MackCollier.com

by

What Are the Top 3-5 Reasons Why I Won’t Do Business With You?

45174111_0322090980_z

We are self-selecting buyers.  Thanks to the huge amounts of information, opinions and data available online, we can research any type of purchase decision beforehand, and know whether or not it makes sense for us.  This takes the ability of your brand to ‘sell’ me completely out of the equation.

Or does it?  Last week I spoke at the Bank Operations and Management Summit in Birmingham.  At one point I was discussing how to build blog readership with this room full of smart bankers.  I asked them to think about the reasons why someone chooses not to bank with them.  What are the top objections?  Take these objections or questions that their current and potential customers have, and answer them in a blog post.  When you address customer concerns and questions head on with your blog, you are re-inserting yourself into the sales cycle for that customer.  Your content then becomes a selling tool for your brand.  For example, if I don’t want to do business with your bank because I’ve heard that you charge too many checking fees, if you detail that you offer a ‘Zero Strings Attached’ checking account that charges no fees, that puts my concerns over fees at ease, and could win my business.

I do this as well with my own content.  One of the areas that has confused companies for years about social media marketing is questions about pricing.  Few companies had any idea what they should expect to pay for social media marketing services, so in 2010 I wrote a blog post detailing what companies could expect to pay for social media marketing services.  It has been viewed over 30,000 times.  In 2011 I updated the price list, which has now been viewed over 50,000 times, and which led to the biggest traffic day ever for my blog.  The most recent update to this list came in 2012 with my post ‘How Much Does Social Media Cost Companies in 2012?‘.  That post has currently been viewed almost 85,000 times, and is the most popular blog post I’ve ever written.

Another reason why it helps to address questions and concerns head-on is because it saves time for both you, and your customers.  Around 2009 or so I started getting regular emails from companies saying they needed someone to analyze how they were using social media, and tell them if there was anything they needed to be doing that they weren’t.  They’d ask if this was a service I provided, I’d explain that I did indeed offer a social media strategy audit for companies.

What I noticed after doing this a few times is that often, the company either wasn’t interested because they would realize they didn’t need an audit after talking to me, or they did, but didn’t have the budget at that time.  But along the way, we’d likely have multiple emails and schedule phone calls, etc.  Both myself and the company ended up investing a lot of time into trying to decide if we were right to work together, only to discover that it wasn’t a good fit.

To address this, I created a page here detailing my Social Media Strategy Audit.  This page details exactly what is included in the audit, as well as the exact price.  This way I am answering many of the questions that the potential client would have upfront.  As a result, the majority of the emails I now get about my Social Media Strategy Audit are similar to “Hi Mack, I read about the Social Media Strategy Audit you offer on your site, I think this might be a good fit for our company.  When can we talk to discuss the next steps?”  And it also helps me even when the customer doesn’t see that page because I can offer it for them as information.  A few weeks ago a company emailed me asking if I could do a social media strategy audit for them, and that they wanted to know when I could talk to them about it?  I emailed them back and gave them some times I could chat with them in the coming week, but also gave them a link to my Social Media Strategy Audit page and explained to them that it would have all the information on the service, as well as the price.  Within the hour the company emailed back and said they only had $500 to spend on an audit.  By simply listing my price I saved both of us the time we would have wasted on the phone call.

So if you want to apply this same method to your own blog, make a list of the top objections that people have for doing business with you.  And it doesn’t have to be your particular business, it could be for anyone that does your type of work.  For example, I think we can all give you several reasons why we hate going to the dentist.  If you’re a dentist, you could write blog posts that address each of these objections head on, which will put my mind at ease, and increase the chances of my doing business with you.

Plus the added bonus is that you are creating more valuable content for your blog’s readers!  Which means more readers and more exposure for your business!

So the big question: If this works, why don’t more (blogging) businesses do this?

Because addressing your flaws (real or perceived) is viewed by many businesses as a sign of weakness.  That’s why you rarely see businesses that are viewed to be ‘blue chip’ brands doing this.  The few that do are typically lesser known businesses looking to make a name for themselves.

But the reality is that when you address the reasons why a customer might not do business with you, you are helping to build trust with them.  Which means that the lesser known business is addressing the actual concerns of customers, so that makes it easier to trust them, and do business with them.

