the stake for any business owner who dares enter the realm of the blogosphere without adhering to their commandments.
Secondly, the vast majority of these blogging enthusiasts lack the understanding of how marketing and other capitalist systems work for the good of the entire society. With their biased opinions they slash away at the roots of profitability (intentionally or unintentionally) trying to bring business owners (more…)
Blog evangelists, professional bloggers, and blogging purists are all a group of happy little campers telling themselves lies about New Media, and then living them out. That would be fine… if they kept their thoughts, theories, and practices focused on building their own backwoods network of off road trails. But, unfortunately that’s not the case.
As we shared in Part One of this article series, it’s become apparent that far too often blogging purists let their comfortable habits (voiced as advice and rules to newcomers) spill over as dangerous debris onto the superhighway of capitalism. And these hazards are causing business owners to skid off the road into drainage ditches filled with wasted time, money, and effort.
Now in the continuing effort to help clear the muddy waters of blogging for business, here’s filter #3.
Filter #3: all your traffic is to be jealously guarded
Professional bloggers want to generate traffic, just like you. But that’s where the similarity ends.
Your main goal is to build a prospect list with names and contact info, not just generate traffic or RSS subscribers. Traffic is important, but how you monetize that traffic is dramatically different than professional full-time bloggers. You make money off of your products or services. They make money off other peoples’ products or services, so the number of outbound links is basically irrelevant to professional bloggers.
Professional bloggers and blogging purists say that you “must link deep, link frequently, and link often.”
Excuse me!? If you’re a business owner looking to market with blogs this flies in the face of reason. You’re going work your butt off and/or dedicate company resources to an endeavor that is going to send people away from your site once they find you? That just doesn’t make sense.
When blogging for business, you must jealously and even selfishly (gasp!) keep visitors on your business blog with valuable original content
You must jealously and even selfishly (gasp!) keep visitors on your business blog with valuable original content. Your average visitor could care less about some blogosphere “rule” that you must link prolifically. As we mentioned earlier, all they want is education, entertainment, or information that helps them. If they get it all from you — great!
Don’t fall prey to the blog evangelist rule that you have to have outside links scattered all over every post either. Most intelligent visitors find that annoying as all hell anyway. Instead of interrupting the flow of an article or post, concentrate your links in a convenient resource area at the end.
Limit your outbound links ONLY to resources that truly benefit your visitors/subscribers. And link to others who compliment your own products and services. If your source for an article or post is referencing a news story, another blogger, or if you’d like to help readers find more info elsewhere — well of course that’s only professional courtesy that you provide a live reference link.
And most important of all — when you work hard to generate the highly targeted traffic that business blogging creates, you don’t want to send those people off your site with an ad sense ad, Amazon ad, or to any other competitors site. That’s literally being penny wise and pound foolish.
In the next installment of this series you’ll get another filter to help clear the muddied waters of business blogging.
John-Paul Micek is a Business Acceleration Coach with four multi-million dollar businesses under his belt and over 8000 hours of experience helping entrepreneurs like you get the profits, performance, and lifestyle you want from your business. He’s a published author (Secrets Of Online Persuasion,) a weekly columnist for the Honolulu Star Bulletin, and professional speaker. You can reach J.P. directly via [communicationcommando@gmail.com].
Discover the fastest, easiest way to unleash the full promotional power of your business on any budget. Get your free preview of the proven New Media system that puts all your marketing on multimedia steroids –BLOG Interactive 360™.
In a profoundly timely fashion, technology expert Nick Carr shows why as a business owner you need to be reading the multi-part article series Blogging For Business: Dispelling Myths and Clearing The Muddy Waters. Blogging purists and blog evangelists are telling themselves lies, then living them out.
Nick points out the painful truth to the hopefuls of blogging fame in his recent article Nick Carr’s “The Great Unread” The truth is painful, but it’s still the truth.
I must commend Nick as he’ll probably take a lot of heat for this from blogging evangelists. But it’s high time that blogging purists understand the harsh reality facing them. Unfortunately many bloggers, including many unwitting business bloggers, will be left outside the castle gates if they ignore capitalist principles and suppress that drive.
Maybe it’s because Deborah and I are business owners, or because we exclusively work with business owners every day, and have the focus of blogging for business (not for readers) — but the points Nick make seem obvious. I mean come on … duh, even if you’re not interested in selling something but would rather have readers — how can you expect to get subscribers if you don’t market? Obvious, yes!
