Feature Product Review:The power of WordPress, when it comes to launching profitable websites and distributing, needs no introduction. Everybody knows how it can distribute content to various other websites when it is posted, but a lot of the time, content syndication has to be done manually, which is a very time-consuming activity. WordPress Syndicator, a
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WordPress Syndicator
Usually on Copyblogger we talk about how to grow your business , get more customers, increase your conversion rate, build thousands of daily readers, and all the rest of it. But you also need to know about the factors that will kill off your business. Sometimes it’s a question of attitude, like when you’re sick of it, when it’s only a hobby and you don’t want to take it too seriously, or when you’re equally scared of success and failure. And then there are just downright mistakes, which, fortunately, can be corrected. If you want your business to thrive, watch out for these warning signs. Get them straightened out and you’ll get your business on the road to robust good health. #1: A sucky attitude Your attitude about your own business will affect everyone else’s attitude about it. Every web visitor, every person you speak to, every twitter and FaceBook contact. They’ll know, without you telling them, exactly how you regard your business. What are some of the warning signs that your attitude may suck? When you don’t post for weeks on end. When you haven’t put out a new product or service for the last six months. When you say your business would be great if it wasn’t for those $#%^& customers. When you whinge about how hard business is and how all those successful A-listers must have had friends in the right places. When you’re expecting to be an overnight success and you’re surprised that you aren’t both rich and famous after six months. #2: Marketing to a demographic, not a niche The best and simplest definition of a niche that I’ve seen is “a group of people with a common problem who congregate together.” What isn’t a niche? Freelancers are not a niche. Work at Home Parents (mums, dads, or both) are not a niche. Small business owners are not a niche. Copywriters are not a niche. Women over 40 are not a niche, neither are men after retirement. Those are all demographics — and they’re all groups that I’ve seen people try to market to. It’s only a niche when they share a problem. So what’s the problem in your niche, and how are you going to solve it? Where does your niche group together so you can market to them specifically? It’s a marketing paradox that the more you narrow your niche, the more successful your marketing will be. Have a look at who you’re aiming at now and ask yourself if it’s a demographic or a real niche. How can you narrow your message down to their core problem — the one that you solve brilliantly and uniquely? #3: Looking like a cheapskate It’s so easy to set up an online business these days — just whack up a WordPress.com or Blogger site and off you go. Need graphics? Pick up some clip art. Logo and website header? $50 should take care of that if you outsource to the lowest bidder. Business cards? You can get freebies from Vistaprint, why pay money for a designer and printing? Newsletter list? Send that from your desktop with Outlook. The only problem here is that your business looks cheap. And the overall impression visitors and potential clients get is that you’re (a) broke, (b) cheap and (c) unprofessional. There are some things you can do free or low-cost and no one will notice. Your website is not one of them. Don’t get me wrong here, you don’t have to go to the other extreme and mortgage your house to pay for the website. You do have to make sure that your site has a clean, professional look, that it’s easy to navigate, and that your web presence makes you look worth the prices you charge. #4: Not capturing visitor details Someone comes to your site, looks around, reads some posts, and then leaves. Sure, they liked it and intend to come back and read some more — but they never do. They forget, lose the url, get busy. And you’ve lost them forever. I’m amazed at the number of small businesses that don’t have a way to capture visitor details — their names and email addresses. They’re losing customers and making life harder for themselves. It takes time and effort to attract people to your site, so why let them leave without a way to keep in touch? Set up an email newsletter list (NOT from your desktop, see #3 above) and offer a valuable free report or ebook in exchange for their details. MailChimp is free up to 500 subscribers if money is tight at the start, and you can build from there. Once you’ve lost a visitor they’re gone forever — along