Which means one day that lesser known business will not only grow its customer base to reach yours, those customers will be more loyal to that business because they trust them.

The reality is that your competition is already doing this.  They are focused on the reasons why customers would NOT want to do business with you.  They are already focused on what they can offer that you cannot.

So figure out your flaws (even flaws that your customers perceive that don’t really exist) and the reasons why customers are reluctant to do business with you, and address them head-on.  Answer their questions for them and solve their problems, and you will win their business!

Pic via Flickr user Sister72

by

Tonight’s #Blogchat Topic is ‘Content Shock’ With Special Co-Host @TheSalesLion!

Marcus

Here’s the transcript from tonight’s #Blogchat!

Tonight (Feb. 9th, 2014), Marcus Sheridan, AKA @TheSalesLion will join us to discuss the idea of ‘Content Shock’ and whether or not it’s too late to start blogging.  You can read Marcus’ thoughts on ‘Content Shock‘ here.  One of the reasons why I wanted Marcus to co-host on this topic is because his views on supporting new bloggers and new voices dovetails with mine.  We both believe the entire online community is richer and more valuable for all when more people feel empowered to share their thoughts and ideas with the world.

Tonight’s #Blogchat will cover two areas:

From 8:00-8:30 Central we will discuss if it is too late to start blogging.  And if you start a blog today, what do you need to know?

From 8:30-9:00 Central we will discuss the idea of ‘Content Shock’, and how you can make your content stand out from the rest!

 

Please follow @TheSalesLion on Twitter, and check out Marcus’ blog tonight in prep for #Blogchat!

by

How to Expand Your Reach in Social Media When You Have No Budget

356136498_9f9b736cb6_z

Last night I was thrilled to join Full Sail University for a special Think Like a Rock Star webinar.  It was an amazing turnout, and I wanted to talk about one of the questions that an attendee asked.

Someone wanted to know how you can expand your reach in social media when you have no budget.  The answer is that you reward the behavior you want to encourage.

Years ago when I first started blogging, I had a nice little community reading my blog.  I would only get 50-100 visitors a day (This was 2006) but every post I wrote had comments, sometimes 15-20.  A blogger friend that was writing for a site that at the time got about 10,000 visitors a month (far more than my blog) left a comment saying ‘I just want to know why you get 10 or more comments on every post and I don’t get any’.  I told him ‘because I respond to my comments’.

I didn’t have many readers, but my level of engagement was much higher than blogs with huge readerships.  If you want to build your reach and engagement then start by rewarding the behavior you want to encourage.  If you want to get more comments on your blog, then start by responding to every comment.  Communicate to your readers that if they comment, that you will respond.  This seems like a no-brainer but you wouldn’t believe how many bloggers never respond to comments, then wonder why they get so few.

No matter how ‘small’ your blog or social media presence is, you’ll have some fans.  People that enjoy your content and that follow you because of it.  Cherish these people.  Even if there are only 2 of them, treat them like rock stars.  Because they are.  And these 2 fans will tell their friends to check you out and before you know it you have 5 fans.  Then 10, then 50, then 100.

The two most powerful words in social media are ‘Thank you’.  Whenever you see someone interacting with your content or sharing your content or recommending your content, then thank them, because they just did you a favor.  And since we all like to be appreciated, when you thank them that encourages them to keep sharing and interacting with your content.

Start small, grow big.

Pic via Flickr user aleske

by

Is Your Blog Still Your Front Porch? Tonight’s #Blogchat Topic!

9408735817_56b62ee29c_z

Here’s the transcript for tonight’s #Blogchat

Tonight (Jan 26, 2014) we’ll discuss if your blog is still your front porch.  Recently, I went back through the archives of The Viral Garden, which was my blog before this one.  I started blogging there in 2006, before we all found Twitter or Facebook and years before there was a Google Plus.  In 2006 and 2007 if you wanted to share an interesting blog post or article, you didn’t tweet it or post it to Facebook, you shared it on your blog.  I did this as well, in fact once a week or so I would post a ‘Viral Community News’ that would have a roundup of 4-5 blog posts that readers of The Viral Garden had wrote that I thought were interesting.  It was also a great way to build readership.