Yet it’s the obvious that can often be the most dangerous. Lies can be lived for a long time before a person comes to the realization that they’ve bought into a lie.
From my vantage point, this is the problem with the blogoshere — bogging evangelists have bought into their own lies. And their still trying to pull others down into their time-sapping pit of lack and unfulfilled desires by laying out a host of unrealistic rules.
The business owners on our subscriber list and even many of our clients are incredibly confused with what advice they read from pro-bloggers and other blogging evangelists. That fact is what has made us decide to take the gloves off and reveal the lies being told in the article series we’re in the middle of — Blogging For Business: Dispelling Myths and Clearing The Muddy Waters.
Enjoy!
John-Paul Micek is a Business Acceleration Coach with four multi-million dollar businesses under his belt and over 8000 hours of experience helping entrepreneurs like you get the profits, performance, and lifestyle you want from your business. He’s a published author (Secrets Of Online Persuasion,) a weekly columnist for the Honolulu Star Bulletin, and professional speaker. You can reach J.P. directly via [communicationcommando@gmail.com].
Today we continue to reveal the truth about blogging for business in the real world of small business ownership. In part one of this series we got off to a rocking start dispelling many of the myths and arbitrary “rules” that have been spread round by long time bloggers. Today we’ll roll on with the second filter that will help you clear the muddied waters of business blogging. And we’ll highlight more distinctions between pro-bloggers and business owners who want to market with blogs and New Media.
Filter #2: successful marketing with blogs and New Media is about people, persuasion, influence … and bias
Professional bloggers write with no attempted persuasion or influence of their readers. As a matter of fact, many pride themselves on being relatively benign, politically correct, unbiased informers disconnected from any source of capitalist influence.
Well, as business owners you and I both know there are two things wrong with this approach.
There is no such thing as an un-opinionated person, unless of course they are lacking in intelligence
First off, any intelligent thinking individual is going to have an opinion and that opinion will put a slant on what they say. There is no such thing as an un-opinionated person, unless of course they are lacking in intelligence (and that of course is a whole nother story.) The claim to be unbiased is frankly BS. And if you try to be un-opinionated about your business, your expertise, or your passions you’ll be doing yourself a disservice.
Not only is taking this un-opinionated approach harmful to business, it’s offensive to other intelligent, thinking people who members of your ideal audience. They don’t have time trying to parse what it is you’re saying. These men and women want to hear your opinion, and if your own products and services will save them time, make them money, or add more fulfillment to their lives — they want to know that immediately.
Keep in mind, you should never turn your business blog into a multi-part sales letter the way I see many internet marketers trying to do. That would mean the terrible loss of the very powerful marketing and sales boosters of comfort, familiarity, and trust in you and/or your company that come from open/honest dialog.
Don’t make the mistake of allowing one cautionary statement to cause a cessation of all direct linkage between your business blog and sales
But don’t make the mistake of allowing one cautionary statement to cause a cessation of all direct linkage between your business blog and sales. You may not want your blog to become a super long-form multi-part sales letter, but it can be a very effective marketing and sales platform in that it educates, opens dialog, and builds trust.
Secondly, blogging purists (which many professional bloggers are) muddy the waters by equating a capitalist marketing bent with some type of evil behavior. This is really quite hysterical and hypocritical since their blogs and cash flow live and die by their ability to “interrupt” visitors with traditional mass media type ads and banners. In my opinion, these interruptions are the ultimate in offense to an intelligent prospect or client. A company sponsored blog when properly done is less cluttered and much more enjoyable to read.
The fact is, marketing with blogs is not a no-no.
Yes, many people are tired of being marketed to. That’s true. But if you’re addressing the right audience using persuasion and influence — they are eager to market WITH you! This is so important a filter for you as a business owner that it bears repeating.
Don’t be afraid of opinion, bias, or marketing with blogs. Use online persuasion and influence to blatantly market with your prospects, subscribers, and clients.
In the next installment of this series we’ll look at yet another filter that will help you distinguish between professional blogging and blogging for business.
John-Paul Micek is a Business Acceleration Coach with four multi-million dollar businesses under his belt and over 8000 hours of experience helping entrepreneurs like you get the profits, performance, and lifestyle you want from your business. He’s a published author (Secrets Of Online Persuasion,) a weekly columnist for the Honolulu Star Bulletin, and professional speaker. You can reach J.P. directly via [communicationcommando@gmail.com].
Discover the fastest, easiest way to unleash the full promotional power of your business on any budget. Get your free preview of the proven New Media system that puts all your marketing on multimedia steroids –BLOG Interactive 360™.
