Life Say Articles

Dean: Did you know you can use your blog to make money offline? Blogger: Offline? What is this “offline” you speak of? Dean: It’s the opposite of “online.” Blogger: (confused silence) Dean: You know. Offline. Not on the internet. The real world. Blogger: (shaking phone) Not only does this stupid phone drop my calls, now it’s translating them into crazy moon language. Okay, I jest. But to listen to some bloggers, you would think a blog’s only purpose is to make money online, by selling ebooks , membership sites , or advertising. The truth is, blogs have grown into a more powerful tool than anyone ever imagined. They’re ideal for making money online, of course. But they can also be used to generate profits for nearly any kind of business, including those that provide real services in the offline world. This often means generating sales leads for a service or consulting business. This is how I use my copywriting business blog, which accounts for most of the new clients who call me these days. Okay, sounds great. People read your blog and then call to hire you, right? Well, not quite. Are you selling a product or a service? First, it’s important to understand that selling a service is not like selling a product. When you sell a product, the process is usually pretty straightforward. Basically, you introduce the product, spell out some benefits, make an offer, and people make a buying decision. Selling a service can be a little more involved. Prospects first inquire about the service, usually comparing you with other providers. If the service is expensive, like my copywriting and marketing consulting, people are even more careful about their decision. I’ve had clients take years to finally made the decision to hire me. And it’s common for people to start a phone call by saying, “I’ve been reading your blog for quite a while now. Do you have moment to talk about a copywriting project?” This shouldn’t surprise you. The more expensive the service, the more important it is, and the more commitment it requires from the customer, the more careful that customer is going to be. Think about it. If you need your bathroom painted, you might spend an afternoon looking for a decent painter. If you need to build an extension onto your house, you might spend weeks or even months finding the perfect contractor for the job. So if you provide a service, such as freelance writing, graphic design, web consulting, wedding photography, event planning, translation, or whatever, you can use your blog to attract prospects and begin the process of selling them on your services. Here’s how. Create your sales funnel Professional sales people often talk about filling their “sales funnel” or “sales pipeline.” What they mean is that in order to make a sale sometime in the future, they want people to inquire today. They always want to have lots of people who are in various stages of readiness to buy. To keep things simple, I like to think of the sales funnel as having just 4 simple steps. 1. Generate inquiries This means getting people to contact you. Typically this is done by offering something of value in exchange for contact information. For my business, I offer a free newsletter . If people go to my main website, I also offer a free white paper . In both cases, they have to give me some contact information before they get the freebie. I also provide a contact form and phone number for “hot” leads who are ready to talk business. I get many inquiries every week. Most can’t afford my services. But a few are high quality and good candidates for future business. 2. Follow up After you’ve delivered the freebie or provided whatever information you have promised, it’s time to schedule your follow-up, usually either by email or phone. Because you are responding to someone’s inquiry, it’s not a cold call. You have a valid reason for making contact and have an opportunity to gauge how serious the person is. Are they just gathering information? Do they need your services immediately? Or are they somewhere in between? The most serious are your sales leads. Everyone else is a prospect. You will want to spend more time on sales leads than prospects. 3. Nurture leads This is the step most people are tempted to skip. Like every other person selling a service, you want to make a sale right away. But while a few people will hire you immediately, most will not. Their interest needs to be nurtured until they’re ready to buy. You should store all contact information in a database, which could be a simple customer relationship management system like Highrise or a desktop-based program such as ACT! . Find ways to regularly communicate with your leads. Over time, they will become more familiar with you and more comfortable with the idea of hiring you. People always prefer the familiar over the unknown. There are many ways to nurture leads. You can send news or information they might be interested in, make additional offers for low-cost or introductory services, connect with them socially, and even seek their advice from time to time. 4. Close sales This step is self-explanatory. A potential customer needs your service. You provide a quote or estimate, answer questions, overcome objections, and eventually close the sale. This is your end game, the goal of your efforts. And if you’ve set up a good lead generation system and kept your sales funnel consistently full, it will actually be the easiest step in the process. Easy ways to generate inquiries from your blog The hardest part about generating sales leads is getting people to contact you in the first place. If you’re just