Learn Blogging & Affiliate Marketing with Rosalind Gardner
Emails are an interruptive form of marketing. They are on the top with TV and radio ads when it comes to annoying customers. Month after month, these emails find themselves in trash bins of unsuspecting human beings who collectively select promotional mails and simply delete them. You do that too, don’t you?
Darlene Ford of SunTrust Bank had this to say:
Business is easy to think about but hard to run. It’s like a marathon and it’ll take a lot more from you than just the intention, the thought, and the execution. If you are planning to sell your goods online, there’s a lot more to it than just an idea, sourcing (or manufacturing) products, and making a profit. Is it really that easy? Or is it tough and competitive enough to discourage you even before you begin?
To start with, you have the basics to cover. As Mark Hayes points out on the Shopify blog, you have due diligence to find the perfect product to base your business on. Mark has quick examples to help you figure out your potential market size, the nature of your competition, ways to source the products, finding target customers, and setting pricing strategies.
Matt Winn of Volusion also has a comprehensive guide to help you sell your products online. But all that is a part of just “figuring things out.†The hustle, however, is a lot harder than it seems…
No matter what product you choose to sell, you need faith and absolute confidence in your products. If you were an authorized reseller or a premium reseller for Apple products and recommended accessories, you wouldn’t have a lack of confidence for sure. Instead, if you’re selling products that you make on your own or if you’re a reseller of less popular brands, it just gets harder to be honest and straightforward.
That, however, is not the only ingredient of the secret sauce. You’d have to know your products inside out before you can try explaining them to customers. Being a “product expert†gives you the additional advantage of being able to emphasize all the features and benefits of your product and even cross-sell or upsell other products.
For instance, your product descriptions could include suggestions that customers wouldn’t know unless you tell them.
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Obviously, you know a lot more about your products than your customers do (despite tons of information about products online).
Just be honest, upfront and vocal.
If you have a retail establishment with an ecommerce website, you can’t expect your customers to visit your store and then wait for them to go back home so that they can visit your online store to buy. If they made up their mind to make that purchase, the best time to allow them to buy is now. For this to happen, there needs to be a “bridge.â€
Customers walking in could touch, feel, try, and muse over your products. When they are ready to buy, you could bring the web to them. Using real world ecommerce integrated POS solutions, small businesses can build those bridges to help sell quickly and seamlessly. You can sell both online and offline with a simple iPad app, while being able to track inventory and purchases, and allowing customers to pay with multiple options.
Waiting for your customers to go back only so that they can connect to your store is disastrous for your business.
So, this customer walks into your store (or visits your ecommerce store). She surfs for a while. She browses through your products, adds a few to the shopping cart, and finally checks out (hopefully). But then, what else is happening? You see, making a purchase is an exciting thing to do: Most shoppers love the fact that that product they just bought is going to be theirs! This is an emotion that’s worth investing in for businesses.
Have social media buttons placed strategically at the time of checkout. Allow your customers to brag about their purchase. Open gateways for them to recommend products to friends and let the world know about their buy.
None of this is going to happen with the sharing gates closed. You have to facilitate these interactions and social engagements. Are you going to do it right?
Don’t get fixated on any one kind of digital marketing channel. For instance, don’t obsess about SEO, which includes stuffing product descriptions with keywords and links. One “keyword†in the product description (most likely the brand name) that piques customers’ interest is more than sufficient.
Focus on strategic content that does a lot more than manipulate the search engines. Work with your engagement strategy and brand conversation management on social media using tools such as Buffer for Business or HootSuite. Aim to please and persuade your visitors (rather than search bots) because income traffic won’t mean a thing if you can’t convert.
Work on the digital marketing channels that work best for you. Blogging works well, and so does creating and sharing parallel content such as slide decks, product videos, and tutorials. You can even have a self-managed community around your brand or products using a tool such as GetSatisfaction.
You can’t work with “perceived†feedback. While you can think of suitable upgrades on enhancements for your products, nothing works better than your own customers giving you criticism, advice or tips for improvement.
Then again, you’ll need a way to make it happen. Start by building simple input forms or questionnaires using Google Forms, Wufoo, or SurveyMonkey. You can also gain precious insights into user behavior by taking advantage of tools such as Qualaroo for surveying visitors while they’re browsing specific sections of your site and Olark for engaging them in a live chat.
Product improvement, if there has to be such a thing, ought to be quick and responsive.
Of course, all of this work is recurring. There’s no such thing as set it and forget it. It takes years of continuous work before you get anywhere close to your goals. It’s doable but difficult. Are you up for it?
Businesses are a result of meticulous planning, flawless execution, and an unflinching commitment to results.
