How To Avoid Hype When You Sell
There’s an interesting challenge I’ve come up against many times, which I think most professional bloggers know well.
The challenge is how to sell something without using all that horrible “hype” that Internet marketers use.
But wait a second. Hype actually works, or at least good “sales copy” works if you call convincing people to buy what you sell your desired outcome.
The challenge is figuring out what level of “sales talk” to use when trying to sell. You don’t want to be accused of over-hyping something, nor do you want to put in such a weak effort that no one buys.
The problem unfortunately cannot be solved 100% because what is hype to one person is not to another. We all have our own internal “bullshit meter” as it might be labeled, based on all kinds of things like our personality, experience with marketing, emotional state at the time of reference, etc etc.
You can’t account for everything, but you can work with what you should hopefully know quite well – you and your potential customers- and attempt to meet the needs of both.
Membership Site Mastermind Reopens Tuesday November 3rd For 24 Hours Only
Did you read that sub-heading? I hope you did.
It might seem a little out of place, but I put it there because one of the messages I want you to take away from reading this blog post is that I’m reopening Membership Site Mastermind for one last day for all the stragglers and latecomers who didn’t join during the opening last week.
I know there are stragglers because they keep emailing me asking if they can squeeze in, so I’m giving you one last chance to take the program with me during this final run for 2009.
This will definitely be the last time it’s open this year. No more one day openings, no exceptions, if you email and ask no matter how good your excuse, you won’t be allowed in. That wouldn’t be fair to the hundreds of people who took initiative and joined when the doors were open.
You can sign up here from 11 AM EST US time on Tuesday for 24 hours only -
So, back to my original thought train…
Are Blog Comments A Trustworthy Source Of Feedback?
I’ve done a lot of online launches – about eight all up if you include closing down and reopening promotions – and each one included heavy support from affiliates, some of whom run popular blogs, including Problogger, John Chow, Shoemoney, Copyblogger and DailyBlogTips.
During a launch, to get a feel for the pulse of how the campaign is going, I spend time reading the comments made to other blogs on the posts relevant to me, my products and the free resources I release.
This is always an interesting process, but it can be very misleading. Most forms of feedback you get online, including comments made to your blog, other blogs, emails you receive and any other discussion points like forums and social media, should be considered very warily.
The problem with this sort of feedback is that it comes from people who rarely represent the majority, yet because they are vocal, what they say does have an impact on the silent majority, those who read the posts and comments but never write a comment of their own.
As the creator of a product feedback is a great thing, but it’s so easy to read a negative comment made about you or what you do on another person’s blog and read into it as indicative of what everybody thinks, which it rarely is. The same goes for positive commentary too, but most people don’t stress about good comments – it’s only the bad ones.
Reputation management is important, but being careful not to involve yourself on an emotional level is important too.
Setting Expectations
The selection of blogs I listed above are very different. The personas behind each blog are different, thus the voice and writing style is different and hence the type of audience they attract is different too.
This is an important consideration, because you have to realize that what is being said on one blog relates to the environment established at that blog from prior blog posts and interactions with that particular blogger. Darren Rowse is different from John Chow, who is different from Brian Clark and Daniel Scocco.
These guys all have followings of people who have come to expect certain actions, types of posts and standards. It’s safe to say that the audience of a blogger generally likes the person behind the blog and shares some, not all, but some of the opinions and viewpoints of that blogger. In other words, they resonate with the person behind the words, hence they read their blog.
This is why, when you head out there and conduct a launch, which is presented in your voice and style, there’s a friction between how you “speak” and how the blogger who writes about you as an affiliate speaks too. The best affiliate is able to use their understanding of their market, and take what you give during a launch and promote your offer so it lines up well with the desires of the audience they have the attention of, using the right language.
Of course there are times when the alignment isn’t there and certain things you do as a marketer are frowned upon by some audiences and not others. This is why you have to be careful when reading comments on other blogs. If your style contradicts the expectations of the vocal minority at that blog, you’re going to hear about it.
State Based Opinions
Another interesting observation I’ve noticed when looking at feedback I receive is how state-based each situation is. This applies to comments made on your blog, or any other blog or any feedback anywhere you get.
New Free Report: The Roadmap To Become A Blogger
Update: The MP3 audio version of the Roadmap report has been added to the download page and it’s free too. Now you can read and listen to what it takes to build a great blog!
I’m very excited to announce that my latest report, co-authored with Gideon Shalwick, my partner in the Becomeablogger.com video site, is now ready for download.
Gideon and I have been working hard for the past few months preparing this report for you. It’s called “The Roadmap To Become A Blogger“, or as I like to simply call it – “The Roadmap“.
You can download the free report right now from here -
Why Another Report About Blogging?
I don’t release new products very often. The reason why is because I prefer to invest time in something to make sure it delivers tremendous value and I like to have the opportunity to develop a product with feedback from active participants.