But over time, I discovered Twitter, and then Facebook, and my linking behavior changed.  I stopped linking on my blog as much, and moved to sharing content via other social media channels and tools.  I think most other bloggers have done the same thing, but at the same time, it seems that bloggers are more worried today about building readership.  In my opinion, part of the reason why it’s more difficult to build readership is because of that change in linking behavior.  Years ago when linking was primarily confined to blogs, that meant traffic bounced back and forth among those blogs.  Today, linking has moved off blogs, and additionally a lot of our thoughts that years ago would have been shared as a blog post, are now shared as a Facebook update.

I wanted to talk about this tonight at #Blogchat, and specifically three areas:

1 – Has the way you use your blog changed in the last few years as Twitter and Facebook have become more popular?

2 – Are the things such as linking and content sharing that make social media as a whole more valuable to you, actually making blogging less valuable?

3 –  What can we do to make sure that blogging stays the centerpiece of our social media presence?  Should it be?

Hope to see y’all tonight at 8pm Central on Twitter!  If you are new to #Blogchat you can learn more here.

Pic via Flickr user YellowstoneNPS

by

Stop Selling Ice to Eskimos, Get a Better Content Strategy in 2014

Last year I made a big mistake on my blog, and it’s a mistake I am constantly reminding y’all not to make.

Here’s a list of the Top 10 most popular blog posts here last year:

BlogStatsNote the #2 and #3 blog posts are about book publishing.  I wrote these last year while I was launching my book.  I wanted to share what I had learned so that the information could benefit other consultants, marketers or really anyone that wanted to be a writer or was considering writing a book.  And the top search term that people used to find this blog last year was ‘I want to write a book’.  By a 10 to 1 margin over the #2 search term.

There’s just one (big) problem.  Current or potential writers that want to make money off writing a book is not my target audience.  Not even close.  So while these two posts were very popular, they helped connect me with an audience that I had no services for.  But I forgot this because I was focused on how these posts could be valuable to readers.  I just lost sight of the fact that they wouldn’t really create value for a big portion of my target audience.

This is one of the lessons I am always preaching here, to keep in mind the audience you are writing for.  I want to create helpful content for my desired audience.  The two posts on book publishing were very helpful, just not for the people I am trying to connect with.

Here’s a simple way to keep your content focused in 2014:

Create three content areas or buckets.  These will be the three areas of your business that you want to focus on with your content.

For example, if your blog is for your lawn care business, your three buckets could be:

1 – Killing insects in your lawn

2 – Growing healthier flowers for your yard

3 – Proper maintenance of your lawn

So for every post you write, you need to make sure it fits into one of these three buckets.  If it does not, you need to justify why you should publish the post.  This is a great way to keep your content on track and to make sure that you are only creating content that’s focused on your business.  An added benefit of this is that as you are creating content around the relevant areas of your business, you will be helping Google identify your blog with certain relevant keywords.  For example, I would rather people find my blog via a search term like ‘building a brand ambassador program for my company’ versus ‘i want to write a book’.

Additionally, you need to always consider who you are writing for.  For example, this blog is a business development tool for me.  Which means if I am creating content, I need to create content that is useful to the people that can give me business.  In evaluating my content here from last year, I noticed that too often I was creating content that was useful to solo bloggers.  I love helping solo bloggers (a big reason why I launched #Blogchat) but solo bloggers aren’t the audience I want to be getting business from.  So that’s why the majority of my content this year will be focused on how brands can market more efficiently, because brands and companies are the audience that I want to do business with.

It pays to go back every month or maybe every quarter and self-evaluate your content and your content strategy for your blog.  Look at what type of progress you are making on reaching your goals, and then make sure that you are still creating the type of content that you need to in order to reach those goals.

by

Your 2,000 Word Guide to Building a Better Blog

MP900433074

First, start with where you are now.   

Before you can move forward with your blog, you need to assess where you are now.  Let’s start by looking at your blog’s stats.

First, are you tracking your blog’s stats?  Hopefully you are, if not, start by adding Google Analytics to your blog today.

Assuming you have access to your blog’s stats, look at your stats for this year.  Start broadly by looking at the entire year.  Look for trends.  How is traffic doing?  How is search traffic doing?  Pageviews?  You want to see if you can find movement up or down and then try to figure out what triggered that movement.

But the main point is, you want to baseline where your blog is now so you’ll know if you are improving on your efforts as the year progresses.

