July 28, 2010

Blogging for your business – It’s a numbers game

In Blogging for your business I shared that one of the reasons a business blog is a valuable business building tool is because you can quickly and easily publish content to the web.  The value of this ability is often lost upon those who don’t eat/breathe/sleep the web.

The Web Game is Just Another Numbers Game

Most “ordinary” business people think that a single web site with only three or four pages can effectively compete when it comes to the web.  What they frequently overlook is that many of the results returned on the first few pages of a search query are often web pages which are part of mega sites with hundreds – in some cases – thousands of pages.

Take for example – Wikipedia.  Do a search for specific information and chances are – a Wikipedia article will  be listed on the first few pages of the search.  According to Wikipedia – the official count for the number of articles which appear there numbers in the 750,000 range. Because these articles are very specific in scope – they often provide exactly the information a web visitor is seeking.

This is why I sometimes have been known to snarl and foam at the mouth when a blog owner who has written 5 blog posts over the past year complains to me that his or her blog is not “working” because it’s not appearing at the top of highly competitive searches.

Winning the web game is in part a numbers game.  Wikipedia has over three quarters of a million “articles” in there competing for a top spot when the search engines provide a list of links containing the information the web visitor has entered to search.   Most of those articles link liberally to other articles on the site.  Because the articles are frequently displayed on the first page of various searches – blog owners and webmasters liberally link to the articles as well.

Compare this “winning” web strategy with the typical “set it and forget it” static web site preferred by most business owners.  The business owner creates a web site and populates the three to ten pages with the content a copywriter created years ago for the company brochure.  The content was stale before it was published to the web – and it continues to languish in the deepest, darkest corners of the web.   It’s like buying 10 tickets for the lottery on the day you launched the website – and then not buying any more tickets yet expecting to win.

Winning the web game is a numbers game.  The business blog with 300 blog posts – created over the course of three years – stands a much better chance of coming up on what is known as a “long tail search”.  Long tail searches are words not searched upon frequently.  Often, these “long tail search” terms are often performed by people who are actively researching a purchasing decision.

For example, 1,000,000 people used the term “lower back pain” to search the web last month.  That’s a LOT of people searching for information on lower back pain.  However, while there are a lot of people searching for the term “lower back pain” there are relatively few who are searching for “lower back pain relief in Boca Raton, Fl.” If you’re a chiropractor – you want to be sure your business web presence is one that is seen by the person who types those words into a search engine looking for answers.

If you’re a chiropractor with a blog though – it’s easy to create a blog post on how chiropractic can help relieve lower back pain.  By the simple act of creating this informative blog post – you instantly create an “article” much like the 750,000 articles which are featured on Wikipedia.  This blog post joins your other blog posts – where you’ve written about how you’ve helped patients with severe lower back pain, chronic lower back pain, and even lower left back pain.  Before you know it, by simply blogging about the different conditions you see in your practice – you’ve created a robust library of helpful “articles” (a.k.a. blog posts) on various specific topics which your prospective patients might use to find information on the web.

Will you create such a robust repository overnight?  Of course not – but one of the best reasons to begin blogging for your business is over the course of time – you can create a robust online resource which will continue to provide a stream of prospective patients long after you’ve written the initial post.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.  Start blogging today so tomorrow your blog posts have a chance of “showing up” when your prospective customers/clients go searching for answers on the web.

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July 19, 2010

Blogging for Your Business

When I say “blogs” – many business owners start seeing horrible visions in their mind’s eye.   Some see self-obsessed, narcissistic egomaniacs for whom the ultimate goal is fame – or infamy – either one, as long as people remember their name.  Others see blogging as a six inch thick chain, locking them to their computer – forced to compose dozens of blog posts daily without the benefit of spell or grammar check.

However, when I talk about blogging for your business, I don”t see the distorted visions most business owners see.  What I see when I talk about business blogging is a cost effective, powerful and affordable business building tool.

Most of today’s popular blogging software programs began as CMS – Content Management Software.  Their express purpose was to make publishing information to the web quick and easy for those who didn’t want to learn the intricacies of HTML, CSS, FTP and a dozen other alphabet soup web terms which were needed to get your marketing message published to the web not so very long ago.

So when I’m talking about blogging for your business – I’m talking about using software to make it easy to get your marketing message onto the web.    When you see an egomaniac who is using the software for shameless self promotion – your thought as a business owner should be, “If that idiot can operate a blog to get his/her message onto the web – I can use a blog to do something useful – like educate my customers via the web.”

While wild visions of colorful – and sometimes offensive characters – may fill your mind’s eye when it comes to business blogging – in reality business blogging is actually best suited for those with an eye to the future.  Business blogs do a great job of building authority and authority (authority =  trust + power… the power to motivate people to take action.) takes a lot longer to create than a fleeting case of infamy.

