Marketing Blagger

I was sent an amusing model today to explain international economics and the challenges of international business. I can only apologise to the original author for not crediting this writing to you. Please feel free to drop me a line so you can bask in the glory of such entertaining writing. For me it’s a great way of explaining why marketing is different for each and every market in the world. There is no one size fits all model that works for everyone. This is one of the great pleasures of living and working in a world with such a variety of people, cultures, religions, food and so much more.

(NB JohnTP, one of the best parts of being in another country is trying out the food, even if it is scorpion…)

AN AMERICAN CORPORATION

You have two cows.
You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows.
Later, you hire a consultant to analyse why the cow has dropped dead.

A FRENCH CORPORATION

You have two cows.
You go on strike, organise a riot, and block the roads, because you
want three cows.

A JAPANESE CORPORATION

You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk.
You then create a clever cow cartoon image called ‘Cowkimon’ and market it worldwide.

A GERMAN CORPORATION

You have two cows.
You re-engineer them so they live for 100 years, eat once a month, and milk themselves.

AN ITALIAN CORPORATION

You have two cows, but you don’t know where they are.
You decide to have lunch.

A RUSSIAN CORPORATION

You have two cows.
You count them and learn you have five cows.
You count them again and learn you have 42 cows.
You count them again and learn you have 2 cows.
You stop counting cows and open another bottle of vodka.

A SWISS CORPORATION

You have 5000 cows. None of them belong to you.
You charge the owners for storing them.

A CHINESE CORPORATION

You have two cows.
You have 300 people milking them.
You claim that you have full employment, and high bovine productivity.
You arrest the newsman who reported the real situation.

AN INDIAN CORPORATION

You have two cows.
You worship them.

A BRITISH CORPORATION

You have two cows.
Both are mad.

AN IRAQI CORPORATION

Everyone thinks you have lots of cows.
You tell them that you have none.
No-one believes you, so they bomb the sh1t out of you and invade your country.
You still have no cows, but at least now you are a Democracy.

AN AUSTRALIAN CORPORATION

You have two cows.
The one on the left looks very attractive.

Recent statistics suggest there are over 70 million blogs in the blogosphere and that figure is growing each day. If you are one of those blogs, how do you deliver quality content that will attract readers and also participants i.e. those that comment, or download your ebooks, or with any luck, buy your products?

Unfortunately there isn’t a simple answer to this question, but here are 5 great tips you should consider:

1. reach your target market through effective keyword research.

Effective blogging invariably requires good keyword research. Blogs that cover wildly varied topics or personal rants tend to attract fewer visitors, unless of course the writing is of exceptional quality. More successful blogs focus on a niche and use targeted keywords to attract the right visitors. Consider using the free GoodKeywordsv2 tool to identify the most appropriate keywords for your blog. This will help you to better target your content to your readers.

2. Ask your readers what they actually want to read.

Writing good content is hard work and there are no shortcuts. If you spend lots of time researching and writing quality posts only to receive limited comments it can be quite disheartening. You might also be unclear what you are doing wrong or what you could be doing differently. A simple step you could take it so ask your readers what they want to read about.

There are plenty of options for how to do this. If you use WordPress there is a WP-Polls plugin that’s very easy to use, or there are various third party suppliers, including PollDaddy and Vizu that will allow you to add a reader poll.

If you already have an established list of subscribers, consider emailing a survey to them to get their opinions. This is the type of market research blue chip companies use every single day to better understand their customers, so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be doing this also. A survey doesn’t have to be too onerous and you can set one up online for free at SurveyMonkey .

3. Post well written and well researched content

It goes without saying that without quality content your readers will quickly click-off without interacting with your blog. It’s been said that 1 quality post is better than 10 average posts and this is something you should consider when writing your content. In terms of writing quality content there is a lot of advice available in the blogosphere and you should consider at least checking out the CopyBlogger for some hot tips.

4. Don’t forget to interact

An easy pitfall is not interacting with people who comment on your blog. The best way to encourage more participation is to answer any questions posted in your comments and to generally engage your readers, drawing them into your community. You could also consider adding the WordPress plugin that enables people to ’subscribe to comments’ which will encourage further participation.

Take note of the posts that attract the most comments as these will be the topics your readers want to hear more about. Consider adding a popular posts page to your blog to encourage more interaction.

5. Invite guest bloggers to participate

What better way to encourage participation than by inviting a big name blogger to guest write on your blog. You will need to be fairly persuasive to get this going, but there are obvious benefits. More established bloggers will bring loyal and active readers and of course lots of traffic.