What were you blogging goals for the previous year?  Did you reach them?  Look at how successful you were at reaching your goals and then decide if you need to alter anything for the year ahead.

Creating a Blogging Strategy 

Let’s assume that you either need to create a strategy for your blog, or you need to totally revamp your existing efforts.  How do you get started?

First, you need to decide what you want to accomplish with your blog.  Here’s some examples:

Increase sales

Increase brand awareness

Establish thought leadership

And those are examples for a business blog, but the same principle applies for a personal blog.  Basically ask yourself “What needs to happen in order for my blog to be a success?”  Answering this question is imperative because it’s the foundation for your blogging strategy.  

Defining Your Audience

This is critical.  You have to understand who it is you are writing for and what actions you want that audience to take.  If you’re trying to use your blog to build brand awareness, then it’s probably not a good idea to post your political rants there!

Here’s an example.  My desired audience for this blog is marketers that are interested in either working with me to help them build programs to better connect with their most passionate customers, or who want to hire me to speak or lead a workshop at their event.  In order words, my desired audience is primarily marketers at mid-sized and larger companies.  A couple of months ago a friend of mine pointed out that my content focus had gotten off center.  She helped me realize that a lot of the content I was creating at the time was actually focused on helping small businesses and solopreneurs.  maybe even personal bloggers.  I went back and checked and she was right!  I was focusing so much on creating helpful content that I lost track of the fact that the content wasn’t as helpful to my desired audience.  So you need to not only define your audience, but keep who it is you’re writing for in mind at all times, so you can create content that’s useful to them.

What Actions Do You Want Your Audience to Take?

Let’s go back to your goals for your blog:

Increase sales

Increase brand awareness

Establish thought leadership

Once you’ve figured out what your blogging goal is and who your desired audience is, you need to decide what actions you want that audience to take.  And those actions should tie back to your goals for your blog.

I’ll use this blog again as an example.  I want to connect with companies that can either hire me as a speaker, or that can hire me to help them build smarter marketing programs to connect with their most passionate customers.  So keeping this in mind, note what you see at the top of the blog on the nav bar.  The options are to learn more about me, to buy my book, to learn about hiring me to speak, and to learn about my consulting.  Then look at the top of the sidebars on the right.  At the top of the first sidebar is a form to signup for my email newsletter.  At the top of the other sidebar is my brand advocacy posts.  All of this is set up to give you information on how we can work together, or give you valuable content that can help you improve your marketing, but that also helps establish my expertise.  So either way, I am trying to move the reader closer to hiring me to either speak for or work with them.

Keep in mind that your most important real estate on your blog is Above the Fold.  This refers to the area you see when you first arrive on a blog without scrolling down.  The content at the top of your blog is always seen, so make sure that you use this space wisely.  For example if you want to drive email newsletter signups, simply moving your signup form from the bottom of your blog to the top will greatly increase your signup rate.

KatyFirework

What’s Your Content Strategy?

Remember earlier when we talked about defining our audience?  A big reason why was so we could craft a content strategy to connect with that audience.  Essentially, you want to think about how you can create content for your audience that is valuable to them, but that also helps them move closer to engaging in the types of actions you want them to take.  Your content needs to ultimately help you reach your larger goals for your blog.

An important distinction to keep in mind is that they type of content that you feel is valuable for your brand might not be valuable to your audience.  For example, if your goal is to increase sales, then you want to create content that moves your audience closer to buying from you.  But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you should create content that directly promotes your brand.  Often, content that teaches your audience a skill and that empowers them will make it easier for them to buy from you.  Sometimes pointing out what your competitors are doing can work because it can help your audience trust you.  Keep in mind that blogging is a great way to facilitate selling INdirectly.  Create valuable content for your audience, and that makes it easier for them to trust you, and easier for them to trust buying FROM you.

Developing a Posting Schedule

In many ways, your posting schedule will be a function of who you are writing for and what you are trying to accomplish (see how we are building the strategy as we add each layer?).  This post goes into creating a posting schedule a bit deeper, but we’ll talk about it here as well.  Think about who your audience is and when they are most receptive to your content.  In general (and please pay attention to the end of the post), posts seem to do better in the middle of the week.  For myself and most bloggers I have talked to since 2005 (whether personal or writing for a company blog), Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are the best days for traffic.  After that Monday, Friday, then the weekends.  So if you can only write one post a week, start running it on Tuesday or Thursday and see how it does.