Creating a business blog post today takes a certain amount of time – which causes many business owners to join in the battle cry of  I don’t have time to blog.  However, while your blog posts do take some time to create – they continue to live on your blog for as long as your blog is in existence – and sometimes beyond as  it seems the internet never forgets.

Imagine if the radio ad you ran last week could continue to be aired indefinitely – and it only aired when a radio listener announced to the radio that he/she was interested in the products and services your business provides.  That’s exactly the way your business blog posts can work to promote your business.

So when you hear the term “blogging for your business” try to erase from your mind visions of reminiscent of an episode of Jerry Springer – and instead view business blogging through a new lens.  Business blogging is a way for your business to quickly and easily communicate with prospective customers via the web.  The informative blog post you create today will live on to continue working with other blog posts – bringing real customers to your business.  That’s the real beauty of business blogging.

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July 12, 2010

Treating people like people

When you start treating people like people, they become people.  ~Paul Vitale

Social media is becoming a force to be reckoned with in the world of business. The consumer controlled conversations happening online are literally reshaping the way brands are perceived.  Consumers have more power today than ever before in history.  You’d think that would be a good thing.  You might even think that everyone from marketing managers to CEOs would be mining those conversations to get a “ground zero” view of how their brand is perceived.

Instead a common reaction to this burgeoning phenomenon – other than the popular ignoring it and hoping it will go away – is to try desperately to depersonalize social media which  is – by nature – a truly personal phenomenon.

Figures Lie and Liars Figure

One way to depersonalize social media is to focus upon the stats.  Make sure you only pay attention to statistics that can be easily imported into impressive PowerPoint graphics like graphs and pie charts.    Focusing on visitors, RSS subscribers and comment numbers is a great way to depersonalize your blog.

The bean counters in companies love stats – and quit honestly statistics have value – but allowing statistics to take center stage is a great way to depersonalize your social media presence.

One of the first places I start when I work with a client is to get a handle on the “stats” of their web presence.  I once had a client who had a 75% sign up rate for her email newsletter who contacted me because she wanted to change the copy one her web site to “improve” her newsletter sign up numbers.  Instead of changing her copy – we took a look BEHIND the stats.  She wasn’t getting a lot of traffic to her site – but the traffic she was getting was tightly targeted and very interested in her products and services.   The stats in this case gave us an opportunity to dig deeper – and discover what the “real” problem was.

The “real” problem – by the way – was that she had been making the rounds of the “internet marketing gurus” who were promising her quick, exponential, sustainable and profitable business growth.  (The preceding statement is an intentional oxymoron.  No morons were harmed in the creation of that statement.)

By digging into the “stats” – we could see that she was on track to create slow but sustainable and profitable growth.

Bots – Bots – Bots

Another way to depersonalize social media is to employ bots – automated programs which are poor attempts at mimicking human behavior.  Bots can be do -gooders.  Without bots you’d have no way to find the content you want on the trillions of pages available online.  However, bots can be evil.  Bots are why you have to enter characters displayed in an image to access content across the web.

In the early days of social media – you could purchase a bot program which would automatically go through and “befriend” people on MySpace.  Launch the program today and by next week you could have thousands of MySpace “friends” for your business. The problem with this strategy is that none of those “friends” – none of those connections – were “real”.

Those easily gained connections were great for the stats – they were great for inflating super sized egos – but they were absolutely awful when it came to conversions.

The real value of a blog for your business.

Blogs are great for your business because you can begin composing the never ending story of what your business does for real people.  As you create those blog posts they can actually rise to the top of long tail search queries – you know, the kind of search queries made by prospective customers who are seeking real information before they make an online purchase.

Then – when people who are actually looking for the products and services your business offers can – GASP- actually make a connection with you via your blog.   They can read – and then – they can ask a question – make a comment or even subscribe to your RSS feed to see when you share more information they need to know in order to buy.

So often – in the “web world” – we are guilty of using the term “visitors” or “users” instead of calling them what they really are – PEOPLE. In her blog post The Benefits Of Visualizing Your Future Customers, Cath Lawson shares that visualizing your future customers is a technique used by some of the most successful people in the world.  She points out that by visualizing your customers – as people and not faceless “visitors” – you can begin to shape your business to meet your customer’s needs.  I go on and on about the subject of viewing your customers as people with Goals – Desires – and Problems (GDP) and how to create marketing messages which speak to your target audience’s GDP in my book Beyond the Niche: Essential Tools You Need to Create Marketing Messages that Deliver Results.

You can’t expect a mindless bot to generate an insightful diagnosis based on a simple log file analysis.  However, when you start treating social media like it’s powered by people – people who want real connections – you’ll find social media is literally a goldmine of information you can use to connect with customers and build your business.

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