Why? Because I didn’t start out with a plan. Conditions have changed a lot since I started in 2002 and a lot of the advice you get today is still based on the old reality. Can blogging contribute to your success? Sure. Will it? Not necessarily.

There are a lot of misconceptions about blogging — it’s simple, easy, and a sure-fire marketing tool. Technically these things are true, but practically it’s a lot tougher than it appears.

Over at DailyBlogTips guest writer Bob Bessette has collected a nice list of the Top 5 Blogging Misconceptions (summarized with my comments below):

• If you write it they will come… No, they won’t. Promotion is key.
  
• People will read because of my great writing. This falls in the necessary but not sufficient category.
• Other bloggers will always be willing to help. Maybe. Usually. Sometimes.
• You will start making money right away. Only if you’re already famous. I used to get a few hundred dollars a year from Google, but it came out to about $0.10/hour. Be sure you know what you’re after.
• It’s easy to blog. Persistence, planning, predictability. After 7+ years I’m still working on these.

Successful blogging takes effort and a plan. Writing, even good writing, is not enough. The quantity of content and competition has grown exponentially. It used to be easy to get linked by “A-List” bloggers. Today — not so much. The technical barriers to entry have crumbled, but the quantitative and qualitative barriers have skyrocketed.

Blogging is like anything else in business — you have to treat it seriously if you’re going to succeed. You need to be clear on what’s required and what you expect to get in return. Bob’s list is a good starting point.

The Federal Trade Commission today announced a law enforcement crackdown on scammers trying to take advantage of the economic downturn to bilk vulnerable consumers through a variety of schemes, such as promising non-existent jobs; promoting overhyped get-rich-quick plans, bogus government grants, and phony debt-reduction services; or putting unauthorized charges on consumers’ credit or debit cards.

The article lists eight (8) early enforcement actions against some high-profile players across a broad range of get-rich-quick niches. Included in the early enforcement actions was TV infomercial regular John Beck/Mentoring of America, which produces “John Beck’s Free & Clear Real Estate System,” “John Alexander’s Real Estate Riches in 14 Days,” and “Jeff Paul’s Shortcuts to Internet Millions.”

Also named was Google Money Tree, for allegedly misrepresenting that they were affiliated with Google and failing to disclose their continuity fee billing.

It’s highly likely that this is just the first of many actions across the get-rich-quick universe, designed to gain some early publicity by tackling a few big hitters. I would not be surprised to see this enforcement trickle down the food chain. Fraud is nothing new, but bad economic times tend to increase the potential market for schemes. Lousy, unethical practices make it harder for legitimate small businesses to use good internet marketing. So I say good riddance to bad practices and let’s see who the FTC focuses on next.

Here’s a video the FTC put together to warn consumers about get-rich-quick fraud:

I don’t think the clients in that last video would enjoy negotiating with Harlan…

I went to Startup Riot in Atlanta this week and one of the more interesting startups was a company called ShoutNow — a rapid voice messaging company. The idea is that you record a short message using your own phone, then ShoutNow broadcasts that message simultaneously to a list of numbes you enter into their website.

The uses they suggest are more personal — coach notifying the youth soccer team that practice is canceled, pastor notifying the congregation in emergencies, etc. But a really good use of this technology for entrepreneurs is creating a voice reminder for registered attendees for your event.

You can’t be too proactive in making sure people remember to attend an event for which they’ve registered, and most people won’t mind a short voice message if it’s something they really don’t want to miss. Email is good, but it’s not reliable for time-sensitive events.

You could also use this as a follow-up reminder after the event to encourage people to get in touch if they have questions. You don’t want to bug people, but I can see a number of ways this could be used effectively to reach people who can’t reliably be reached online.

Thanks to Jim McGee for the link.

Their are three kinds of research you should do right now if you aim to discover the best way for you to be the red leaf.

1) Study your competition – likely this will verify that everyone is saying the same thing and the opportunity exists for you to say something different.
2) Study difference makers in other industries – what do small business brands that you may already admire do that you don’t? Hire a coach who works with a different industry.
3) Talk to your customers – ask you ideal customers what you do that they value. Chances are it’s not what you think and greater chances are it’s what you need to tap as your essential difference.

Let me see if I can say this in dramatic enough fashion – you absolutely must tap or create a valuable point of differentiation and then build your marketing strategy around communicating that difference or your business will struggle to rise above the competitive noise.

What Jantsch is describing is referred to by internet marketers as your Unique Selling Proposition — or USP — and it’s the key to developing your business.

Too many entrepreneurs never take the time to carefully, conscientiously, consider just what it is that their customers value in their product or service. They are too busy thinking about the cool technical features they offer, or the variety of services they provide. But these are features, not benefits. And it the benefit, as seen through the eyes of your customer, that is your USP.

Well-known direct sales copy writer John Carlton has a simple starter formula for developing your USP:

We help [this group of people]… do [this benefit(s)]… [better].

For positioning John suggests that “better” be related to the competition or common wisdom about your topic. John calls this “getting inside your customer’s head” and emphasizes that it’s not about you at all. In fact, that’s the hardest thing for most entrepreneurs to do, get outside their own head and into the head of a customer. There are many ways to do this, ranging from face-to-face conversations to web-based surveys. But the important thing is to do it.