starting out and no one knows who you are, this may seem impossible. As a blogger, you may know a variety of ways to promote your blog. Obviously, the more blog traffic you get, the easier it will be to generate leads. But you don’t need a ton of traffic to make it work. According to Alexa , my business blog is ranked at around 100,000 or so. That’s not bad, but it’s nowhere near superstar blogs such as Copyblogger. However, I get enough of the right kind of people reading it to generate a steady stream of inquiries for my services. So don’t worry about becoming a top-ranked blog. To successfully sell your services, you just need regular inquiries from the right kind of people. The more specialized you are, and the more targeted your blog posts, the more likely this will happen. Of course, bringing people to your blog is one thing. Generating inquiries is another. Here are some simple things you can do to make those inquiries happen. Contact Form — If you have a blog, you almost certainly have a contact form. However, the standard contact form is not enough. You should modify your form to match the service you sell. Take a look at the highly specialized form I use . E-Newsletter — This is an easy way to stay in touch with many people and provide great value while you’re at it. Since I specialize in copywriting for direct mail and direct marketing, my newsletter features articles and information on the subject. I have several thousand subscribers and about half of my new clients say they became pre-sold on my abilities by subscribing. Free White Paper — While a newsletter requires an ongoing commitment, a white paper is a one-time effort. Write it, post a contact/request form, and send a link to the PDF when requests come in. You could also automate the process with an auto responder, but I like to fulfill these requests personally so I can watch for hot leads from companies I want to work with. My white paper on improving direct mail response generates many requests every week. Information Kit — If you’ve built a blog or site around your services, you should provide plenty of information online. However, you can offer pricing, forms, a client list, and other information in the form of a downloadable PDF. Remember, when someone requests information, it gives you the opportunity to capture contact information. Webinars — These days it’s fairly simple to put together a webinar using services such as GoToWebinar . You can also create non-interactive presentations with software like PowerPoint or OpenOffice. The idea is to provide something of value that enables you to collect contact information. Videos — Using software and hardware built into many computers, you can create simple, informative videos. They don’t have to be fancy. Just look into the camera and talk. Or edit together simple footage demonstrating your work or how you solved a problem. Video can also be a helpful tool to encourage people to sign up for your newsletter, webinar, or other information. Pay Per Click — If you write and promote a good blog, you’re probably getting a fair amount of natural traffic. But pay-per-click ads can give you a boost for people looking for your particular services. Your results will vary depending on the level of competition and amount you’re willing to spend, but it’s worth a test. Just remember: Your blog is a means to an end . If you use your blog to attract the right kind of traffic, and follow the advice above to generate sales leads, you should see a dramatic increase in your business. About the Author: Dean Rieck is one of America’s most in-demand direct marketing copywriters who shares his writing and freelancing know-how at Pro Copy Tips .

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A Four-Step Guide to Generating Sales Leads from Your Blog

“What am I doing wrong?” I whispered to the computer screen. A part of me wanted nothing more than to go to bed and forget about blogging forever. And yet, there I was, hunched over the computer, as I dug through my traffic stats for the millionth time. Somewhere inside was the answer to why I wasn’t getting more traffic, and I was going to find it. Some people would have said I was asking for too much. The blog was already doing decently well, averaging about 100 visitors a day after only two months. I got at least a few glowing comments on every post I wrote. Several people had sent e-mails, complementing me on my writing. But the problem was the blog wasn’t growing. I was putting out better content than anyone else in my niche. I tried every traffic strategy you can name. I was working on it so hard that my day job was suffering. And yet the traffic stayed the same. It was like I’d run up against some invisible barrier, and nothing would push me past it. I was beginning to think I’d be doomed to 100 visitors per day forever, and that certainly wasn’t enough to quit my job over. I sighed and pushed back from the computer. “I’ll figure it out tomorrow,” I said, heading off to bed. And the next morning I woke up with a peculiar idea that explained everything. The glass ceiling What if I told you the blogosphere has a sort of “glass ceiling?” The idea goes something like this: Anyone can start a blog. If you work hard, you can even grow it to a few hundred visitors a day or so. But at some point, the growth stalls out. You reach a plateau. It’ll be like you’ve run into a glass ceiling — an invisible but bulletproof barrier. You’ll see bloggers on the other side, and they don’t seem to be doing anything different than you are. But for some reason, they were able to break through, and you