BlogWorld & New Media Expo is Coming, Are You Going?

This time of year is one of my favorite times because I get so excited to see all of my blogging friends at BlogWorld & New Media Expo. I have been lucky enough to have attended every single BlogWorld that there has been. I went to my first on in 2007 and am going to be speaking at this one on Friday October 15, at 2:45pm. My session is called Content You Care About. I happen to be on at the very same time as the owner of this blog, Zac Johnson, is on the Make Money Super Panel. I really would have liked to have seen him speak especially since he came and saw my panel at Affiliate Summit and has let me ramble on here on this blog offering help where I can.

In one of my earliest posts on Blogging Tips.com I asked the question Should you Attend a Social Media Conference? At that time I mentioned that I had put in proposals to a number of conferences that I planned to attend. Well, my proposals were accepted at all of them and the response has been incredible. Blogging and Social Media conferences are amazing ways to make contacts, friendships and business ventures. But you have to do a lot of work to make it happen for you, so here are my essential tips for having a successful conference attendance.

Talk to Everybody – Seriously, you never know who you are going to meet and if you don’t talk to everyone you are going to miss out on so many opportunities. MY most recent conference was at Modern Media Man in Atlanta. I was tired and figured that I would head back to the hotel when I saw one of my friends talking to a representative from Mattel. At the time I hadn’t been doing very much with my Dad blog, Read to Me, Dad. and wondered if I had much to offer in the way of working with Mattel, but I do love toys and so I got introduced and struck up a great conversation. This leads me to my next tip.

Ask for What You Want – I don’t mean that you have to be a swag whore and try to get something for nothing but you do need to put yourself and your intentions out there. I knew that I wanted to work with a major brand like Mattel and so I asked if they were looking for Dad bloggers who did reviews. I also asked if I could be one of those bloggers. A relationship started right then and there.

Give it Your Best – While at Modern Media Man I spent a lot of time with major sponsor Chevrolet. They had cars on hand to take on test drives. I saw people taking the test drives and collecting their iTunes gift cards, essentially taking but not giving anything back tot he advertiser. I quickly got out my camera and snapped a ton of photos of the staff and the cars and then took one of my video cameras and gave it to the company rep who took me on test drives of the Silverado, Camaro and Convertible Corvette. I asked them to interview me about my thoughts on their cars at the same time as they showed me the great features of each car. I was able to give them content from my experiences in their vehicles. I then put the videos together and posted them so that as an advertiser they got something for all the money they spent to support the show.

Follow Up – It is so essential to follow up on your connections right away. I really wish that GMail had a feature where you could schedule when you send your e-mails because I would have written every follow up message that same night that I met someone and they were fresh in my mind, but send it a couple of days after the conference so that they had time to catch up on the work they missed while at the conferences. Either way, follow up is so crucial because it means that you are serious and should be taken seriously.

Have Fun – Conferences aren’t all about work, going out and having a great time is also key. Go out to the parties, have meals with your new friends, don’t eat alone, or spend all your time working in your room, there is time for that but the one on one time that you get with other conference attendees is priceless. Have fun and who knows you might meet your next business partner, friend or more.

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Temporary Blogs: Blogs as Stepping Stones

Lately I’ve been chatting to a number of bloggers whose blogs have dropped off the radar. I’d been disappointed (as a reader) that they’d stopped blogging and I’d secretly been thinking of it as a “failure” of sorts. But I was reminded by those bloggers that in many ways that they’d actually succeeded with their blogs and that stopping blogging was a sign of that success.

In this video I explain more.

Notes

• View this video full size (in HD) here
• Video shot on a Panasonic Lumix DMC GF1 (aff) – here’s why I use that camera to shoot my videos.

Transcription of “The Five C’s of Blogging: Reflections on Eight Years of Blogging”

I’ve had this video transcribed below for those who prefer to get it that way. The transcription provided by The Transcription People.