96.5% of what you’ve been reading about blogging for business is dead wrong. Ready for a real-world capitalist wake up call? If you’re a small business owner or a professional running a practice, here’s the real lowdown on business blogging.
The last couple of months have brought us dozens of emails from frustrated small business owners, physicians, and even a few sales professionals. These hard working men and women are confused by much of the “business blogging advice” being bandied about. From advice on using Ad sense and other such “ad revenue” streams. To the “rules” handed out by long time bloggers on what business people “must” and “must not” do on their business blogs.
Regrettably business owners are being led down a rabbit trail with advice from many full time (”professional”) bloggers. And almost equally, blogging evangelists who (not being business owners themselves) dole out advice for corporate employees and leaders muddying the waters even further.
With the advice from both these camps often incorporating language and even headlines that are “profit” or “corporate” focused — it’s no wonder small business owners are confused.
What matters most to business owners
This past weekend a particularly distressing email from a small business owner in Maryland was the final straw. With the blogging waters so muddied for business owners, I can’t take it any longer. I feel it’s high time for a common business sense advocate, someone with significant small business ownership experience, to address these points of confusion.
After starting four successful multimillion dollar businesses since the age of 21, I have a dramatically different viewpoint on blogging and the New Media Marketplace than many of the technology-obsessed bloggers and corporate blogging evangelists. I live and breathe the business owners lifestyle, and have done so since the age of 12.
It’s time to stop the incestuous blogosphere madness
I feel for my fellow small business brethren and their confusion about the New Media Marketplace. It’s time to stop the incestuous blogosphere madness. And it’s time to clear the muddy waters for all business people who are looking to maximize the marketing of their own products and services using business blogs and other New Media tools.
I’m probably not going to be making too many friends with hardcore bloggers or in the blogging evangelist community with what will be said here. But I’m OK with that. I’m not a rubber stamp advocate blindly parroting accolades for any individual technology like blogs, or even the blogosphere as a whole.
I’m an advocate for people. And the people I care most about are small business owners, their clients, and their prospects.
I mean come on…. as a business owner do you really care what some corporate techno-geek who’s been blogging in their free time since the turn of the century has to say about what you should and should not do with your business blog?
As Ingram Books and Morgan James Publishing prepares to start printing our new book Secrets of Online Persuasion for release in October, we’ve already started to collect reviews and comments on pre-release copies. If you’re a small business owner or professional sales person looking to market and profit with New Media — this book is your guide and master plan!
Advance Praise for Secrets of Online Persuasion
"The book Secrets of Online Persuasion is BRILLIANT! Deb and JP really get it but more importantly, they show you how to get it as well. I have the pleasure of having Deb as a guest on my radio show but it was only after reading this book that I understood how she was using the old media and making it new. I had so many ideas blasting off in my head that it was like a fireworks show! Thanks for opening my eyes…now if you wouldn’t mind keeping this book secret so my competition never learns how to use the new media!"
Wayne Kelly
The Wayne & Jayne Show,
KBS Radio
OnAirPublicity.com
"The #1 way to market your business online!"
Grab a free excerpt of our new book and learn how you can win the hearts, minds, and pocketbooks of thousands. Plus, for a limited time, get a free subscription to the New Media Marketing Journal.
"There is a powerful and profitable pattern unfolding rapidly in business. Blogs have more than proven their significance as part of a digital business design and in this masterpiece, "Secrets of Online Persuasion," Deborah and John Paul Micek take you on an incredible business building journey from blogging to Podcasting and beyond. What they reveal about the New Media Marketplace will forever change your business… and make it more profitable as a result.
I highly recommend everyone using the Internet for business, politics or advocacy to grab a copy of this book."
Stephen Pierce
Business Optimization Strategist
Founder of Thinkubator, Ann Arbor
OptimizationSeries.com
More Than 77 Internet And Persuasion Secrets Exposed!
What the New Media Revolution is and how you can profit from it as it transforms the face of advertising and marketing forever
How to trigger powerful, word-of-mouth BUZZ with innovative New Media campaigns
Why your business blog (not mass marketing) must be at the center of your marketing strategy using New Media tools
Discover where your target audience is hanging out and captivate their attention with your persuasive message
Six key tools you must have when launching your own successful New Media Marketing Strategy
Online persuasion strategies that draw hundreds and thousands of highly qualified fans to your business, non-profit organization or political campaign
"Get hold of this book now – before your competition does!"