You can’t do with anything less.
Entrepreneurship is all about leap of faith. Every small business owner does it. The dirty secret is that these leaps of faith are not one-time occurrences. Small business owners have to do it again, and again.
While serial entrepreneurs almost ways jump into the new almost as if it’s as easy as it is to breathe, many other business owners have to grapple with the new, surmount new challenges everyday, run their business, embrace new ways to market products/services, and more.
Yet, doing all of that is “mediocre†for entrepreneurs. Assuming you want more out of your entrepreneurial efforts, there’s so much more to do.
Here are some big ideas for your small business:
The “Small†is in the Mindset
There’s fun in being small. You can be agile, quick, and highly receptive to change. You could make decisions in a second. Most people mistake “small†to being “no good.†Small is certainly beautiful. However, no one ever said that you don’t have to leverage to be small. You could be a tiny one-person operation and still have as much leverage as you like. The “small†and “big†is in the mindset, and that has nothing to do with profitability.
Find ways to leverage your business using people or technology or both. For instance, hire help to manage and organize your operations. Have ambitious sales people connect with partner channels to drive up your sales. Hire help for any aspect of business that you are not good at where you’d inadvertently spent tons of time, such as accounting, legalese, shipping and logistics.
Scale. Grow. Orchestrate.
Whatever you do, grow organically. Make it all a part of your business plan from the start. Create your business plan outline in such a way that it accommodates for growth and accounts for cash flow. Your business plan shouldn’t be a professional piece of writing only to be forgotten. Much like musicians use their music notes, you have to use your plans and blueprints to orchestrate the growth of your business.
You aren’t in a race, you are in business. Take your time to grow and scale. Do it with your money and not from external funding.
Go Ecommerce
“Oh, we do have a website for our business…â€
“Our website looks awesome! Plus, we are on Facebook, FourSquare, and Twitter.â€
Good start there, but that isn’t enough.
No matter which business you are in, it’s time for to go ecommerce. It’s a 300+ billion dollar opportunity in the U.S alone. Add the world’s markets to this number and you’d only wince at the size and opportunity.
It’s easy to setup ecommerce stores today thanks to technology and the low-barriers to entry. Given that you are already in business (whether you sell products or services), it’s only a matter of adding the internet and the mobile as much-needed channels for your business growth. The decision to go digital to sell doesn’t even have to be strategic for you to let it marinate in your head or discuss with partners (if any).
It’s a “Do it now or good luck Chuck†situation.
Why are You Local while Global Awaits?
“So, we are a local business operating in downtown Manhattan. We are this, and we are that.â€
“We are a fish tackle business operating to serve this beautiful, small, and enthusiastic community of fishing enthusiasts!â€
“We sell trinkets, widgets, and a host of other stuff locally…â€
Unless you are an entrepreneur who is extremely happy with a local business and has no intentions of growing the businesses larger than it is, every other business owner gets into the: will grow, profit more, and create more wealth category.
If so, why stay local?
There’s only so much market opportunity as long as you stay local. You’d also have stiff local competition that eats into the already diminutive size of the market available to you. Kunal Sarda, co-founder and COO of VerbalizeIt, wrote on Forbes.com that 96% of the world’s consumers live outside the U.S. Go multi-lingual, multi-national, and deal with multiple currencies. The rules are changing. Your country isn’t the only country in the world where people need your products and services.
Instead, you could reach to nearby cities or spread your wings to the whole country. If you could work a way to stretch beyond borders and go global, your market size grows that much bigger. Taking the ecommerce route is an obvious first choice but imagine the size of the target market you’d have if you plan to go global!
Grow Your Marketing Up
Small businesses think small with most aspects of their business. It’s no wonder that E-myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber was such a popular book. Since marketing fuels capitalism and helps you grow your business, you need to grow up in thought, form, and function when it comes to marketing.
It’s time to walk the rope and feel the flinch, as Julien Smith writes about in his book The Flinch.
If you never advertised online through Google AdWords, do it now. Increase your exposure with social media ads or sponsored updates. Did you ever try hiring global talent for creative or marketing services? Try outsourcing.
Experiment with landing pages, native advertising, media buying, leveraging ad networks, and retargeting. Kristy L. Campbell, director of marketing and Communications at Manta, also has a few tips to mobilize your marketing: dare to go back to traditional media, make sure you stay on the grid, create mobile opt-in programs, and tap into social media.
Stay small but think big. Growing into the “big†happens not by chance but by thought, execution, and commitment. Mistakes are a part of the package. Assuming you want success and growth, thinking is your ticket to the destination you have in your mind.