I was having a chat to a blogger that I really admired and was writing some incredible content a couple of years ago. I was chatting to her a couple of weeks ago now, and she kind of dropped out of the blogosphere and wasn’t really writing any more—just the occasional post.

I used to really love her content, and it was almost like a daily experience of wonderment and learning just logging in to see what she was writing. And then she kind of disappeared; one of her posts said that she’d just got a new job, and the posts kind of disappeared after that.

And I was always disappointed in that; and I said to her, when we caught up for a coffee recently, “What happened to your blog? It was so great; it had so much potential.” And as we were chatting she said, “Well, I got a job. And the reason I started a blog was that, you know, I wanted to land a job, I was out of work, and the blog was never really going to be anything beyond an online résumé, a place for me to build my profile and build some credibility, and potentially meet some employers.”

And it kind of was interesting to me, because I’d always sort of seen it as a bit of a failure—as a disappointment—that she’d stopped blogging; but, the more I chatted to her, the more I realised that a temporary blog, a blog that just had the goal of landing her a job, is really an okay thing. And whilst it was disappointing for me as a reader that she disappeared, she actually had landed her dream job as a result of her blog.

It reminded me of another interaction that I had with a blogger who, off the back of his blog, launched just a very small piece of software. And it was a piece of software that really took off and got used a lot; and as a result of that software, he then went and launched another piece of software and another piece of software, and then ended up with a software company which employs ten to 15 people.

And I remember having this similar sort of conversation with him: “Why don’t you blog any more? Your blog was great; I loved it; I really found your ideas interesting.” And he reflected back to me that again, his blog was a means to another end—he was never going to be a professional blogger, that wasn’t his model; his model was to launch a software company, and he used his blog to do that.

And again, there’s a whole heap of stories I could probably tell along similar lines. And I guess these sort of conversations are reminding me that there’s not just one model for blogging and for making a living from blogging. And your blog doesn’t have to go for many, many years to be successful. If success for you is landing a job, or launching another company, your blog can actually be a stepping stone for you.

And whilst I’m disappointed that these people aren’t blogging anymore, I’m really excited that blogging is a medium that can be used to help people achieve their goals beyond having a successful blog.

This is just something I’ve been thinking about the last few days, and I’m interested to hear your comments. What’s the goal of your blog? Are you blogging for blogging to be the end, or is it a stepping stone to something else for you?

Love to hear your comments.

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Building Credibility – The Value Shift

It’s Blogworld coming up in a few days. Another big conference with busy halls, packed sessions, and loud parties.

That might sound like heaven or hell to you, and believe me I understand both perspectives.

I am doing up to six sessions this year. Around six more than my nerves are built to take. You can see my schedule here. That nifty calendar shows where I will be as far as talks and panels are concerned, either on stage or heckling from the audience

When people hear that I have my name down for these kinds of things, they tend toward incredulity. “You??“. Yes. Me.

You might already know I am shy and introverted, and I don’t actually see that as a bad thing. For a while I was lead to believe it was a “fault” that needed “fixing”. After thought (and trying to “cure” myself with no success), I came to realize it is just a difference of personality and style. It’s part of who I am, and clearly it doesn’t hold me back that much.

As well as developing my Shy Networking approaches that help me mix and connect effectively without losing my sanity, I decided to embrace my quirks, constraints and all.

The fact is, if you need to be known, and establish credibility, there is a lot that can be done from your desk. I wrote a whole course about growing your audience, boosting your authority, and offering products and services around that. But even though you can have a big list and thousands of people know, like and trust you, even then there are limits. Even with the best online system, things are accelerated when they can hear and see you in person.

Essentially, uncomfortable as it is, if I want to do the things I want to do, I have to be seen on stage and I need to network at these events.

In my view there has been a big shift in how credibility is perceived over the last ten or so years. The era of the internet has changed society to the extent the old rules do not apply with as much persuasive force as before.