weren’t. It took me two years and three failed blogs to figure this out. And the answer is nothing close to what I expected. The inner circle The good news about the glass ceiling is there is a door. The bad news is it’s guarded. You see, every niche has an “inner circle.” A group of people who command a lot of attention. Everyone reads their blogs (or books). Their opinions are widely respected. And they often coordinate their marketing to help each other grow. In the blogging niche, it’s people like Brian Clark, Darren Rowse, Chris Brogan, and Sonia Simone — who, of course, all came together to form Third Tribe . In real estate investing, it’s gurus like Bill Bronchick, Ron Legrand, and Robert Kiyosaki. It doesn’t matter what niche or topic you point to; you’ll find an inner circle. And if you want serious traffic — and by serious, I mean thousands of visitors per day – the fastest way to do that is to convince members of the inner circle in your niche to promote you. They’re not going to come find you The odds are you’re not going to publish a post some day that makes all of the insiders in your niche want to know you. If you want their help, you have to proactively build relationships. The bloggers who bypass the glass ceiling don’t just do it by publishing more or better content than everyone else. They also do it by working behind the scenes to build friendly relationships with people who can help them. The question is, how? That’s the last piece of the puzzle. And it’s one that I stumbled across totally by accident. The key to building a popular blog Late one night, I was working on my blog and just so happened to get an IM from Brian Clark. I’d been hanging around in the Teaching Sells forums for a few months, not only soaking up the content, but answering questions from other members. Little did I know it, but I’d caught Brian’s attention, and he reached out to me. “I really like what you’ve been posting in the TS forums. How would you like to do a guest post for Copyblogger?” I was stunned. Copyblogger was quickly becoming one of the most successful blogs in the world, and I didn’t think I was anywhere close to being ready to write at that level. But I wasn’t going to miss the opportunity, either, so I agreed. A week later, my first post went up, and it was the highest traffic day in the history of my new blog. It wasn’t thousands of visitors, no. I still had a lot to learn about writing a really strong post. But it was an eye-opener. Brian’s help didn’t stop there. He gave me invaluable advice on how to grow my blog, and he started connecting me with power users who could help promote my posts on Digg and StumbleUpon. Within a few weeks, I was up to an average of 2,000 visitors per day, and I had hit the front page of Digg, bringing me 20,000 visitors within a few hours . I was euphoric, and there was no question Brian’s generosity with his connections and advice were the key ingredient to making it happen. So I started to wonder. “What if I did more of this?” I started to guest post wherever I could, and before long, I was getting so much traffic that my server started to crash, and I had to switch hosting companies. Performancing even nominated my blog for the Best Business/Money Blog in the world. I felt like a genius, like I’d discovered the cure for cancer or something. But then I started to look around. I wasn’t the only one guest blogging. People like Leo Babauta , Chris Garrett , Sonia Simone , and Dave Navarro were doing it too. And they were reaping incredible benefits. That’s when it occurred to me: the best way to build a relationship with anyone is to give them something of value. It’s the whole principle of reciprocity . It goes back not just to the work of Robert Cialdini, but to the good old Golden Rule. And what do popular bloggers need more than anything else? Great content. Why guest blogging is such a powerful strategy It’s hard to fathom when you’re a beginner, but running a huge blog is a lot of work. You have to come up with something brilliant to post every day, or you risk losing the attention of your audience. No vacations, no holidays, no calling in sick. You have a huge crowd of people waiting to hear what you are going to say next, and it had better be good. Many popular bloggers publish guest posts just because it gives them a day off. Someone else can take over the show, and they can take a moment to relax and regroup. It’s not laziness; it’s a creative necessity. And it’s also a big opportunity for you. Not only does guest posting give you a chance to connect with a huge audience, but it also makes you a sort of understudy. The blogger begins to care about you and how you’re progressing, and they’ll go out of their way to help you grow. The result? Lots and lots of traffic. Look into the history of almost any popular blogger, and you’ll find they guest posted for other popular blogs. In fact, go through the list of 30 bloggers to watch in 2010 , and over half of them have written for Copyblogger alone. It’s not a coincidence. It’s the way the blogosphere works. Everyone talks about building a relationship with your audience — and that’s critical. But few talk about building those relationships behind the scenes. Not sucking up or trying to exploit anyone, but making yourself useful and valuable. Becoming a contributor to their success is one of the best ways to build your own success. That makes guest blogging a smart strategy. Stay tuned and I’ll give you some quick tips for exactly how to do it. About the Author: Jon Morrow is the Associate Editor of Copyblogger. Get more from him on twitter .