Also keep in mind that certain goals will be dependent on creating more content.  For example, none of your goals for blogging will be easily reached if you can only write 1 post a month.  You need to create as much valuable content as possible.  Now ‘valuable’ is a very subjective term, but in general a good goal to shoot for is writing a minimum of one new post a week on your blog.  If you go below that it really becomes difficult to build readership.  A lot of people don’t like to talk about this, but there are several advantages to creating more content.  First, it trains you to become a better writer, quicker.  Second, search engines love sites that update their content frequently.  So new content helps your search rankings, and search traffic.  Third, new content helps build readership quicker.

So as a minimum baseline for your posting schedule, shoot for at least one post a week, ideally either on Tuesday or Thursday.  Another point to focus on is consistency of posting.  If you can only write 1 new post a week, then publish it the same day every week so your readers know when to expect it.  Not everyone will subscribe to your blog.

Tracking Your Blog’s Progress  

Did you take care of your blog stats as we discussed at the start of this post?  Good, because you’re going to need to have access to this information throughout the year.  Now comes the fun part, where we start tracking if this stuff is actually working.

First, read this post I wrote on blog analytics.  It will help you understand what you are looking for.  Go back and look at your goals for your goal.  What we want to do now is track metrics that relate to those goals.  Here’s some examples:

Stats1 These are metrics you can track to tell you that your content is helping you reach your goal of building brand awareness.  These metrics are all signals that your content is resonating with other people, and as such, that content is building a tool to help you or your brand build its reputation and awareness.

So when you start tracking metrics, pick metrics that tie back to your goal.  Don’t simply settle on the metrics that are the easiest to track, you want to make sure that you are focused only on tracking what makes sense for your blogging strategy.

Additionally, you will want to drill down and analyze your content to see which posts/topics are generating attention with your readers.  It’s a good idea every month or at least every quarter to look at your most popular posts for the last 30/60/90 days.  What you’re trying to figure out is which posts were more popular with readers and why were they more popular?  For example, if you look at your blogs stats for the last 90 days, you might find that 3 of your 5 most popular posts were posts that included industry news and links to stories within your industry.  That’s a key insight, and it could prompt you to start writing a post recapping industry news every Friday on your blog.  That one change could result in a 15-25% increase in blog traffic over the rest of the year.

Also, look at the keywords that people are using to find your content.  This will also help you learn how to change your content to make it more accessible to search engines.  When you look at your keywords, you will probably find that a lot of the phrases used are something like this: ‘How do I….’ or ‘What’s the best way to….’  So if you start writing your post headlines as a question, that can really help your search results because your post’s headline will closely resemble the actual search phrases that people are using.  One of my most popular posts here is How To Write Your First Blog Post.  A big reason that post is so popular is because the headline closely resembles common search terms such as ‘how do I write my first blog post?’ or ‘how to write my first blog post’.  So factor in how people will search for content when you write your posts and especially your post headline.

Finally, Remember This is All a Guide, Not An Absolute

I want to close with a word of caution: None of this is absolute and it shouldn’t be taken as such.  The purpose of this post is to get you started.  But as you start fleshing out your blog in the coming year, you may find that some of the advice I’ve shared with you here doesn’t seem to be working on your blog.  That could be because you are doing something wrong, or it could be because your blog is different.  For example, it may be that your particular audience wants new content on Saturdays and Sundays, instead of during the middle of the week.  If you truly want to build an awesome blog then you need to experiment and be willing to try new things.  You need to tinker, and see what works and what does not.  I have been blogging now for over 9 years, and I am constantly trying new things.  The reason why I do this is because I want to get better.  Like you, I will read what others tell me I should be doing.  I look for best practices, but I also understand that just because something works for every other blogger doesn’t guarantee that it will work for me.