Old school credibility could be gained from things like …

• Heredity
• Professional organisations
• Qualifications and Certifications
• Society membership
• Committees
• Management positions
• Traditional PR mentions

Don’t get me wrong, all of these things do help, especially appearing in traditional press.

But we are becoming increasingly cynical about these kinds of things. We no longer trust the media, the old boys club, or even professional accreditation to provide enough credibility to work with.

There are three main ways we can generate more credibility with an audience once we have a spotlight:

1. Expertise proof.
2. Results proof.
3. Social proof.

Look back over the old-school credibility builders. Notice anything?

None of those old ways of achieving credibility offer evidence of real value. There is no “What’s in it for me?”.

Even qualifications and certifications are no longer evidence that a person has relevant and demonstrable expertise because the pool has been tainted by unscrupulous certificate factories and fraudsters. You can be a doctor or a Lord now just by paying enough.

More and more we are turning to people who have something useful to share, who our friends trust, and who can prove they get results. If you want credibility that is what you need to start doing. Share your best tips, your case studies, and interact with people in a live setting.

Of course do not wait for an annual conference, be visible online and locally too. But when you have a platform where you can really deliver, swallow the fear and do it.

Bottom line: Shy as I am, this is how appearing at Blogworld helps me towards my goals and I recommend you consider something like it for your own.

Do you see people in your niche turning away from traditional credibility indicators? How are you growing your credibility? Attending Blogworld? Please share in the comments …

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4 Simple Ways to Get More High-Paying Clients with Your Blog

How many new high-paying clients do you get for every hour you spend blogging?

What’s that? You have no idea?

We need to talk.

Building a client-based business isn’t easy. But if you’re spending hours every week on an activity that’s not generating qualified leads, you’re making it harder than it has to be. You’re keeping yourself from making money by wasting the most valuable resource you have: your time.

Wouldn’t you rather spend your time as efficiently as possible, so you can have that “life” you thought you were going to have when you went into business for yourself?

Of course you would. Here’s how.

Strategy #1: Solve one problem per post

High-paying clients tend to be busy. They’re willing to pay more to get things done because (1) they don’t have time to do everything themselves; and/or (2) their time is worth a lot to them.

Which means that they aren’t just browsing around the Internet, looking for interesting blog posts to peruse. If they’ve made it to your blog, they’re probably looking for something specific.

Give them what they’re looking for, and make it easy for them to find.

If you solve one — and only one — problem per post, your readers will be able to do a quick search, find the relevant post, and find the answer they needed in the first place. You want to be the person they turn to when they need something, so when they need something bigger than a blog post, your name is the first to come to mind.

When your prospects think of you, you want words like these to pop into their minds:

• Quick
• Smart
• Helpful
• Knowledgeable
• To the point

Most of all, you want your prospects to see how highly you value their time. Treat their time like the precious resource they believe it to be, and you’ll become a precious resource to them.

Strategy #2: Speak your clients’ language

Your ideal clients don’t know as much as you do about your area of expertise. That’s why they need you.

If you’re talking about their needs in technical terms, instead of in the terms your clients actually use, you’re missing an opportunity to connect with the people who need you.

Say your ideal clients are local businesses who want to use the Internet to expand their client base. How do they describe their needs?

• “I need to learn how to install WordPress.”
• “I need to get a web designer, an SEO expert, and a social media consultant.”
• “I need to figure out this whole Internet thing.”

It could be any of these, of course. The trick is to figure out how your ideal clients actually speak, so you can relate to them on their terms.

Strategy #3: Tell your readers what to do next (and make it easy)

Your ideal client shows up at your blog. She reads your post, loves your work, just generally thinks you’re awesome.

Now what?

Are you telling your reader what to do next, or are you just letting her wander around your blog, looking at all the things she might do:

1. Go to your “Contact” page, fill out the form, and wait for you to call her back.
2. Sign up for your e-mail list.
3. Go to your “Services” page, find the relevant service, and pay for it using a Paypal button you conveniently placed at the bottom.
4. Call the phone number on your “Contact” page.
5. Set up a free consultation.
6. Download a free resource.
7. Check out your “links you love” page.
8. Read other posts on your blog.
9. Leave a comment on your blog.
10. Subscribe to your RSS feed.
11. Sign up for your free webinar.
12. Etc.

