Tag Archives: online marketing

The Trouble With Getting Your Friends, Family & Local People To View Your Blogs

Just over 12 years ago, me and a couple of friends had a weekly video conversation using Google Hangouts (how many of you remember that?), calling ourselves the Google Hangout Crew. Most of the time it was just the 3 of us, but sometimes we’d invite someone else onto the chat to talk with us and share their opinions on the topics of the day.



Sheryl Loch, Brian Hawkins, and me

On one of those days, which was always a Sunday, we decided to discuss the topic of blogging for local folks and businesses, and the issues we all seem to have in getting those people to take a look at what we write. This wasn’t a new topic for me actually, as I talked about it first in 2009 when I wrote a post leading with If You Can’t Get Your Family And Friends To Subscribe… and again in 2011 when I asked Why Aren’t You Well Known Where You Live?

This conversation was slightly different than our general conversations, but the overall theme is the same. I always make the recommendation to businesses that if they want to increase their search engine optimization and the potential for doing more business locally and online, that having a blog can do wonders for each. Just being a player in the online game gives you a great boost in local search, which is a great thing, but the question was do those visitors read your stuff, and if not why not? For that matter, why don’t they ever comment on any of it?

I tend to want to look at my own sites, and I’m going to share statistics on two of them from that moment in time. I request that, if you have the time, that you check out the video at the end of this post where we talked about it all, and the other site I’m going to talk about that’s mentioned in the video; the statistics I’m sharing is what they were back in 2012, as I haven’t put much effort into figuring out how to track my Google statistics in the last couple of years.

Anyway, for this blog, the month’s stats at the time showed that there were 32 visits from what I’d call the local area, which includes Rochester, which is about 75 miles away. If I only included the Syracuse area, I’d have had to remove 11 visits. That’s pretty poor if you ask me.

New York state is my highest volume state, and the majority of visitors were coming from New York City (which makes sense), but that’s not quite local. I consider this my flagship blog, even though it wasn’t the highest ranked blog at the time. I didn’t have many local visitors who were subscribed to the blog back then, which means I wasn’t sure where they were coming from, but I knew they weren’t subscribers at the time.

My other blog is called Syracuse Wiki, and it’s my local blog. It’s not a highly visited blog now, but even then it wasn’t seen by many local people, even when I wrote specific articles regarding those times when a bunch of us met up for some kind of frivolity, but I also didn’t and still don’t write a lot of posts there because I mainly write about local events and issues, and it helps when I can capture pictures regarding local events. I couldn’t gripe all that much because the visitors on that blog were 54% local, but I also knew that blog would attract way more people because it talked mainly about local topics.

This brings us back to the original issue and why it’s a problem. If you’re running a local business and you’re trying to get local people interested in what you do, what can you do to advertise yourself and get local business consumers? On the video above, I offered suggestions to companies that sell products, which includes coupons and lots of pictures, and even advertising their blogs in their stores and advertisements so people can keep up with new things they offer. It’s a great way to show off your personality, unless you don’t have one; I’m just sharing… lol

What about those of us who offer services, who don’t have offices outside of our homes or even if we do, we don’t own the space and thus are more limited with some of our banner advertising, if you will? Is there a way we can target our blogs so that it attracts local traffic and thus local business?

What about our friends and family members? One’s best advocates are always those close to us, but if we can’t get them engaged then can we legitimately hope to engage our community, no matter what we do? Truth be told, I have a page on Facebook called Mitch Mitchell’s Writings And Videos that’s been live for around 4 years, with only 55 subscribers, few of them local people. I have to own up to the fact that I haven’t advertised it as much as I did when I created it, but it gives me the opportunity to share some of my older articles here and there; in case you didn’t know, I’ve been writing online and off since 2001… whew!

I put the question out to all of you… at least I hope there’s an “all” instead of one or two readers; what do you do to help increase your online footprint? Do you blog, and if so how often? Do you create videos on YouTube and advertise them? Or, and this can work, do you comment on other people’s blogs or videos, making sure you link back to your blogs of videos or other online sources?