with every person they may have referred you to. Do you really want to let them get away that easily? #5: Failing to plan long term Or don’t plan at all. Business plans are for big businesses, and for when you need to go to the bank for capital, right? Wrong! When you don’t plan you’ll drift. You’ll chase the latest marketing guru and technique, flit from this to that and wonder why nothing seems to work for you. What are you aiming for? What do you expect out of your business? How will you know when you’ve reached it? You don’t need a 100 page plan full of legalese and possible budgets and financial projections that no-one but your Accountant understands. But at the very least you do need to know what your aims (goals) for your business are, who you’re marketing to, and what makes you different from everyone else out there. No plan = No business. #6: All learning, no action Are you a ‘gunna’? You’re ‘gunna’ do this and ‘gunna’ do that? Just as soon as you’ve studied this marketing e-course, read those 136 ebooks, listened to the 84 teleseminars and watched the 78 hours of business videos that you’ve downloaded onto your computer? How many information products have you bought that you’ve never read, listened to or watched? How many of them have you actually worked through step by step? We all do this, or rather, don’t do this. Me? I’m waiting for retirement before I work through my resources folder — it’s the only way I’ll ever have the time. Ebooks, courses, videos and all the other teaching methods are great, as long as you utilize what you’ve learned . Information junkies abound. People who take action on what they’ve learned are rare. You’ll learn more in your first twelve months of actually running your business and putting yourself out there than you will from any number of books, courses and videos. Information is great, but nothing beats taking action. About the Author: Mel Brennan is the antipodean force behind both SuperWAHM and the Two Hour Business Plan . You can also catch her on Twitter . P.S. Looking for the advice we talked about at the beginning: how to grow your business, get more customers, increase your conversion rate, gain several thousand daily readers, and all of that good stuff? You’ll find it on the free Copyblogger newsletter, Internet Marketing for Smart People . Come join us today !
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6 Online Marketing Mistakes that Will Kill Your Business
Ever wonder where you’re supposed to find the time to promote your blog? If you’re blogging in your spare time, it can seem impossible. You’re already struggling just to publish a post every weekday, and sometimes you can’t even manage that. You want to work on your SEO, twitter following, and relationships with popular bloggers, but you also have a job, family, friends — responsibilities that are just more important. And so you wonder: should you just keep going, doing the best you can? Or is there a strategy you can use that doesn’t require so much time? I started to research the answer to that question about a year ago, and after working with more than 50 bloggers, trying different things, I think I’ve found one. As it turns out, the answer isn’t doing more. It’s doing less . Let me explain. Step One: Publish only one blog post per week Whoever said you have to publish a blog post every weekday? Nobody, as far as I can tell. It’s just what everyone does, and so most of us assume it’s the only way to do it. But it’s not. If you’re strapped for time, there’s nothing wrong with cutting back on the number of posts you publish each week. Your readers might even be grateful. Most people have so much to read that they don’t have time to keep up with all of your blog posts, and they feel bad about it. By cutting back, you make it easier for them to stay a subscriber. So how many posts should you publish, exactly? There’s no set number, but here’s a suggestion: start with one really good post per week, and if you have time, work your way up. The key word is “good.” One well-written, well-thought-out blog post can get you more links and traffic than hundreds of hurried ones. Some writers are faster than others, but in general, if you’re spending less than two hours on most of your posts, you’re probably going too fast. Cut back the quantity, and focus on quality. By itself, this will often double or triple your traffic. But it also does something else: it frees up time to focus on promotion. Step Two: Publish one guest post per month on popular blogs As you’ve probably seen, there are hundreds of strategies for promoting a blog. In an ideal world, you would use them all, digging dozens of channels for traffic to come flowing in. There’s only one problem: you don’t live in an ideal