Trust is not transitive

Andy Beard is asking his RSS subscribers… “Do you trust my advice?“   Andy asks because he’s been checking the “follow through” on his promotion of other people’s products and has been disappointed in the final figures.

The very first comment to the post went along the lines of “Yes, I trust you… but just because I trust you doesn’t mean I trust this other guy.”

BINGO!

Andy uses RSS to communicate with his blog readers.  The other resource uses email.

I know that I am MUCH more likely to subscribe to a site’s RSS feed than I am to sign up for an email list.  Why?  Because I know I have CONTROL over the RSS…  I simply remove it from my iGoogle and it’s gone.

Email, on the other hand, is forever.  Once I’ve subscribed to your list… how do I know you’ll honor my unsubscribe request?  (This is truly a TRUST issue.)

Case in point, I signed up for an email list and then unsubscribed.  I didn’t receive emails for a few weeks but now, suddenly, they are starting to come in again from this source.  HELLO!?!?!  I unsubscribed!!!  Why am I hearing from you again?

Why did I unsubscribe from the newsletter?  Well, because the information provided didn’t live up to the “hype”.  They broke a fragile new trust by not delivering what they promised.  As a result, I unsubscribed from the newsletter.  Surprise, surprise…. they’ve broken their promise yet again.  The best predictor of future behavior once again is past behavior.

Trust is a slippery critter.  It’s tough to earn and easy to lose. 

Just this morning, I had a “difficult” conversation via email with a client.  Had I not established a trusting relationship with her, my “advice” could have been viewed as self serving, even though it was not given with my needs in mind but rather her future.  My client wanted to take a “break” from blogging and was going to take down her web site for 6-8 months, relaunching it next year.

My reply was along the lines of “ACK!  Leave your blog up!  You’ve got a PR of 3, a decent Alexa ranking after less than 6 months of blogging!  Don’t take it down because you can’t continue to post every day!!!”

It would have been easy for her to think I simply didn’t want to lose her hosting business.   That wasn’t the case, but I knew it could appear that way.  I was relieved to read her response.  Instead of seeing it as a “sales” tactic,  this was part of her reply:

I trust what you say. You have been nothing but honest and helpful for me.

WHEW!!!!  

I’m the daughter of a car dealer… and sometimes I come across, well, like I grew up with a car dealer as a father.  I had to “sell” and “close” all the time.  I grew up believing that “No is simply the customer asking for more information.  I was relieved that I had built up enough trust with this client that she could see that leaving her blog up was in HER best interests, not mine.

In other words, I had earned her trust.  It’s something I don’t take lightly.   When you earn someone’s trust, you shouldn’t take it lightly either.

The Numbers Game: Hits vs Visitors

As I was walking a blog client through her “webalizer” stats program last week and the subject came up of “hits” vs “visits“.

During the EARLY days of the internet, we loved us our hit counters! My early sites ALL contained a nice little hit counter at the bottom of the page. Those hit counters would measure every time the browser would “hit” the server and ask to have that image file delivered. It was definitely a “feel good” kind of thing to have. Feeling ignored on the internet? Check your hit counter. Fortunately, in those days, it would measure and count the web master’s visits as well! Want to goose your “hit count”? Click “reload” a few (hundred) times.

The same principle is in effect today. A single page may “hit” the server many times during a page load. So the client who looks at his/her 40, 000 hits may be surprised to learn that there were only a few hundred visitors generating all those “hits”.

Sabahan.com has a GREAT post outlining hits vs unique visitors in great detail. (Reason #1021 why I love blogging. I can link to his post instead of reinventing the wheel here!)

A few days later, I was searching for the origins of the quote, “A billion here, a billion there… before you know it, you’re talking about REAL money”. (Turns out, according to the Washington Post, the quote is attributed to late Sen. Everett Dirksen, who claims he was misquoted and liked it so much, he never bothered to deny it.)

During that search, (which I originally thought was MILLIONS not BILLIONS) I stumbled across this forum post: 2 million hits/ month and no real money

In that forum discussion the posting web master, who as it turns out had 11,000 VISITORS creating those 2,000,000 hits on his server, learned that 11,000 unique visitors each month is a $50 per month proposition.

I recently had THAT kind of conversation with another client as well.

Client: “Oh, by the way, I’m going to monetize my blog with Adsense!”

Me: “Wha, wha, WHAT?” (We’d just picked and “customized” a theme template… one that DIDN’T support Adsense! Reason #22 why I encourage new bloggers to go with a pre-made template for starters.)

I recovered with, “Let’s wait until you hit 10K visitors per month before you launch Adsense.” That seemed to satisfy him.

The numbers of potential web visitors is HUGE. Most of my clients’ are AMAZED at the sheer NUMBER of visitors a moderately successful web site generates. Which is why I encourage my people to begin by fishing in “small” ponds, a.k.a. to TIGHTLY target their niche! Because who wants to work hard enough to attract over 10,000 visitors to only earn $50 for your efforts!

On the web, experience could be your worst enemy.

J. Paul Getty once said, “In times of rapid change, experience could be your worst enemy.”

The other day, I was on the phone with a client when he told me, “I get complimented all the time on how “ahead of the curve” I am with my blog, but truth be told, I’m just following you. ” Later in the conversation, we began talking about his former web developer, to which he said, “He’s just satisfied making HTML web sites. The thing is, I don’t know of anyone who has made the jump from HTML web sites to blogs like you have.”

In times of rapid change, experience can be your worst enemy.

I wish I could say that I “saw” the explosive growth of blogging coming and jumped onto that bandwagon. I didn’t. I was literally FORCED into blogging by a client of mine.