Let me know if you can; meanwhile, check out this video from over a decade ago (Google Hangouts could be wonky, so I apologize up front if there are glitches lol):


 

Can I help your business or blog with some of the services I offer?

© May
I’m Just Sharing

You Probably Aren’t Going To Meet Her; It’s Not Important

Many years ago, I was in Las Vegas at a health care finance conference. I had a pretty good time, first time in many years I have to say; I had 3 conferences in Las Vegas, and visited two other times. This time around, I noticed something pretty wild that helps me with the premise of what I have to say today.

Photo by Jemingway via Flickr

If you’re anywhere on social media, you’re going to see a lot of images of some very good looking people. The overwhelming majority are pretty women, but sometimes it’s a good looking guy (I suppose; I don’t notice the guys that often lol). They’re extremely good looking, to the point of perfection sometimes. They just look too good to be true.
Continue reading You Probably Aren’t Going To Meet Her; It’s Not Important

Online Marketing, Blogging, Social Media… It’s All About Traffic

Let’s get the promotional stuff out of the way. In 2013, I was part of a group of 33 bloggers who was asked a question about how to increase blogger engagement. A few months ago I was part of another group of people that includes some fairly big names on a website called First Site Guide. We were all asked to give our 3 best blog monetization tips. I’m included with some fairly well known bloggers, few of whom know me; that’ll change one of these days (gotta have hope). Then about a month and a half ago I wrote in this space about trying to market my latest book on leadership titled Leadership Is/Isn’t Easy.

Freeways and Purple Buildings
Rick Hobson via Compfight

With all of that, you’d think I would know what I was doing. In a way I do, but in a way I don’t. Let me clarify that one. I know what I need to do to make more sales. I actually know what it takes to drive more traffic to my blog and my websites. After all these years, there’s lots of that kind of stuff I know.

However, what I wasn’t sure of was just how much more traffic I might need to make a dent in selling things online. You know, marketing online isn’t all that much different than real marketing, or offline marketing if you will. In both, it’s all about one or two things.

One, who you know that might be able to help you with things you’re not good at for the mutual benefit of both.

Two, the numbers, as in the more people you can reach, the more traffic you can drive, the better the opportunity you have to be somewhat successful.

The one thing I’ve never really known is just how many numbers you need online to make real sales. I have made a few sales over the years but, being more of a consultant offline than online, I’d never put together any numbers on my own.

Who did I get some numbers from? None other than my old buddy Lynn Terry of Click Newz. I asked her to take a look at the sales page for my book in her private Facebook group to see what I might be missing. She gave me some tips, then asked me how much traffic I’d had. I gave her the numbers and she said “That’s not nearly enough. You can’t make any real sales until you can get at least 3,000 to 10,000 people to your site.

In other words, it takes a lot of traffic, targeted or not, to make any real money online. And those numbers are pretty high.

Truth be told, the only numbers I can get are from Google Analytics, which are slightly suspect. My host, 1&1, doesn’t have Cpanel, which means I can’t look at any traffic figures from them unless I pay an extra fee; sigh. I don’t have a compelling reason to move to anyone else (so don’t even mention whose hosting your site because I’m not switching) because, no matter what people say, they’re as good as any other shared hosting company these days. For anyone who doesn’t believe me, just ask someone how many times Hostgator has gone down in the last couple of years and then ask me how many times 1&1 has gone down in the same period… to which I’d answer “none”.

Rushing to get home on Interstate 405
Matthew Rutledge via Compfight

I know an argument someone will make is “what about niche marketing and niched blogs. Whereas you have a better chance of attracting the people you’re trying to reach, it’s still about the numbers, about the traffic. My book was on leadership, so I reached out to people interested in leadership through my business blog, a couple of groups on LinkedIn concerning leadership, and my articles there on leadership. For me, the traffic wasn’t bad; for making sales, there just wasn’t close to being enough traffic.

