Spend Less Time Trying to Get New Referrals and More Time Writing
by Kevin on May 22, 2010
One of the reasons many bloggers fail is because they are so committed to selling products and increasing referrals (or people who visit your site as a result of a recommendation from someone else). These people are so committed to this process that they lose touch with their biggest fans and instead focus on delivering a product that isn’t even able to live up to its lowest expectations. This isn’t where you want to be.
I figure this is the result of close networks of people who are unwilling to branch out and include more of the community. These people are self-centered and want to keep all the profits within a close group of people. Nearly all new sales are generated from this group of people marketing to the same (generally large) group of people. While those inside of this group are able to constantly pump out new products based on their most successful products, there really isn’t much innovation going on within the circle.
Rather than spending so much time on increasing referrals, focus on these tasks and you’ll see a much higher return. Plus, it may come much sooner than you could have ever dreamed!
- Learn about your visitors and connect with your greatest fans. You’ll be able to develop a closer relationship with your most valued readers.
- Write as often as possible, as your content will sell itself. As you write more often, you’ll gain more natural links back to your content, especially through the social networking sites.
- Spend more time developing a brand behind your content. Some people focus solely on creating the content, but you should also spend the time distributing the content, getting your brand name out as often as possible.
- Be more generous. Sure, this might mean that you’ll initially lose some revenue, but if you get your good product into more people’s hands, then you’ll be able to sell more product down the road.
- Change what you do. If your site is just a simple landing page, add a blog. Generally, you won’t have to spend much more than an hour or two each day writing on this blog portion, but you’ll see much more return.
Writing should be your top priority on your blog. If you instead focus on increasing sales, you’re likely to lose out on many sales in the future. These sales are likely to come as a result of visitors from search engines and through recommendations you normally wouldn’t have received if you had stuck to simply promoting links and the same old sales message.
Five Ways to Persuade Your Readers to Purchase Your Product
by Kevin on May 21, 2010
Blogging is all about persuasion. Although you may be focused on writing, if you aren’t also focused on persuasion, you won’t have any readers. When you are able to persuade, you’ll be able to recruit new members to your site, encourage them to share your site or products with others, and you’ll also be able to increase your site’s revenue for long-term growth.
Increasing traffic to your site is generally much easier than trying to increase sales, but having a clear plan going forward can lead to massive benefits. Your main focus should be on creating a product others simply can’t match and everyone wants to talk about. Sure, it may sound easier to say than do, but using these few simple methods for persuading your readers, you’ll be able to increase sales without changing your product or main focus.
1. Be sincere and know your product. The world’s best marketers didn’t get where they are selling products that don’t live up to their promises. By informing their potential customers and providing truthfulness in their marketing approaches, these people have been able to sell millions of products. In addition, they rarely diverted attention to the competitors’ products – they answered all the questions in their videos or articles to effectively persuade.
2. Influence your readers. While persuasion and influence go hand in hand, there is a difference between the two. Persuasion is the act of persuading someone to do something, while influence is the ability to impact or effect someone using your power. Get your readers to believe that your product or service will solve problems and they have a much higher chance of parting with their hard-earned money. This begins with selling a successful record of solving problems. A good way to do this is through testimonials, which leads into the third method.
3. Provide answers and reasoning behind the product or service. Launching a product or service into the marketplace can be quite challenging, especially if it is your first or if you are trying to enter into a whole new product category. On your sales pages or through video, answer as many questions as possible, leaving very little potential questions unanswered. Another way to do this is through “testimonials.” I place this in quotations as testimonials have been so abused, especially in the age of the Internet where everything can be forged.
4. Think of persuasion as an art. Like an artist, it’ll take time before you know what works and what doesn’t. It’ll also be a skill that you can’t learn overnight and not everyone will be able to be successful at it. Simply trying to sell someone a product won’t work. People are able to single out and isolate advertisements – this is one of the reasons why you need hundreds of thousands of visitors each month to make a good income online and millions of watchers on television.