This post will get you started on your journey to have an amazing blog.  But if you hit a pothole along the way, don’t be afraid to step back, and try something different.  It might not work, but even if it doesn’t, you will still learn something in the process.   As long as you are constantly learning, you are constantly improving.

by

Which Needle Are You Moving? How to Tell If Your Business Blog Is Working

BlogMouseOver the past few weeks I have, as you’ve probably noticed, seriously ramped up my blogging.  I’ve gone from writing 1-2 posts here a week to 5-6.  The reason why is because I want to see if I can turn my blog into a serious driver of work leads and referrals.  I started blogging more on October 20th, and I wanted to walk you through some of the metrics I am tracking to tell if my efforts are working.

First, a caveat:  We are talking very small numbers and very inconclusive data at this point.  After another 2 months or so, I should have some decent numbers and trends I can look at and tell if my efforts are paying off.  The goal here isn’t to pass judgement on my efforts after less than a month.  What I want to do is walk you through my thought process in measuring and tracking my efforts so you can apply this same formula to your own business blog to help decide if your efforts are working.

Traffic.  When it comes to blogging, traffic is likely the first metric that you’ll look at.  But traffic is often a ‘feel good’ metric that doesn’t always translate into actual business value.  For example, typical daily traffic here from Monday-Friday prior to October 20th was 700-800 visitors a day.  Now it’s 1,100-1,200 visitors a day.  That’s about a 50% increase in less than a month and sounds nice.  But my main goal from blogging more isn’t to get more traffic, it’s to get more qualified leads.

Now there are some ancillary benefits to increasing traffic.  For example, increasing traffic drives up readership and that makes sponsorships here or as part of a #Blogchat sponsorship more appealing to potential sponsors.

So What Metrics Should You Track to Tell If Your Business Blog is Working? 

First, you need to consider what action you want visitors to your blog to take.  For example, if you ultimately want to sell a particular product on your blog, then the metrics to track could be:

1 – Actual sales from blog visitors

2 – Visits to the product page on the blog

3 – Signups for a free trial of the product

Again, traffic to the blog doesn’t really matter unless that traffic is engaging in the actions that you want.

For me, I want visitors to engage in one of three different actions (ranked in terms of priority):

1 – Contact me about working with me.

2 – Visit pages related to working with me, such as my Work With Me page, or Speaking page, or Bio

3 – Share my content online

The idea is that if they aren’t contacting me directly about possibly working with me, I want them to either check out my info here, or at least share my content with other people so that they might be interested in working with me.

But it’s important to note that the type of engagement that’s likely to be the easiest to get (sharing my content) is the least valuable of the three.  This is common with blogging.  For example I can tell anyone how to get more traffic to their blog; Write more posts.  But just because you can easily get more traffic doesn’t mean that traffic by itself has any real value for you.  Sure, it can make your ego feel good to see that needle moving, but is that meaningful?

So when you are tracking your blog’s efforts, follow this process:

1 – Figure out what you want visitors to do on your blog.  What’s the one most important thing that a visitor could do on your blog?  Order a product?  Sign up for your newsletter?  Share your content?

2 – Track metrics that lead back to that most important goal.  If possible, you want a straight line from the metric you are measuring to the goal.  Prioritize your metrics so that you are tracking the one that most directly leads to your goal for your blog first.

3 – Only track metrics that feed back to your goal for the blog, either directly or indirectly.  If a metric doesn’t impact your ability to reach your goal then don’t track it.

by

How Bloggers Can Protect Themselves Online: Tonight’s #Blogchat Topic With Kerry Gorgone!

Kerry

Here’s the transcript of tonight’s #Blogchat, click Transcript on the left!

Tonight (Nov. 3rd, 2013) we’ll be tackling a couple of legal areas of blogging that have always been requested at #Blogchat.  The one and only Kerry Gorgone will be joining us to discuss blogger disclosure rules as well as how to protect our work, especially if its stolen.  Tonight’s #Blogchat is sponsored by Pencils.com, please follow them on Twitter and check out their blog!

To prep for tonight’s topic, there’s two posts by Kerry that I want you to read and BOTH are bookmark-worthy.  Seriously you will want to save both of these posts and if you work for a blogging company you’ll want to share them with your team internally.

The first is a post on disclosure rules that Kerry wrote on her blog.  This covers exactly what you need to disclose when working with companies and how to do so.

The second is a guest post that Kerry wrote for us here on Friday covering how to protect your works online.  Please read both and make sure you are following Kerry on Twitter!