Now, that doesn’t mean if you hit upon something that no one else is doing that you won’t make any money at all. What it means is if you’re hoping to make enough money to sustain yourself by selling things online, you need thousands of people stopping by who are interested in what you have to say, then in what you have to sell. Even if you know how to monetize your site, as my buddy Peter wrote in his post called The Truth About Blogging For Money, it’s about getting the right traffic, marketing the right thing, and touching the right nerves.

That’s mainly why I wrote 3 years ago that if you’re going to make any real money blogging you probably need to change your focus to “service” as opposed to product, even if you’re creating the product. Maybe if your product is teaching other people how to make money you’ll get some sales, or teaching almost anything with the right market. Otherwise, you need to decide whether you want to offer writing services, consulting services, training services, etc. That’s really what it’s all about.

Even Ryan Biddulph, who wrote the book and has the website about Blogging From Paradise, admits in the book (yes, I bought & read the book) that most of the money he makes is from freelance writing, although he’s starting to do well selling his books these days. Another famous guy, Darren Rowse, aka Problogger, became the first millionaire blogger by setting up forums and other sites with other marketers and becoming more of a comglomerate instead of purely blogging (selling photography equipment he wrote about didn’t hurt, as he made a lot of money that way, but it was the other stuff that took him over the top).

Let me be clear on this; all of that still takes a lot of traffic, but maybe not as much traffic to make enough money to live off if you pick the right thing you want to do that people will pay for. It’s something to be considered in any case. Give it some thought, and if you agree or disagree, let me know.
 

When “Scam” Is A Scam Of Sorts

Last weekend I finished reading a book by a guy named Brendon Burchard called the Millionaire Messenger, which was recommended by Mitchell Allen of Morpho Designs. It’s a wonderful book with great ideas on how to earn money by promoting yourself as an expert.

I was curious as to what Brendon looked like because he’s a fairly young guy; actually it turns out he’s around 38, but I had the feeling he was much younger. I go to Google and start typing in his name, and you know how it starts listing topics. The second thing that pops up with his name is followed by the word “scam“. I was curious so I decided to click on that link to see what I got.

There were a lot of links under that topic, more than 60,000 to be precise. A lot of the links had his name and “scam” in the topic line. A few asked if it was a scam, and a few mentioned it in the description of what we might see.

Y’all know me; it was time for some research. I clicked on about 10 of these things. I discovered that none of these people actually believed he or his books or ideas were a scam. Indeed, all of them praised the book and the man, even though some didn’t believe it was the type of thing for everyone.

Suddenly I felt scammed by all these people and all the other people that had the word “scam” and “Brendon Burchard” associated with each other. And yet, I know this type of thing isn’t the first time I’ve seen it.

Tell the truth; doesn’t it bother you when a headline totally misleads you? I see this type of marketing all the time; as a matter of fact, many of the so-called online marketing gurus tell you this is a great tactic to increase sales, whether you believe a product is a scam or not. I’ll admit that sometimes I’ll check out these types of sites, but I think it’s disingenuous to us, the readers. Hence my calling it a scam in and of itself.

For the record, this guy’s very legitimate, and he’s got a lot of energy. He’s written some other books as well. He talks about how he’s made millions and talks about pricing and marketing and getting the money you deserve to get. He also talks about everyone being an expert in something (with his definition of an expert being to know something others don’t know, even if you don’t know it all). He gives you both pointers and motivation. True, it’s really not for everyone, but what book or program is?

This had to follow up my post about not falling for scams, didn’t it? I dislike people who report something as a scam only to find out it’s not a scam; that’s the real scam. I wouldn’t buy anything from these people; I’d find someone else who was talking about that product legitimately and buy from them instead. I can’t imagine supporting anyone that tricked me like that; would you?

Or am I being too sensitive about this type of thing because I wouldn’t do it? What do you think?