Grab a free excerpt of our new book and learn how you can win the hearts, minds, and pocketbooks of thousands. Plus, for a limited time, get a free subscription to the New Media Marketing Journal. Then come back and share your pre-release comments here on this page.
In today’s rapidly changing marketplace, we all hope to deepen our relationships with people and create a swarm of hungry customers. Or, as the Miceks so aptly demonstrate, we should be creating tribes."
… from the forward to Secrets of Online Persuasion
Dave Lakhani
author of "Persuasion: The Art of Getting What You Want"
BoldApproach.com
In yet another success story of marketing with New Media and blogging for business — the consumer generated marketing for the upcoming movie Snakes On A Plane just keeps getting better and better. The buzz leading up to the launch of this movie is an excellent case study on New Media Marketing
For those of you who may not be familiar with what’s been going on for months now, New Line Cinema’s early interaction with the New Media Marketplace ignited a firestorm of participation (primarily from Samuel Jackson fans.) Initial requests for input on the soundtrack for the film and actual submission of music for the soundtrack got buzz going. What followed over the last few months has been nothing short of remarkable with hundreds of consumer generated videos, suggestions for lines in the script, and blogs fully dedicated to marketing the New Line Cinema movie… all done for free!
Getting that organic buzz
All the buzz for this movie has been completely organic so far. And no movie, except for maybe Mel Gibson’s The Passion, has had such grassroots New Media Marketing working for it so hard and so far in advance of the actual movie release. (Snakes On A Plane is scheduled for release sometime in August, buzz started in mid-winter.)
The number of views are well over a quarter million on many of the top videos promoting the Samuel Jackson movie. And that’s on YouTube alone. Here’s one of the best ones I’ve seen so far. The professional grade editing job on this takeoff of a Bono (U2) music video, the lyrics, and the entire packaging is brilliant.
With nearly 305,000 views so far and over 750 comments on YouTube alone, this is just one example of how viral New Media Marketing can be when it’s done right.
The mass (drive-by) media has even had to recognize the New Media buzz machine that’s been created for Snakes On A Plane. Here’s a clip from a recent CNN story on the New Media Marketplace in action.
Successfully marketing with New Media means focusing on people, participation, and persuasion.
New Line Cinema doesn’t seem to have the foggiest idea how this happened, or how to further fan the flames of this New Media Marketing bonfire. Yet the power is really not that difficult to harness.
It’s like we talk about in our upcoming book Secrets Of Online Persuasion and the one thing we keep our business coaching clients focused on. That’s blogging for business and marketing with New Media is all about people, participation, and persuasion.
Trash any Web Marketing 1.0 tactics that “interrupt” and instead get your ideal audience to “interact.” When you do you’ll leap frog competitors who stick with old world, mass media style marketing every time.
What do you think of the Snakes On A Plane New Media Marketing phenomenon?
Discover the only strategic online sales and persuasion system guaranteed to unleash the maximum marketing power of the New Media in your business — BLOG Interactive 360™.
John-Paul is a published author (Secrets of Online Persuasion, Morgan James Publishing/Ingram, Fall 2006) and weekly columnist for the Honolulu Star Bulletin. He is a New Media Marketing Consultant working with business owners and politicians to leverage online influence and persuasion for more clients, more profits, and more votes. He and his partner have developed a simple scientific code for maximizing personal performance and influence online and off-line. You can reach J.P. directly via [communicationcommando@gmail.com].
If you’re a New Media video connoisseur, or even if you’re just a business owner who is interested in seeing how the New Media is becoming more searchable for the average person — the beta launch of the new video search service called Dabble is great news!
If you’ve ever done keyword searches for video you know how frustrating it can be. Up until now you have had to go from YouTube to Video.Google to any one of the more than 250 video hosting services looking for what you want. Now with the beta launch of Dabble there’ll soon be just one destination when you’re searching for New Media video.
Dabble was founded by Mary Hotter and has gone through an alpha testing phase already. They’re currently in beta testing and accepting limited new members.
Dabble’s more than a New Media video search engine
Dabble is not a hosting service, but much more than a just a video search engine.
Unlike YouTube, Video.Google, etc., Dabble is not a video hosting service. All search results reside on their host servers. Dabble is a new search service specifically for video… but with a twist.
Dabble not only scans through an ever expanding list of partnerships including many of the 240+ video hosting sites currently in existence. It also scans independent sources on the web as well.
Plus Dabble has an extensive social network on the backend. But it’s not just for socializing.