world. And neither do I. Even if you were working on your blog full-time with a dozen employees to help you, you couldn’t do everything . So don’t try. Instead, focus on one strategy, and get really good at it. My advice: start with guest blogging . Here’s why: pretty much every other traffic strategy depends on you having connections. To make SEO work, you need links from trusted sites. To make twitter work, you need to get retweets from people who have a lot of followers. To make social bookmarking work, you need connections with social media power users who can bring you dozens or even hundreds of votes. And that’s hard when you’re a beginner, because you don’t have any of those connections. In my opinion, it’s far, far easier to establish relationships with influential people first , and then use those connections to fuel the other strategies. If you can publish just one guest post per month for popular blogs, at the end of the year, you’ll have made connections with twelve very influential people who can help you grow your blog. That’s not going to give you 100,000 subscribers all by itself. But it will give you a nice foundation, and it’s one you can build on. Step Three: Slowly start doing more posts and promotions Once you start getting results, I think you’ll find it’s a lot easier to expand your efforts. Everyone is more motivated to work on something that’s working. If you land a guest post on a big blog and pick up a few hundred subscribers, you won’t have to push yourself quite so hard to work on your next post. You’ll want to do it, and that makes blogging a lot more enjoyable. You’ll also have the connections you need to slowly start trying some other traffic strategies. For instance, you could: Publish a special piece of content, such as a free report or video, and then use your connections to get links from popular blogs ( Here’s a free tutorial on how to do that ). Build a following on twitter to help promote your posts, and then strategically make a post go viral ( Here’s a free tutorial on how to do that, too ). Pick a search phrase that gets hundreds of thousands of searches per month, and then use your connections to get trusted links (That tutorial is coming this Friday). By themselves, none of those strategies are new. Anyone who has been blogging for more than a few months probably dreams about attracting links, building a twitter following, and getting a first page ranking on Google. The difference is you’ll actually be able to do it. Cutting your posting schedule will free up the time you need to work on promotion, and guest blogging will give you the connections you need to pull them off. It’s a very simple system, but it’s also one that gives you everything you need while investing a more reasonable amount of time. Is the system perfect? No. In fact, it has one serious flaw: Isn’t getting a guest post on a popular blog kind of hard? Yeah, it can be. With audiences numbering in the tens or even hundreds of thousands, popular bloggers are justifiably careful about the quality of content they publish. Frequently, they also have a lot of bloggers volunteering to do guest posts, so the competition can be stiff. But it’s not impossible. New bloggers do it on a regular basis here at Copyblogger, as well as many other popular blogs. There’s no reason you can’t do it too. You just need a few tricks of the trade to help you get started. Check out the free GuestBlogging.com videos If you haven’t seen the GuestBlogging.com videos yet, you should check them out . They’re free, and they contain some of the most powerful strategies I’ve learned while writing for Copyblogger and building popular blogs of my own. So far, thousands of people have signed up for them, and many are saying it’s some of the best blogging advice ever published. The bad news is that I’m about to take it all down. No, it’s not because I’m the King of Mean. ( Even though I am .) It’s because next week, I’m opening the doors to a new training program I’ve put together specifically for people who are serious about building a popular blog. I’ll leave the videos up for about another week, but once the training program starts, I’ll be taking them down to give members 100% of my attention. I’ll probably be releasing them again at some point, but I’m not sure when, and I didn’t want the Copyblogger readers to miss out. So, if you’ve been looking for a strategy you can implement in your spare time without having a lot of connections, be sure to take a look . It’s not the only strategy for building a popular blog. But if you’re strapped for time, I think it’ll work well for you. About the Author: Jon Morrow is the Associate Editor of Copyblogger and the founder of GuestBlogging.com . Get more from Jon on twitter .