Here’s the schedule for tonight’s chat:

8:00 pm-8:30pm Central – How to Protect Your Content Online.  This for everyone that’s wondered what their options are when they see someone has published their post without the blogger’s permission, or is using a photo without permission, etc.

8:30 pm-9:00pm Central – Blogger disclosure rules.  If you are taking sponsors or working with companies, how do you disclose that relationship via social media?  Do you always have to?  Kerry will explain all!

 

I think this might be the most informative #Blogchat ever so make SURE you get your list of questions together for Kerry.  I’ll be posting the transcript here after #Blogchat so you can have that as well.

And make SURE you have turned your clocks back so you arrive on time.  See y’all tonight!

by

Announcing #Blogchat’s November Sponsor, All Topics Plus Special Co-Host!

PencilscomLogoI’m thrilled to announce that Pencils.com is #Blogchat’s sponsor for November!  Pencils.com sells fine pencils and other tools for the artist and writer, so I was thrilled when they decided to sponsor #Blogchat!  Please follow them on Twitter and you can also read their blog which features some stunning pencil artwork, incredibly detailed!

Now to tie in with Pencils.com sponsoring #Blogchat in November, we’re going to make the theme of #Blogchat this month be on creative writing!  It’s a natural fit for both Pencils.com as well as #Blogchat!

(Cue late-night informercial voice) But wait….that’s not all!

KerryThis Sunday will start the month with a bang by having Kerry Gorgone join us as special co-host!  Kerry will be discussing a topic that’s always been requested among the #Blogchat community: Disclosure rules for bloggers.  In addition, she will also be discussing how to protect your creative works!  In fact, look for a guest post from Kerry here later today that gives you some tips for what to do when you see that someone has taken your post and is using it on their blog.

Here’s the topics for every week in November:

November 3rd: Disclosure rules and protecting your creative works with Kerry Gorgone!  Again look for a guest post here later today from Kerry on this topic!

November 10th: The creative process.  We’ll look at how we write our blog posts, and also look at the digital and analog tools we use in the writing process.

November 17th: Guest posting.  We’ll discuss how to get guest-posting gigs as well as how to bring on people to guest-post on your blog.

November 24th: OPEN MIC!  No set blogging topic although I will probably have some questions about finding creativity in our writing in line with this month’s theme.

I’m really excited about this month because we’ve never had a theme for the entire month, especially not with a sponsor.  But the topic of creative writing is such a perfect fit for Pencils.com since they are literally selling the tools that help us create our own works of art!

BTW if your company wants to sponsor #Blogchat in December, here’s all the details as well as the price.

See you this Sunday and don’t forgot to check back in a few hours for Kerry’s guest post!

by

Want to Make Money From Your Blog? Get a Sponsor

Hundred Dollar Bills Folded in a Money ClipYesterday I wrote about how you can increase your chances of getting paid for the content you create.  How to monetize a blog is one of the most requested topics among the #Blogchat community, so today I wanted to talk about another option for making money from your blog:

Getting a sponsor.

The problem that many bloggers run into is that they want to start making money as soon as they launch their blog.  Which is understandable, but they simply don’t have the large platform and readership that most advertisers are interested in.  Years ago I was approached by one of the major blog ad networks about having them place advertisements on my blog.  At the time (this was 2009 or so) they told me that a blog had to have a minimum of 800,000 monthly pageviews before they could accept them. I had about 1% of that at the time.

Many bloggers will add Ad Sense ads or something similar to their blogs as a way to generate revenue.  The problem is this usually gives them pennies at best, and ends up detracting from the reader’s experience and clutters up the content on the blog.

But a sponsor can be a much better solution.  First, it gives you control over who the sponsor is.  You can bring on someone you are comfortable, and that’s a good fit for your blog’s focus, and your readers.  Second, you have control over what the sponsorship entails.  Third, if you’re smart you can work with the sponsor to enhance the experience on your blog, not detract from it, which is what a lot of ads do.

While I don’t have sponsors here, I have been selling sponsorships at #Blogchat for the last 3 years.  It’s worked out pretty well for everyone.  Here’s the framework I follow with #Blogchat and you can easily do the same with your blog.