How much time do you think your prospect will spend trying to figure this out?

Probably about as much time as you spent reading that list (not much).

Instead of letting them stumble around, become your prospects’ guide. At the end of every post, tell your reader exactly what to do next. Make it a simple, low-risk task that requires next to no thought. For example:

Click here and enter your e-mail to learn more about how [your great service] can help you with [their pressing problem].

Then follow up with some useful information about your services and an invitation to talk by phone for a few minutes. Keep it simple.

Strategy #4: Stop writing about yourself (or stop blogging)

Your business blog shouldn’t be about you. It should be about your clients.

That doesn’t mean you can never write about yourself — only that you should write about yourself in a way that’s relevant to your prospects.

Telling a personal story that helps potential clients understand your commitment to quality? Good.

Telling a personal story that helps potential clients understand how big a crush you have on the hot new boy at Starbucks but your roommate thinks he’s really not that cute but your mom wants to know whether or not he’s Armenian or just looks Armenian but how can you ask that without sounding like a total weirdo and by the way you’re thinking of switching to decaf?

Not so good.

Sharing some details of your personal life can help potential clients know, like and trust you. And that can be useful.

But oversharing is not interesting to your clients. (It’s not interesting to your friends either, but that’s a post for another blog.)

The thing that interests your prospective clients is how you can help them, and what you would be like to work with. Give them what they want.

If you can’t give potential clients what they want, stop blogging.

Yes, this is a radical solution to propose on a website called Copyblogger. But the truth is, if you’re spending several hours every week on a blog that doesn’t interest your potential clients, you’re not marketing. You’re either wasting your time, or writing what should be a personal blog.

And one more thing …

If you’re spending a lot of time wracking your brain trying to figure out what to write about, you should probably be blogging less and talking with your prospects more.

Seriously. Just talk to them.

Offer a free consultation, spend some time helping them with their current issue, and then ask a few questions. See what comes up.

Talking (and listening) to people in your target market is the best way to generate ideas for your blog, because it’s the best way to find out your prospects’ problems, concerns, and the language they use to talk about those things.

Wondering how your blog stacks up?

If you’d like your blog to generate more leads for your business (or higher quality leads), leave a comment below with your URL and whatever questions you’d like us to answer.

Traci and Rudy will provide in-depth feedback for 3 of the blogs listed in the comments, and will respond to as many people as we can for those who comment within the next 24 hours.

We may not get to everyone, but we’ll respond to as many people as we can.

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10 Ways to Reduce Friction in Your Purchase Process

This post was written by the Web Marketing Ninja—a professional online marketer for a major web brand, who’s sharing his tips undercover here at ProBlogger. Curious? So are we!

The harder you make people work to order your products, the less people will buy. This basic knowledge has been proven both on and offline. Unfortunately, we’re all not blessed with same level of brand loyalty and scary desire for our customers to line up for our latest ithingy like Apple is, so we need to take a serious look at how much friction we’re causing our customers—and find ways to eliminate it.

There are lots of different ways to go about fixing friction. Here are some easy wins to get you started.

1. Capturing information that’s only necessary for the sale

You might want to know everything you can about your customer so you can help service their needs. But the checkout is not the place to ask for that information. Until the money has cleared, don’t ask them for anything more than you need to make the sale. After the sale has been made, quiz them all you like. The same goes for setting up accounts and passwords: think very carefully before you ask someone to create an account and password—even if your intentions are good.

2. Including direct order links from your emails or blog posts

This might not work for all products, but it’s worth a try. When you’re promoting a product or offer in a communication (such as an email or blog post), don’t send readers to a sales page—send them directly to your checkout page, with the product already in the cart. You don’t need to re-sell to them in a sales page if you’ve done a good job in your communication piece.