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The Glass Ceiling, the Inner Circle, and the Key to Building a Popular Blog

When I was fifteen, I wrote a novel. I thought it was pretty good, and daydreamt about literary stardom. Fast forward ten years. I recently found my old notebooks and read that novel over again. And … let’s just say it wasn’t as good as I remembered, and leave it at that. It’s amazing what a difference perspective makes. Usually, you’re not going to be revisiting work from a decade ago. You’re going to be busy trying to get that new website copy done, or that sales page written, or that ebook finished. Problem is, when you’re writing, you’re working at a zoomed-in level. You’re so deeply into the words that you can’t get a grasp on the whole piece. You’re emotionally attached to your work, and even if it doesn’t seem perfect, you simply can’t see any way to change or improve it. Here’s how to zoom back out and get the big picture. 1. Let it rest Ever since I started writing as a teen, I’ve heard this piece of advice. Put your first draft aside for a few days (or at least 24 hours ). Leave it alone. Yes, it’s hard; you’re itching to get your piece finished . You’ll need to plan ahead: give yourself a few days in the middle of a project to take a break. Your unconscious mind will carry on mulling over that project while you’re away from it. When you pick it up again, you’ll come to it afresh. You’ll have new insights. You’ll see different possibilities. Mistakes will jump off the page at you. How long should you put your work aside for? I’d say, the longer the piece, the longer you let it rest. For a blog post, leaving it for a day is probably enough. For a novel, give it at least a couple of weeks — preferably a month. 2. Read as a reader When you pick up your piece again after a break, try to get into the mindset of a reader. Imagine it’s the first time you’ve read this. It helps to make a clear physical break between your writing mode and reading mode. Depending on your project and how you like to work, that might mean: Printing out the whole thing and reading it in a coffee shop Turning it from a word document into a PDF so that you can’t keep changing the text as you read Creating a “real book” version of your manuscript on Lulu Reading through the whole thing in one session While you’re reading, watch out for: Anything vague. Have you assumed knowledge which your real readers might not have? Anything extraneous. It might be interesting to you, but if you can cut it out without losing any meaning from the piece, it should go. In fiction, I ask myself “Is this part of the story?” Anything redundant. When you’re working on a project over a long period of time, you’ll often end up with two similar sections, or very similar phrase or word choices close together. Next to impossible to spot when you’re writing, glaringly obvious to readers. 3. Ask for feedback However great your imagination, you can never truly put yourself in the position of a first-time reader. You know your writing and your topic too well. There’s an easy solution, however: Find some actual readers Ideally, pick people in your target audience. You could try: A writing circle — either a group that meets in real life, or an online one Regular commenters on your blog Participants in a forum or membership site which you belong to (I’m sending out my ebook draft to some fellow Third Tribers this coming weekend) Unless she happens to be a writer too, or typical of your readership, your mom is not the best person to ask for feedback. Ditto for your spouse. They’re likely to be kind rather than constructively critical. When you ask for feedback, be clear about what you want If this is a first draft, you’re not primarily concerned with typos or the occasional clunky sentence. You want to know if whole sections should be cut, or whether your angle works, or if your call to action is clear. I always give my guinea-pig readers a free copy of the finished piece, if appropriate. It’s also nice to offer to reciprocate if they ever want feedback on a writing project. 4. Proofread Once you’re past the revisions stage and into the final version, you’ll need to proofread. Although you can get away with the occasional typo, spelling mistake or grammatical slip in most blog posts, you’ll want to avoid any embarrassing mistakes in your shiny new ebook or your slick sales page. I find that I’m great at finding typos in other people’s work … and awful at spotting them in my own. Usually, I find a long suffering friend to proof-read for me, but if I’m proofreading my own material, this is what helps: Proofread on paper For some reason, it’s easier to spot mistakes on paper than on the screen. Perhaps it’s because we’re more prone to skimming on the screen, or because our eyes glide over any mistakes which the spellchecker hasn’t picked up. Regardless of why , it works. Print out your piece, and go through it slowly with a red pen in hand. Proofread backwards When we read, we rarely take in every word. Uur brain fills in what it expects to see — even if that’s not quite what’s there. (Ever mis-read a headline? Or a billboard?) Reading your work backwards deals with this. You’re forced to look at every single word. It’s a slow and tortuous process, but if you have a piece of work which absolutely must be error-free, it’s the best way to do it. How about you? Do you find it hard to get perspective on your writing? What methods work for you? And have you ever written something which you thought was perfect … until you looked at it again a few months later? Let us know about it in the comments. About the Author: Ali Hale writes about productivity with perspective alongside Thursday Bram on their newly-launched blog Constructively Productive: you can grab the RSS feed here .