Back in 2007 I hired Gideon Shalwick to produce a series of videos I had envisioned for a domain name that I acquired called becomeablogger.com. I wanted to have some very basic training presented in video for people new to blogs so they could learn how to begin the blogging process by themselves, no matter what skill they currently possessed with technology.
Fast forward to today and we are nearing 60,000 viewers of those videos. Gideon did a fantastic job and I’m so pleased the site has truly taken off.
Gideon and I both agreed that if the videos were well received we would like to do more. However, in order to devote the time and resources into creating the videos (the free videos we currently give away cost several thousand dollars to create), we would need to make the service a membership site, and hence the idea for Become A Blogger Premium was born.
This new premium video membership site will open December 4th 2008 to invite the first intake of students. I’ll have more news about that soon.
As soon as we decided to launch the new training program I knew we would need something to give away as a teaching tool to introduce people to the concepts we are presenting in the new series of videos. After going back and forwards between delivering the resource in video or text, we decided to use both, but focus our core message in one document – The Roadmap.
What Is The Roadmap Report?
How To Simplify The Niche Selection Process
During the last few live question and answer sessions with my Blog Mastermind students at least one person every call asks for help determining whether they have a good choice for a blog topic.
Given that new people join the program each week, it’s not surprising that question crops up over and over again. Everyone new to blogging faces the challenge of topic selection as the first big hurdle, and while I can never offer the “right” solution, as only the market can tell you that, I do my best to offer my suggestions and tips for conducting research to aide with topic selection.
What Topic Is Right?
Topic selection for a blog is similar to niche selection for a business. What you decide to write about determines what type of audience you attract and how you make money from that audience. In today’s e-commerce landscape, content is the driving force behind traffic and purchasing decisions online, so topic selection is a big deal.
Today I want to offer a simple answer to this problem, to help choose what topic and niche is right for you. I say simple because it’s possible to make this a very complicated choice, with in-depth keyword research, market analysis and other assessable factors weighing in on the decision process.
Unfortunately I find that many people who do extensive research become paralyzed. With more data comes more awareness of the different variables at play. Sometimes knowing less is a good thing because it gives you a clear next step – an action you can take that actually moves you closer to a result.
This is especially important for newbies and people with personalities that demand they know everything about everything before taking that first step into the big wide world. As someone new to Internet marketing, learning about all the different ways to research a potential topic may be so much work and such a big learning curve that it takes months before any action is taken to actually test the topic in the market.
You have to learn how to choose a niche before even choosing a niche!
I’m not saying you should bury your head in the sand and take a leap of faith when choosing a topic, but you can certainly make it easier on yourself.
Spotting Opportunities
Let me explain how I have selected topics for the businesses I have run in the past. In almost all circumstances the process has gone something like this -
The Death Of Blog Networks?
I saw this coming years ago and thankfully I made adjustments back then too.
If you watched my video on Conversion Blogging and the blog posts leading up to the release of the video, you know I was advocating a move away from the Page View Slave (PVS) model of blogging for money.
The PVS model relies on the raw number of page views you can deliver to advertisers in order to increase or maintain a level of income from blogging. Following the PVS model you set yourself up for hard work literally forever, plus you tend to put all your eggs in one basket, relying on traffic from Google to keep the page views up and in some cases, trading that traffic right back to Google in the form of AdSense click income.
Blog Networks In Turmoil
Today I had a chance, after supporting the new Blog Mastermind students and taking some time off, to catch up on the activities in the blogosphere.
One particular thread caught my attention, starting at Problogger with Darren’s short post on Talking Blog Networks, linking through to a post by Jeremy Wright, CEO of blog network b5media, on his feedback about the challenges of running a blog network and ending with Wendy Piersall’s thoughts on what the closure of a high profile blog network means to people in this industry.
I’ve never been a blog network owner per se, but I’ve owned multiple blogs and at one stage considered launching my own network after successfully branching into a second blog. Needless to say, I know the challenges you face coordinating bloggers, hiring good ones and monetizing the sites by selling the page views. It’s not easy for one person to do and I was stretching myself at times when trying to do it for just two blogs, so I can only imagine what Jeremy goes through at b5 with hundreds of blogs even with the support of a company team around him.
This is why years ago I decided to focus on long term asset creation and look for a means to get leveraged outcomes from what I do with blogs without wholly relying on the creative talents of other bloggers. I’ve never had intentions of trapping myself to a desk running a huge company as a busy CEO either, so I look for ways to keep things small, yet exponentially profitable, without giving up time and lifestyle freedoms.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve made good money being in charge of blogs that I didn’t personally write to (leveraging other people’s talents, but always in a win-win relationship), but the job is taxing – people managing is always taxing. If that’s a role you are prepared to fulfill, perhaps for a short term period, you can make it work, just be aware of what you are signing yourself up to if you decide the blog network model is something you will pursue.