I’ll say it upfront: blogging isn’t exactly the best way to make money. There are some bloggers who did make it big but those are an exception. Most bloggers find it extremely hard to pull in revenue through their blogs. John Bardos makes an honest confession on JetSetCitizen, and we can feel it.
John said it out aloud that blogging is a lousy way to make money; most bloggers won’t tell you. There’s a sense of shame, self-aggrandizement, and fear of ridicule associated with failure. As long as we are human, coming out in the open about failure isn’t exactly natural.
Yet, blogging is not a lost cause. The cause is not lost as long as you realign your intent, passion, determination, and entrepreneurial ambitions. Here’s how you can still make it big with blogging:
Forget “Blogging,†Think “Publishingâ€
 Blogging is self-publishing. It’s the “self†that hurts the publishing part though. Individual bloggers have seen notable success. Take a look at what Gary Vaynerchuk (wine magnate cum social media evangelist), Ann Smarty (prolific blogger and founder of MyBlogGuest), or our very own super-marketer Ros Gardner have done, and that’s proof enough. Most people forget the years of sacrifice put in by these amazing bloggers, not to mention the fact that they started early, and then make the mistake of doing exactly what they’ve already done in more or less same niches.
When you start retailing online, you don’t compete with Amazon and eBay. In the same way, don’t bother trying to beat already established blogs. Take the publishing route and take on niches that haven’t been covered as much. Avoid personal finance, travel, health, making money online, and “blogging†as your niches to begin with.
Don’t Go It Alone
 Blogging is a way for individuals to start publishing for themselves. It is also a great way for companies to publish. Companies either hire in-house personnel or freelance copywriters to blog; most individual bloggers don’t have this luxury.
If don’t involve others in contributing to your blog, the fun that blogging is ends right there. Blogging alone is like getting a fancy job that doesn’t even pay. Being passionate about a topic and writing about it for a lifetime is something else. If you have to make money from blogging, you absolutely have to get in the professionals. Find experts, interested and opinionated readers, freelance writers, influencers and others to write for you.
That’s the only way you can scale.
Let Users Generate Content, So You Don’t Have To
Typically, you write blog posts that others read. If your blog becomes popular, you see healthy discussions around your posts that are pleasantly (and sometimes profitably) interactive.
That’s not enough, though. You’d need a strong input from users to create user generated content that has value in itself, both for those who contribute and those that read and consume.
The rise of social media can be attributed to the power of user-generated content. Quora, Urbanspoon, Glassdoor, and many more sites are all examples of reviews, comments and visitor-blogging ideas that propelled themselves on the power of user-generated content.
Everyone likes to be where the action is. We all want to know what others think. Combining the power of collective inputs on little-known areas is insanely powerful. The most popular publications tap into and depend on it. Why shouldn’t you too?
Find Parallel Paths for Publishing
Once you start blogging like it’s a business, you expand your scope for publishing. What used to be text and images on your blog now finds a way to extend into videos, podcasts, webinars, seminars, physical events, training courses, guest blog posts, interviews, and books.
If you have to make it big with blogging, you’ve got to think big first. Seek opportunities to publish a book, offer free training (on whatever it is that you blog about) for your readers, create on-location events, create slide decks, present them and put them up on SlideShare for people to view them for all eternity, share your videos on YouTube/Vimeo, or start a forum.
Your blog, given today’s state of blogging, is too small to make an impact. You have no choice but to grow big.
Run It Like a Business
When you start a business, you think of hiring staff, creating systems, creating value, and selling value in exchange for money. For bloggers, value lies in “information.†Instead of operating a never-ending avalanche of information conveyor belt all by yourself, run your blog like a business.
Think of monetizing your blog, selling information in exchange for dollars, paid subscription for access to your blog, and producing pay for access content.
GigaOm did that. Can you?
Plan for Revenue, Long-term
Read posts on “blogging†and you’ll hear some people lament: “avoid advertising initially,†“don’t look to monetize,†and “give and then take†– all of that is true. You don’t have to display advertising but you can “plan†to monetize. Create long-term goals on how you intend to make money out of your blog.
Brent Weaver, a web designer who runs his own agency at Hotpressweb.com, first started BCGurus.com as a blog where he’d publish all things connected to Adobe Business Catalyst. Later, the blog turned into a veritable source of information (including videos, cheat sheets, and downloadable information) exclusively for other business catalyst members.
Today, BCGurus is a thriving community complete with the original blog, directory, and even a marketplace for BC templates.
Brent didn’t plan everything from the start, but he did have a vision. He wanted the fruit of his labor, and he now uses BCGurus as a business model by itself while creating tons of precious social proof for his own business.
The common thread is that all popular blogs are monetized. They are built to bring in revenue. None of that happened in a day, though.