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The Foolproof Cure for Weak Content: 4 Ways to Get Some Perspective

There’s a scene in the animated series Futurama that cracks me up every time I think about it. The show’s characters are at the horse track of the future, but there’s controversy when a race ends very, very closely — so closely that the race officials need a powerful electron microscope to judge the “photo finish.” The track loudspeaker eventually announces, “And the winner is … Number Three, in a quantum finish!” And Professor Farnsworth, who had bet on the other horse, tears up his tickets in a rage and yells, “No fair! You changed the outcome by measuring it!” Didn’t get the joke? Don’t worry, neither did most of the viewers. I’m quite sure that the writers laughed out loud when writing that scene. They were a bunch of nerds, and thought that applying the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle to horse racing was the height of hilarity. But 99% of the viewers probably didn’t find it the height of hilarity. I’d guess that 75% didn’t even know that the line was a joke. So why did the writers include the gag? Because the remaining 1% who did get it became fans for life. How to lay eggs (like a platypus … they don’t do much, you know) I call hidden gems like this “Easter eggs” — a video game term referring to hidden areas, rooms, or events that developers add to games to amuse themselves. Animated humor shows like Futurama , The Simpsons , and many others are absolutely stuffed with Easter eggs, and they’re an important part of building the massive cult followings these shows enjoy. When I recognized Farnsworth’s line for what it was, I felt like I was part of an exclusive club. In fact, I felt like that joke had been placed there for me and me alone . I could immediately imagine hanging out with those writers. That Easter egg made me feel like we were buddies, that we had so much in common. I became hooked on Futurama . I never missed an episode. I told all of my friends to watch it. I bought all of the DVDs. Then, when I realized how effective those obscure little jokes had been on me, I started including them in my own writing. If something amused me, I didn’t worry about the people who wouldn’t get it, unless not understanding it would ruin the reading experience. So I let those oddball references fly … and I credit them with a lot of my recent growth. Here are two examples of Easter eggs I’ve placed recently here on Copyblogger: In a recent Copyblogger wrap-up , I made passing reference to “ruling the tri-state area,” “setting fire to the sun,” and “big laundry.” All three were lines said by Heinz Doofenschmirtz, the ridiculous villain of the children’s animated series Phineas and Ferb. In an earlier wrap-up , while recapping a story about how overcoming purchase paralysis is like saving people from a burning building, I mentioned hanging from the arm of Kurt Russell while he says, “You go, we go!” in a heroic fashion. That’s a line and scene from the firefighter movie Backdraft . Luckily, Brian is in that small group of people who finds most of my Easter eggs, and he lets me continue to hide them. And when I wanted to be replaced by Johnny Marr , his comment was, “It doesn’t matter if anyone else gets it. I think it’s hilarious.” I thought it was hilarious too. A small group of people who read it thought it was hilarious, and proceeded to swap Smiths and Johnny Marr references in the comments. If you’re thinking, “I don’t want only 1-5% of people who read my writing to appreciate it!” I have a clarification to add: As long as your post works without the Easter egg, people will still read you and like you even if they don’t get your hidden gags. This is an important point, so I’ll make it one more time. The post has to stand alone. It has to work even if they don’t get the Easter egg. That Johnny Marr post on Copyblogger? While a small group got the gag and joined in on it, a much larger group read the wrap-up the way they would read any post, and clicked through my teasers to read the full posts. The post did what it was supposed to do, whether or not you know (or care) who Johnny Marr is. If you place your Easter eggs well, you’ll get a cloud of people who read your stuff the way they would read anything else they were interested in. But at the center of that cloud will be your core fans . Your insiders. Your “club of you.” I love my club. The people who truly “get” me with all my oddities and foibles are like old friends. I bond with them. They bond with me. We interact in my comments and on Twitter. But they also want to read more of what I write, wherever and whenever I write it. They spread the word, tell their friends, become ambassadors and raving fans … and often buy everything I sell (as well as taking advantage of my free offers, for that