Last year (December 2006) I published my first book, Beyond the Niche: Essential Tools You Need to Create Marketing Messages that Deliver Results. Unfortunately, I began writing the book in March 2005. By March 2006, I began to recognize that the book was NEVER going to happen if I didn’t clear some “emotional clutter” that kept getting in my way. I hired one of my clients at the time to help guide me.

Ernie Moore was a long time client and I knew he was the one to get me moving forward on my book project. Ernie suggested that I launch a blog to help build “buzz” for the book.

My response: “UGH! Blogs are for people who DO NOT KNOW how to code in HTML!”

However, Ernie was relentless (That’s what a coach is supposed to do!) and wouldn’t let me off the hook. Despite the fact that I had a perfectly good HTML web site waiting to promote my book (Find My Niche.com) I purchased a domain name and launched Beyond Niche Marketing to promote my book.

It took my blog 9 months to emerge from the Google Sandbox, which fortunately just happened to be just a month after my book was published. Last June I ran the log files for both sites and was STUNNED at what I saw. The blog gets 10X+ the number of unique visitors the HTML site gets. VISITORS!!! Not hits… VISITORS! Those visitors also tend to return time and time again.
The reasons the blog site is SO much more popular than the HTML site include:

• It’s so easy to add a post (a.k.a. FRESH CONTENT) that I do it more often there than I do the HTML site.
• More content = more opportunities to appear in searches
• Blogs make it easy to trade links with other blog site owners (increasing PR and authority of the site).
• The Semilogic theme and plug ins make the site very attractive to the search engines.

The thing is, looking back the development/promotion of HTML site, I worked HARD to get the PR up to 3. HARD! Meanwhile, the rise of the blog site to a PR 4 was positively EFFORTLESS in comparison.

Thus my “conversion” from an HTML web developer to a blog FANATIC.

“In times of rapid change, experience could be your worst enemy.”

Don’t let experience be your worst enemy!

I didn’t think this was a secret… but maybe it is

The secret I’m talking about: “You’ve got to spend money to make money.”

I followed Andy Jenkins and Brad Fallon’s Stompernet launch. I was totally mesmerized by the “show”. Even though I didn’t buy into their system, I did end up on their email list.

In their latest missive, they introduce their readers to Eben W. Pagan, better known by his stage name David DeAngelo. According to Wikipedia, Pagan is the founder of “Double your Dating” and runs an e-mail newsletter which is distributed to over 1 million subscribers.

Now I could launch into how Pagan has tightly targeted his niche market and found outstanding success… but I won’t. Instead, I’d like to present for your consideration, the following from Brad and Andy’s newsletter:

. . One of the guys (from Pagan’s seminar) took ONE LITTLE IDEA and by the end of the week had made $66,000 in new revenue. I’m talking about an idea that took 5 minutes to explain - Pretty good return on his $10,000 investment, don’t you think?

Thank you Brad and Andy for providing a wonderful illustration of the “you have to spend money to make money”.

I remember when I was launching my business a decade ago. When I began, I was a very, very poor business person.  I was hesitant to spend $35 to register my business’ domain name, that’s how “tight fisted” I was 10 years ago.  Now, I’m all for boot strapping…. I still “bootstrap” to this day… but way back when…. I expected to make money without spending a dime. Fortunately, I was a quick learner who was willing to work long and hard providing exceptional service for my clients so my business did survive my lack of business acumen.

I’ve read two quotes that literally changed my thinking during these past 10 years.  Below are paraphrases of each because I can’t remember the source:

1. You either have a lot of time or a lot of money.  If you find you you’re short of both, then you’re either spending your time or your money unwisely.

2.  Time is truly worth more than money.  You can always get more money, you can NOT relive a single minute of time.

I’ve come a long way in the past decade.  I’ve survived the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” delivered via various means during those years.   Despite the fact that I double majored in business and economics in college…. the school of Hard Knocks turned out to be one of my greatest teachers.  I guess that’s why I have such a soft spot for those bootstrapping entrepreneurs who are just starting out.

You win some, you lose some

This week I lost a client who has been with me for four years. I’m pretty sure she was surprised at the enthusiasm with which I accepted the termination of my services.

I work with very few large companies.  Most of my clients are solo entrepreneurs and they tend to fall into two categories.

The first category are those who understand that the web is just another tool to put to use in building their business, whatever that business may be.  I just got a fan letter from one of those clients the same day.  She’s like a sponge, soaking up every bit of information and hungry for more.  I’m more than happy to oblige.

The second category is comprised of those who expect this whole web thing to work on autopilot for them.

In the termination letter from the client of four years, she informs me that she’s found a web developer who is going to create “a first class HTML web presence”… one that will have her at the top of the search engines for her ultra competitive terms with the only investment being a trade of services.  She’s thrilled that she’s finally going to get the autopilot web site of her dreams and she’s not going to pay a single penny out of pocket.

Oh, but there is a glitch. Could I change the DNS settings on her domain name for her?   (No settings provided…. it’s the hosting account that comes standard with her ISP.)

Anyone reading this who knows how basic changing DNS settings is to the whole “web development” process is rolling their eyes right now.  For those who aren’t familiar with how basic changing DNS settings is in the web development process…. it is like a race car driver not knowing how to buckle his safety restraints.  It is like the concert pianist you just hired to play for your reception asking for help in finding middle C.

I feel for my departing client.  I really do.  I too have to fight the urge… in my case it’s the desire to believe that I really can lose every spare pound of body fat without changing my diet, surgery or increasing my exercise.  However, I fight that urge and instead of pulling out my credit card and picking up the phone,  I lace up my walking shoes and head out the door.

I’ve said it before… there is no such thing as a set it and forget it successful web site.  Anyone who tells you differently is trying to sell you fat loss without diet, surgery or exercise.

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