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The Three-Step Guide to Getting More Traffic by Writing Less
You try to kick someone under the table and your leg stays as inert as the table’s leg. Your toes are unwiggleable. Your eyebrow won’t arch wryly in disdain. You want to make something happen, but that desire isn’t translating into movement. Your muscles don’t obey the signals from your brain. That’s paralysis. Analysis is pretty much the same thing. You analyze your business all the time. You decide that it would be smart to start an email campaign, or change the direction for your blog posts. You decide whether to run a promotion for your consulting business or launch an information product. You’re thinking about something happening. But you’re not making it happen. When analysis paralysis is beneficial It turns out that sometimes it’s good to be paralyzed. Every night, when you go to sleep and drop deep into that REM state that lets you wake up all refreshed in the morning, you are, medically speaking, paralyzed. This is a good thing. When you get tired, your ability to act is impaired. You’re more likely to get lost, to drive poorly, to call the ex you swore you’d never speak to again. Get paralyzed by sleep for a couple of hours, and suddenly everything improves. When your spouse throws the car keys at you a little too hard because they haven’t forgiven you for calling your ex last night, you catch them effortlessly with catlike reflexes. Analysis can be like this. Sometimes we have too much going on in our businesses. It can help to take a moment to stop everything and hold completely still, moving nothing but our brains, just thinking about the problem. We don’t have to take action yet. We don’t have to move a muscle. We just have to think about what we’ll do when we’re ready to move. Analysis can be a refreshing pause for our brains. It can also be a serious problem. When analysis paralysis Is detrimental The kind of paralysis you experience in REM state every night is good for you. You probably didn’t even know you were paralyzed. (If you weren’t freaking out about it before, don’t start now. Whatever you do, don’t think about the xkcd comic that points out that dreaming means going comatose, hallucinating vividly, and then suffering amnesia. Adding paralysis to that list doesn’t sound so bad now, does it?) It’s okay for your legs (and the rest of you) to be paralyzed for a couple hours a night. If it goes on for more than a day, though, you’re going to start to be pretty concerned about some of the logistics. Analysis can be like this, too. When you’ve taken the time to hold still and analyze your business for a couple of hours — even a full working day — before you take action, that’s perfectly healthy. It has probably improved your ability to move forward confidently and with good judgment. If you find yourself analyzing for weeks or months at a time without moving, it’s time to be concerned. How to cure analysis paralysis To cure real paralysis, you generally need the sort of miracle doctor featured prominently in many a popular medical drama, but not so prominently in real-life hospitals. To cure analysis paralysis, though, you just need to check out the recent Third Tribe seminar featuring Sonia Simone and Chris Garrett , where they talk about how to take action on that product launch you’ve been meaning to do, thinking about, analyzing, and never doing. You’ll learn: The product development technique that kills paralysis, moves you to a fast launch, and creates great value for your customers Why “thinking big” can stop you dead in your tracks, and how to get moving again How to use your own “weaknesses” as strengths that move you forward What to do if you don’t have thick skin (and how it can work to your benefit) How to create products that move your customers farther and faster toward their goals. While you’re listening, you’ll find yourself analyzing how to use these techniques in your business. You may also find yourself lulled into a soporific state of bliss, because Sonia’s voice is extremely soothing. And that’s okay. To make sure you don’t get stuck there, though, there’s a Next Action worksheet to help you move forward. Use it. Make your business stronger through movement. Otherwise, I’d have to explain what “atrophy” means. And no one wants that. About the Author: Taylor Lindstrom is a freelance copywriter and the new Assistant Editor for Copyblogger . This is her first Copyblogger post. P.S. To snag Chris and Sonia’s interview, and instant access to 15 more cutting-edge seminars that will move your business forward (with new seminars added every month), join the Third Tribe today .
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The Cure for Analysis Paralysis
I saw this cover of the current Time magazine while waiting for a flight at LAX. The article poses an interesting question – is three months of downtime each summer causing American children to fall behind? The Case Against Summer Vacation I think the answer is obvious. What would happen to American adult jobs if they took off three months each year? Others would surely step up and take their place. Just days before seeing the Time Magazine cover I was at Disneyland where I saw a kid wearing a T-shirt that made an impression on me that coincidentally illustrates the differences between American kids mentality and those who weren’t as lucky to be born here – the kid’s shirt said: “I work mine off so I can kick yours.” The kid wearing the T-Shirt didn’t appear to be anything like the one characterized in the illustration above. Nor did the kid have any illusions about what it takes to succeed in America let alone the world today. If only American kid’s were so lucky.
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The Case Against Summer Vacation