matter, like my current free blog setup promotion .) The smaller the group who takes something from your writing, the more exclusive those people feel. You don’t have to settle for a small audience, but there’s a lot of value in having a nucleus of core fans surrounded by what I might call an “interested horde.” You can build both the nucleus and the horde at the same time. Here’s how. Six rules for hiding Easter eggs 1. Don’t confine yourself to humor I’m an animation geek and have always liked humor in most forms, so the Easter eggs I hide tend to be jokes or references that are meant to make the reader chuckle. But anything obscure will work. If you’re an alternative music fan, you might observe how Darren Rowse looks a little like Moby . If you’re a Starbucks barista, you might mention that tech skills need constant adjustment and sharpening — just like a burr grinder that processes a lot of low-quality beans. 2. The post has to work even if they don’t get the reference I know we already said this. It’s important. The Farnsworth line in Futurama wouldn’t have worked if the rest of the episode had revolved around the intricacies of why quantum uncertainty had foiled Farnsworth’s horse bet. It worked because it was a throw-away line. You either caught it or you didn’t. Either way, the action marched on. 3. Don’t be a pretentious jerk A few Easter eggs are fun. A diet of Easter eggs will give your readers heartburn. If you stuff your writing full of references and jokes that are so obscure that nobody will get them, you’ll just come off as pretentious. (An example of someone who doesn’t listen to this rule: former comedian Dennis Miller. Yeah, he used to be funny.) 4. Don’t over-explain If you have to explain it, it’s not an Easter egg, it’s just a joke that fell flat. You’ll have to walk a fine line to balance clarity with inside jokiness. Sometimes you’ll need to add a few clues, but don’t overdo it. 5. Make it natural I’ve failed here if all of a sudden, we see a rash of blog posts into which writers have used a crowbar to insert obscure references and inside jokes. Don’t think of them as something you add; think of them as something you allow to remain. It should feel natural. Write what comes to you — and then stop yourself from editing all of the gems out. 6. Amuse yourself first I use Easter eggs because I love finding them myself. It’s a game. If something doesn’t make you chuckle or smile or think when you write it, don’t include it. Some things are meant to be edited out because they simply don’t work. Let those go; no one likes a bad Easter egg. The name of the game is connection, and like so many other pieces of advice in the blogosphere, much of this boils down to finding your right people . Using Easter eggs is kind of like when a punk fan wears a shirt with a certain band’s logo on it. Other punk fans will see it and will say, “I know what that logo is!” And if those two people strike up a conversation, there’s likely to be instant rapport. Think of your Easter eggs as a way of creating specialized rapport. Great content builds a wider audience. But leave in a couple of Easter eggs, to build your “club of you,” too. About the Author: Johnny B. Truant is setting up self-hosted WordPress blogs for free until July 23rd . Learn more about Johnny at his blog, JohnnyBTruant.com .

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The Insider Guide to Creating An Audience of Raving Fans

Ever wonder what your writing sounds like to those who read it? I hadn’t thought about it much but Coding Memories apparently has. Their site – I Write Like – is a browser based writing analysis program that compares writing samples with a database of famous authors works. I Write Like To give their tool a try, I took my post from yesterday and entered it into the I Write Like app. To my surprise, I Write Like determined my writing to be like that of science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. Funny… Often when I’m writing, it feels like I am trying to take notes in Russian – a language I don’t speak! I Write Like Isaac Asimov Still quite a compliment considering Asimov according to Wikipedia “was one of the most prolific writers of all time, having written or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 9,000 letters and postcards.” Granted, yesterday’s blog post required a little more heavy lifting than a conversational piece so I found another one to test out to see who’s voice I was more likely to sound like on a regular basis. Surprised again… I Write Like said the piece was similar to something Dan Brown would write. I Write Like Dan Brown I am sure if I kept digging I would find less remarkable writing but for now I am going to take I Write Like at their word.

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I Write Like… Browser Based Writing Analyis Software