First, make sure the sponsor understands what the sponsorship does and does not include.   I have created a special page for sponsoring #Blogchat so that potential sponsors know what they are getting.  You should do the same for your blog.  Think about what you can offer sponsors.  Will they get exposure on your blog itself?  As part of the #blogchat sponsorship, I give sponsors the option to have an ad on the right sidebar, and 1 sponsored post for the month of their sponsorship.  I also promote the sponsor here and on Twitter.  I let them know the bare minimum of exposure they will get but I always try to go a bit above that so that they will be pleased with the coverage they are getting.

Second, make sure the sponsor is a good fit for you and your audience.  This is highly subjective and you will have to figure out what works for you and your audience.  Basically I have two rules for potential #Blogchat sponsors: That they understand that they cannot use the #Blogchat chat itself as a promotional tool, and that their sponsorship doesn’t detract from the #Blogchat experience.  As I tell any potential sponsor, if the #Blogchat community is upset with the experience of the chat based on a sponsor’s involvement, then that makes both myself and the sponsor look terrible.  And yes, I have turned down sponsors that wanted to use the chat itself as a promotional tool for their business.  My suggestion is that you not promote a sponsor on your blog to the point that the sponsor is overshadowing the content.  If that happens then your readers will notice and likely be disappointed.

Third, create a win-win-win situation.  This is where you need to get creative.  You want to find a way for the sponsorship to benefit three parties:

1 – Yourself

2 – The sponsor

3 – Your audience

If you can bring on a sponsor and have all three parties benefit, then you’ve hit a home run.

First, think about what you want.  Do you want cash?  Do you want a product?  Do you want a service?  Again consult yesterday’s post for some great ideas on how to get paid.

Second, explicitly ask the sponsor to tell you what they want to happen as a result of the sponsorship.  Do they want to drive traffic back to their website?  Get more downloads of their new white paper?  Encourage more free signups of their new software product?  Ask them to tell you what they want, because that will greatly influence how the sponsorship is structured.

Finally, how will your readers benefit?  At bare minimum, you don’t want the overall experience on your blog to suffer as a result of the sponsorship.  The last thing in the world you want is for someone to read your blog on November 1st and think ‘Aw shit, he’s got another sponsor!’  You want them to either not notice the sponsor is there or (the best alternative) you want them to be excited that the sponsor is involved!

When I bring on a sponsor for #Blogchat, I am always careful to think about how the community will benefit as a result.  For example, when I bring on a sponsor for #Blogchat, the topics get set for the entire month at the start of the sponsorship because I work with the sponsor to cover topics that interest them, that will also appeal to #Blogchat.  So there’s one benefit.  Another is that each sponsor gets a guest host, so #Blogchat knows if we have a sponsor for the month, they also get an expert guest-host.  Finally, the sponsor will frequently offer #Blogchat members a special deal or discount on a product.  For example, this month’s sponsor, AllergEase, created a special offer to give away its product for free to #Blogchat members.

How to Get Started Landing Sponsorships on Your Blog

1 – Create a page spelling out exactly what a sponsor gets.  Here’s mine for #Blogchat as an example.  This communicates to potential sponsors that you are accepting sponsors, and tells them exactly what they will get.

2 – Figure out who your ‘ideal’ sponsor would be.  For example, if you are a tech blog focusing on startups, then tech startups.  If your blog focuses on parenthood, especially new parents, then a company that makes products for toddlers and newborns might be a good fit.

3 – Do your research and figure out if these companies are active on social media now, and more importantly if they are already working with bloggers and doing sponsorships!  From the above example of a parenting blog, let’s say you do some checking and uncover that Graco is currently sponsoring other bloggers (I have no idea if they are), then you could reach out to them and let them know that you are offering sponsorships on your parenting blog and explain to them how it would be a good fit for their brand.

4 – Focus on the win-win-win.  Figure out how a sponsor’s involvement on your blog will enhance your blog, not detract from the experience you have.   What do you get from the sponsorship, what does the sponsor get, and what do your readers get?

If you are willing to do your homework and some leg-work, you should be able to start getting some sponsors for your blog.  Something else I have noticed with #Blogchat is that it is MUCH easier to sell sponsorships when you are selling sponsorships.  I went all year without selling any sponsorships to #Blogchat, then suddenly over the course of 3 weeks I sold the sponsorships for September, October and November.  So if you can ever start getting sponsors on your blog, it become much easier to keep getting them!

If you accept sponsors on your blog, what has worked for you?