5. Paint a positive picture. Continuing from method four, you should always try to paint a positive picture of your products and services. Often, you’ll find negative reviews of your products on blogs due to people who didn’t understand how to use your product/service. If this is the case, you should reach out to answer their questions or solve their problems. Rather than losing slaes, you’ll be able to convince them that your product is effective, resulting in an increase of sales. You don’t want people to even think about comparing your product to what the competition offers.
Conclusion. Having an effective approach in persuading your readers is extremely important. It can mean the difference between one sale and a hundred. More often than not, landing sales is the result of just a few lines of copy – the lines that truly convince your visitors that your product is much better than anything your competitors offer.
Theme Review: ElegantNews
by Kevin on May 20, 2010
While you could pay for a premium WordPress theme, there are still quite a number of free versions available. Generally, you won’t receive the same level of support with them and their back-end option panels won’t be nearly as comprehensive, but they can still be great alternatives for bloggers on a budget.
The ElegantNews theme recently caught my eye, as it offers all the features a “news” blogger needs in a template. In addition, it’s fairly clean looking and well-designed.
Main features of the theme for bloggers include an options page for changing some of the main settings, post thumbnails support, a featured content area for highlighting your best posts, and a banner ads area in the sidebar for the popular 125×125 pixel ad format.
In addition, the theme includes three columns for making the most out of the browser space you have. Gravatars and widgets are incorporated into the theme, so you won’t have to spend time coding these in.
The coding is optimized for search engines and you shouldn’t experience issues with users who can’t view your site properly: it has been tested to work across all the most popular browsers.
For more information about the theme and to take a look at the demo, please visit the theme’s release page.
Browser-based TweetDeck Using HTML5 Coming
by Kevin on May 19, 2010
Although HTML5 is still in its infancy, many websites are already integrating some of its technology, allowing sites to “ditch” Flash for a more open alternative. In 2004, the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) listed this next standard as “Web Applications 1.0.” There are many ways the technology will be used in the future, and it’ll certainly bring us closer to a more browser-based workflow.
TweetDeck recently announced several new changes, including plans to move to the browser – at least as an alternative to using it as a mobile or desktop app. The main reason for moving in this direction is for development. Currently, they are building a different version for the various app stores, and this results in some inconsistencies across them.
The HTML5 version is not expected for several more months, as they are focused on delivering a product that includes all the features currently available in the desktop version. When the web-based version is available, there will certainly be more integration with the TweetDeck accounts – you’ll likely need to sign in to access all the columns, saved searches, Twitter accounts, and more.
Update: A number of new services will also be included, such as geotagging support for users of Google Buzz and Foursquare.
What’s Preventing Your Blog from Becoming “Successful”?
by Kevin on May 18, 2010
Nearly all failure comes as a result of not planning. If you consistently repeat the mistakes you have been making, you are bound to fail.
A popular quote many live by is “The only real failure in life is the failure to try.” Apply this same quote to blogging, and you’ll quickly find another source of failure.
Success is an arbitrary term for many and has a far range when one applies it to blogging. For one, it could mean that you receive ten new comments per day, while to another person it means making a full-time income through the blog.
Beyond these two main sources of failure, there are several other reasons you aren’t seeing success as a result of your work.
- When disaster hit (bad press about your business, a search engine rank hit, etc.), you didn’t have a plan for how to deal with it.
- You don’t have a plan for the future, and you run your blog day-to-day. Sure, this can work for a month or two, but it won’t last.
- You aren’t providing support to your blog visitors. Again, “support” can have a huge range in meaning. Respond to comments as well as emails. Don’t neglect any visitor or customer.
- Do you provide a product or service people need? See if you can describe what you offer in just a few sentences. Otherwise, you have something people don’t have a need for.
- Are you simply copying the competition or following trends? Recreating the success of others works, but it won’t get you too far, especially with how inter-connected all online businesses and blogs are.
Once you understand what is preventing you from becoming successful, you’ll be able to change your method for growing your business. No matter whether you focus on visitors, readers, or customers, keep these few basic ideas in mind when you write your next post or promote your blog.