3. Recalling the information you know about the customer

If you’re running your own checkout process and you’re (securely) storing customer information, when it comes time for a customer to purchase their second product, fill out as many details as you can for them. You need to allow for them to update the information if required, but many will just sail straight through.

4. Minimizing cross-sell and up-sell messages

In the past, I’ve been guilty of creating friction by attempting to increase my average order value with up-sells or cross-sells. There’s a very fine line to tread when it comes to balancing these two needs. Personally, I limit myself to one up-sell message of one product in an entire checkout process. Any more, and you might risk reaching the friction tipping point.

5. Avoiding bouncing customers to unknown third parties

For some, this might be something you can’t avoid, as you don’t have an internal checkout process. But if possible, keeping the checkout process consistent in terms domain, aesthetics, and style will reduce the shock associated with bouncing to a third party. If you do need to ship your customer somewhere else, make sure the customer knows what’s about to happen. My only exception to this rule is PayPal. It’s such a recognizable brand, the effect can actually be positive rather than negative.

6. Making your process usable, accessible, and cross-browser compatible

For me, this one’s a bit of a given: the lower the number of people who can access your checkout process, the fewer sales you’ll make. It’s a pretty easy calculation, yet so many people fail to make their checkout processes consistent for everyone. Google Analytics, when configured properly, will make it easy to identify whether people with specific browsers are converting a lower rate than everyone else. This will help you quickly identify any problem areas.

7. Using smart and intuitive data validation

Even after you’ve reduced the number of fields you’re asking your customers to complete, people will still make mistakes. If you’re not giving people a clear message about what they’ve done wrong—and what they need to do to resolve it—the sale is going to very quickly be thrown in the too-hard basket. Make sure your error handling is smart and intuitive.

8. Doing what the big guys do

The reality is that the big guys, with the big budgets, are going to be better informed in terms of what constitutes the ideal checkout process. If you want to see a seamless checkout processes in action, be sure to buy something from the likes of Amazon so you know where the benchmark is.

9. Tracking checkout drop-offs

This is all about being as informed as you can about what’s actually happening though your checkout process. My favorite piece of free web software, Google Analytics, is the best place to start. You can thoroughly integrate your ecommerce pages with Analytics—some of the insights you’ll gain might even scare you a little. How you do that is another post in itself, so if you want me to step you through the process, be sure to let me know.

10. Asking people why they’re leaving

Another obvious but seldom-used method to gain insight into why people don’t order your products is to ask them. On-exit pop-ups and light boxes are a great method to quickly ask your customers why they’re leaving. This detailed information will show you very quickly where your friction points are.

When you think about it, if someone abandons your checkout process without completing it, you’ve only got yourself to blame. You’ve done all the hard work to convince the customer that they want to buy your product, then managed to talk them out of it with a poor checkout experience. Reducing the friction in your checkout process is one of the easiest ways to maximize your revenue.

Stay tuned from most posts by the secretive Web Marketing Ninja—a professional online marketer for a major web brand, who’s sharing more of his tips undercover here at ProBlogger over the coming weeks.

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Google Updates and Other SEO News

Nothing ever stays the same very long on the Internet and that’s especially true when you’re dealing with Google. Now since that’s the primary search engine it’s also the one most people involved with search engine optimization need to concern themselves with so when the Head Googlers recently made the announcement they’d come out with a URL shortener, goo.gl, it raised a few preliminary red flags among people whose big concern is seo.

Google’s Matt Cutts has gone out of his way to put everyone at ease by pointing to things like the fact the shortener uses a method to redirect links that could be good for social media users and actually point to benefits for your website. If you’re anything like me your ears perk up when you hear any steps Google is taking to increase the efficiency of links because they are the bread-and-butter of any good search engine optimization campaign along with keywords.