Your USP is the key to standing out from the crowd. It may change over time, as you learn more about your customers or as your competitive environment changes. But you must always have a USP in mind if your goal is to differentiate yourself and sell on value rather than price.

The conversation turned to resource constraints — time, effort, money, etc. – and the need to spend some portion of time on futuristic efforts as well. He estimated that he needs to spend 5%-10% of his time on long-term futures thinking and planning. I think that’s realistic – 100-200 hours per year. I asked if he was spending an equal amount of time on product development. His answer was that he spent about 200 hours this year on developing new seminar materials, and 300-500 hours on his blog.

I was surprised by this, as the ratio seemed upside down to me. So I asked another question, “Do you track leads/sales generated from the blog?” His response, paraphrased, was that he only tracks it loosely, but it helps.

What we have here is a misallocation of resources. 15%-25% of his time is spent on a marketing vehicle that he cannot connect to any specific improvement in sales or leads. This is an inappropriate, and potentially damaging, strategy over the long run and could be very detrimental to his firm’s growth unless he makes one, or both, of the following changes:

• Refocus the blog to have a specific, trackable, purpose
• Ensure that content developed for the blog can be leveraged through multiple use

Why You Blog

This next sentence is very important:

The only purpose for a small business blog is to turn Looky-Loos into Prospects.

That’s it. That is the one and only function of a small business blog. That is the one and only reason to spend time blogging. If you are spending time blogging for any other reason then you have a hobby blog, not a business blog.

You can find lots of articles on the internet espousing the value of blogs for business – build your brand, demonstrate your expertise, provide content for search engines so people can find you more easily, etc. All those things are true. But I ask you, what is the purpose of those things? The purpose is to convert lookers and seekers into prospects. What do you care how many people find you if they are never going to buy? So if you’re not blogging to actively convert readers to prospects you’re writing a… what is it again? That’s right, a hobby blog.

So, how do you make your blog a trackable lead-generation tool?

You start an Email List and use the blog as a mechanism to attract subscribers. You put an opt-in form on the blog, create a compelling offer to induce interested readers to subscribe, and you track the results. That’s it. Once you do this you have a useful business metric, The Prospect Ratio, for determining how effective your blog is. It looks like this:

Calculating your prospect ratio

As an example, if you get 1,000 Unique Visitors per month, and 35 of those visitors subscribe to your mail list you have a 3.5% Prospect Ratio. Simple, right?

Now we need to figure out how much each of these prospect conversions is worth. The way to do that is to track the number of sales that come from these prospects, as follows:

Calculating your sales conversions

If you have 500 subscribers to your mail list, a reasonable number to shoot for in a year, and you know that you have made 22 sales to this group, you have a 4.4% sales conversion ratio. Now you know that for however many Unique Visitors you attract to your blog, 3.5% will become subscribers (aka qualified leads) and 4.4% of those will become customers.

These two ratios alone will give you valuable insights into where to put your efforts. Which is the best use of time – getting more Unique Visitors to the blog, creating a more compelling offer to increase your Prospect Ratio, or refining your email sales strategy to increase your Sales Conversion Ratio?

But there is still one piece missing – value. We need to know how much each point increase, for each ratio, is worth. We start by calculating our average sale value. This calculation is easy – Total Sales/No. of Customers. Let’s assume that last year (or quarter, or month) you sold $42,000 of business to 25 clients. Your average sale is $1,680. This gives us some interesting data points. First, the average value of a Unique Visitor to your site:

Calculating unique visitor value

Using our example above, we can see that every Unique Visitor to the site is worth an average of $3.98. Now let’s calculate the value of each email list subscriber:

Calculating subscriber value

Again using our example above, we can see that the average value of each subscriber to our email list is $76. This assumes, of course, that you have an effective email marketing strategy that nurtures prospects and converts them to customers (more on that in a future post.)

Using these metrics you can now plot a business plan for your blog. You can assign a value to the time you spend developing the blog and developing your mail list, and you can compare the return to other prospecting and lead generation  methods.

This process, called conversion tracking, is a key analytic that can and should be applied not just to your blog and email list, but to every sales and landing page on your site. Otherwise you don’t know whether your efforts are paying off, and you don’t know whether you are spending too much, or too little, time on your site.

Further, you can now get a clear indicator of the ROI for your blogging time. If, for example, you spend 500 hours per year to get 3,000 Unique Visitors, and each visitor is worth $3.98, you can reasonably estimate $12,000 of revenue from that effort – or $25/hour. Is that good? On the other hand, if you can get 500 new subscribers to your mail list you can reasonably project $38,000 in revenue. Which seems more promising?

Are there other ways to spend your time that can make you even more money? Or are there changes you can make to your blogging or email strategies to drive those revenue numbers up? Can you create entry-level products or services that will lower your average sale but drive up the number of conversions and give you more customers rather than more prospects? Now you can begin to answer these questions. But you can’t answer any of them until you have metrics.

Getting maximum leverage from your blog content

The other key to managing your blogging time is to be sure the material you create for your blog can be reused for other purposes. If you can reuse half your blog content – either before or after posting – you have effectively reduced your time expenditure by 50% – 250 hours rather than 500. If you apply this intelligently it’s the single biggest boost you can give to your blogging ROI.

Reuse it how? First, understand that very few people will ever go through all your blog archives to read everything you’ve posted. At best, readers will find specific pages via search engines and then scroll around for similar posts. But rarely will they invest time in finding everything you have written on a topic.

You need to feed it to them again, in multiple channels. Research indicates that the average customer needs to see something 5-6 times before it really sinks in. This gives you a half-dozen opportunities to present your message in different ways.

Your blog posts can be summarizations of key white papers or reports that you already published. Or your posts can be used as the basis for new reports. These reports can be used as incentives for Readers to subscribe to your mail list. Or they can be converted into entry-level products that your prospects want to purchase to better understand the problems you solve.

Some consultants prefer to use their email newsletters to simply point to a variety of new blog posts on specific topics. Others will mine previous posts and expand them into articles for trade journals or online magazines. Don’t discount the value of audio and video. Webinars, teleconferences, and other forms of presentation can be captured and reused as well. The possibilities are almost endless.

The idea is to get your blogging time to at least pay for itself in new revenue and, preferably, become an income generator on its own. This is certainly not easy, but having a plan and metrics to track your progress is far better than expending a lot of time with a completely unknown ROI.

The value of information product marketing

In my own experience I have worked for three firms that started and grew their business through the marketing of information – both before and after the internet era. One is now quite large, with nearly 50 employees and $10 million dollars in annual revenues. It was sold a few years ago to a major consulting and information marketing firm. The second is also quite large now – 20+ employees and $4-$5 million in revenues. The third is much younger and smaller but is doing quite the job of marketing it’s research, reports, and information products to build a brand.

And this is just in my experience. There is an enormous body of work, as far back as the 1960s, indicating that the development of information products is the cornerstone of building a successful consulting practice. Authors like Howard Shenson, Robert Mancuso, and Herman Holtz have written about this phenomenon as far back as the 1970s. Today there is an entirely new generation of people focused on marketing information products via the internet.

As an independent consultant or small firm you are simply a problem solver. Your value to clients is in helping them understand the problem you solve, the impact it has on their business, and teaching them how to mitigate it. To get business you have to prove that you can do these things.

Capturing your ideas, philosophy, approach, tools, methodology, and understanding in information products is the fastest, best way to communicate you value to a broad audience. The internet has brought Direct Marketing – one-on-one, personalized communications to your prospects – within reach of every small business. And Direct Marketing is still the Number 1 way small consultancies can promote themselves. But to use it effectively you must have a message that educates your prospects about your value. And you must track, test, and improve that message based on real metrics that give you a clear picture of your progress.

Here are two resources you can use to simplify and automate your direct mail communications:

• MyCardSystem.com – this service offers a veriety of ways to send note and greeting cards to prospects or customers. You can upload address lists to send out cards in batches. The interface is good, and there is pricing to suit every budget. This is a great, affordable way to prospect if your product or service appeals to a non-technical audience, or even if it does.
• Ink-a-Note – This service is a little different, and focuses on “handwritten” note cards and Thank You cards. You have a variety of handwriting fonts to choose from. The interface is not geared to automation or large campaigns, but rather to individual follow-up. It’s a great way to speed the sending of Thank You notes to customers who have purchased from you.

The important thing to remember is that there is no such thing as the “best” or “perfect” marketing channel. Smart entrepreneurs use every channel at their disposal and, in stead, focus on automating communications so that the process is easy and fast so you can stick with it every day.

1. Internet marketing is not just the domain of shysters, hucksters, scammers and crooks. There are real people, with real businesses, using internet marketing techniques every day.
2. Internet marketing works. There are legitimate, proven advertising and marketing techniques which are well-suited to the internet and are very effective.
3. Content (sales pages and e-mails) can be well designed, in keeping with your business site, and still be effective. You don’t have to look (or sound) like Matthew Lesko or Billy Mays if that’s not the right approach for your audience.

There may have been some folks among the attendees who had online endeavors I might consider questionable, but there were a number of very legitimate people working to build real businesses with the things they learned. Among them:

• A traditional marketing consultant from DC who wants to help small businesses use the internet.
• A pilot for a major commercial airline.
• A man whose mother suffered from bipolar disorder, which led him to create the largest Bipolar online support community on the internet, with more than 350,000 members.
• Two freelance writers who have written for numerous national magazines and have used the internet to build their freelance business to gross well over $100,000 per year.
• A lady with a background in the auto industry who wants to teach women how to buy a car.

And these are just the ones I met. I’m sure there were others. The entire seminar was focused on techniques and tools that these people could use, and so can you. Can these same tools and techniques be misused? Sure, but so can anything else. The internet has no lock on misrepresentation and hucksterism.

It’s up to you to decide what’s right for you, but if you’re a small business and you’re not using the internet to generate leads, nurture your prospects, and increase your sales you are cheating yourself. Don’t let your biases get in the way of your success.