Goo.gl could also play a part with the ranking algorithm the site uses and work its way into search results if the whole technique becomes popular. That’s the thing  everyone who works with seo knows—its parameters are constantly changing and that means you need to keep on top of all these changes so you can supply rankings and traffic that  provide your clients with what they need in the way of hits.

Some experts are predicting the results could be similar to Facebook’s Like button in that there will be some demographic information passed along when users are signed into their accounts.

Of course with the rise of social media people are beginning to wonder how seo will fare and although many pundits were first calling for the burial of search engine optimization with the rise of Facebook and Twitter, there now seems to be more of a conciliatory attitude with many professionals calling for a combined effort between the two.

Of course it stands to reason when you consider a good website that is search engine optimized is always the basis for any business and any of the social media campaigns you undergo will always point back to the same starting point. Through it all, there has never been any call for discarding good content or scrapping keywords and links.

In another bit of news, it’s now even predicted that mobile SEO platforms will become more important than the ones used on laptops or even PCs. Some of the people who know are even predicting a resurgence in things like pay per click advertising on the mobile web with the number of smart phones that are now in use.

Remember too that another report is stating Internet marketers are looking toward making link building their priority in the next twelve months and that means the need for well written content to couch these links will grow in the near future….again.

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Blogging Tips from Pro Triathletes

This is a guest post by Mike CJ, co author of Beyond Blogging.

One of the businesses I consult with organizes triathlon events. Although my work is based around their blog and social media presence, I also enjoy getting stuck in as a general volunteer on the actual events.

The triathlon we run is called Ironman, and it consists of a 3.8km swim, followed by a 180km bike ride and finished off with a 42.2km marathon. Our triathlon is renowned as the world’s toughest, as athletes have to endure our searing heat and a mountainous bike course.

I’ve been lucky enough to get to know several world-class, professional competitors, and it was while talking to one of them that the similarity between what they do and what bloggers do dawned on me.

It’s the details that count

Steve was explaining to me that the difference between being a winner and an “also-ran” in triathlon is about improving a wide range of factors, bit by bit, over time.

He said the mistake most amateurs make is to focus on what he called “The big one”— the biggest challenge. In triathlons, that’s almost always the bike discipline, or the marathon. Amateurs tend to work hardest on those areas, believing that there is a lot to be gained from the two longest legs.

He told me that they’ll work and work on one area, and then lose all the time they’ve gained in those legs on other parts of the race.

As a pro, he told me the secret to his success was to focus on improving every single element of his race by a small amount every week. As well as the obvious key phases of the race, he also concentrates on small details:

• the swim start, running into the sea and getting into a stroke fast
• stripping his wetsuit off while running to the transition area
• getting sun cream on quickly
• leaving his bike shoes strapped to the pedals and doing them up while riding
• changing his seat height for the final few miles to get his legs ready for the run
• dismounting from the bike and racking it fast
• putting his running shoes on while running
• planning his fluid intake during the race.

These are just a few examples, but he told me that he seeks to improve the efficiency of each of those factors by several per cent every year. In real terms, he may make up only a few seconds on each, but when they’re all added together, he improves by minutes every single year.

How to blog like a pro triathlete

We bloggers love to focus on the big stuff—changing our themes, writing an epic series of posts, or perhaps creating a new ebook or course.

But actually, it’s all the little things that add up to improve our traffic, increase our conversion rate and really move our blogs forward over time. Lasting progress is achieved in many small ways:

• revisiting old posts to add internal links and improve them
• adding new follow-ups to keep our email lists engaged
• testing placement of adverts or calls to action to improve response rates
• taking the time to follow commenters back to their blogs
• creating sneeze pages to help new readers find relevant stuff
• adding links to relevant past posts when we write new ones.

None of these tasks are interesting, fun or sexy, but find me a successful blog and I’ll show you a blogger who does them. All the time.

Mike CJ is a full time blogger and writer who lives in the idyllic Canary Islands. He’s co author of Beyond Blogging and you can find out more about him at Mike’s Life.

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