In the likely event that you can’t persuade Seth Godin or Tom Peters to guest write on your blog, you could encourage them to comment by posting link backs or interacting on their blog. Consider writing a controversial post on a topic your favourite blogger writes about and follow this up by emailing them and introducing your post. You may be surprised by the reaction you get.

So there you go, 5 fairly straightforward ideas for engaging with your readers. Please don’t forget to come back to the Marketing Blagger to let us know how you get on.

I’ve recently stumbled on another social bookmarking site that looks worthwhile adding to your blog promotion tool kit. This one appears promising as it’s specifically designed by bloggers for bloggers. Set-up by a team including JohnTP, Shivaranjan and a handful of others, it is trying to draw bloggers away from Digg, Reddit and others to a more blog friendly community, helping you to find the best content in the blogosphere.

So what’s different about this bookmarking site?

First of all it’s specifically for bloggers. Anyone who has submitted a blog post to the mainstream bookmarking sites (Digg, Reddit, del.ic.ious) may have been voted down or even received a hostile comment or two. It looks like Digg has even banned some blogs from being submitted, including great blogs like John Chow dot com . This is just not going to happen in a community of bloggers and you can submit your own stories without fear of recrimination, assuming of course you stick to the Blogg-Buzz rules.

Blogg-Buzz also allows you to build up a community of other ‘buzzers’ who are writing about topics that interest you. This could be very interesting if for example you’re an internet marketing blogger looking for joint ventures, or if you’re looking to secure a guest writer for your blog. This is easily facilitated through the private message function.

One of the qualities I like the most bout Blogg-Buzz is that you can find out who is buzzing the most, i.e. voting on posts. If you can identify who is buzzing the most on your topic area, wouldn’t it be worth a quick message to introduce yourself and a relevant post. This would be a great way of driving more traffic to your blog.

The icing on the cake is that Blogg-Buzz also allows you to add your AdSense publisher ID to your account, therefore any ads displayed alongside posts you submit will start to earn you money. Don’t worry, it’s smart enough to ensure you don’t click on your own ads.

What would I change about Blogg-Buzz-com?

I would prefer to see some more categories, for example a section for internet marketing posts, or small business and general marketing topics - my areas of interest. Although I can see JohnTP is already addressing this issue. It would also be great to develop a WordPress plugin so that people can submit posts directly from the blog itself, rather than having to login to Blogg-Buzz each time. Maybe some chicklets would also be good for this.

The only other draw back is the design of the site. A good graphic designer could make this a sexy little number I’m sure. Other than that, my congratulations to the team at Blogg-Buzz.com.

1. You can make lots of money quickly and easily

There are very few ways to make money easily and internet marketing (IM) is certainly not one of them. If you aren’t ready for some serious hard work and a fairly steep learning curve I suggest you get back in the queue for a lottery ticket. To make money online you will need at the very least good products, good promotional skills, some technical ability and lots of time. If you choose IM as a job you are not in for an easy ride.

How do you avoid the trap of starting out on the IM road and not making any money? Put some research and planning in place to give yourself some targets to reach. Have you ever heard the expression Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance - it’s no different for internet marketers.

2. Google AdSense is a sure fire way to make money

When I included AdSense on my first blog I was sure within a matter of weeks I’d be sitting on a sun lounger, sipping a cocktail, watching the dollars roll in. After all it was very easy to put AdSense on my blog. Unfortunately that just wasn’t the case and I would imagine the majority of other bloggers / website owners are in the same position.

When you include AdSense on your site, first of all be realistic, don’t expect to retire overnight. Consider these tactics to increase your AdSense revenues:

- consider testing different ad formats and placements and use the statistics to analyse performance changes,
- ensure the ads match the content on your site / blog by writing on consistent topics with consistent keywords,
- work on driving traffic to your site / blog as this will increase the likelihood of receiving clicks,
- read and understand Google’s terms and conditions - you don’t want to get banned by clicking on your own ads for example,
- read a book written by an AdSense expert.

3. The first thing to do is set up your blog

It’s easy to believe all the hype about making money online and specifically through blogging, after all, it is very easy to setup a blog. Don’t jump in with both feet though until you’ve sat down with a pen and paper and written a proper plan of action. If you want to make money online you will need to take a planned and structured approach.

Consider writing a marketing plan. You should consider the following steps:

- situation - where is my business currently at?
- objectives - what do I want to achieve with my internet business?
- strategy - how will I go about achieving these objectives?
- tactics - what specifically will I do to make this strategy work?
- action - who is going to make these tactics happen and when?
- control - how will I know when I’ve reached my goals i.e. what measures will I use?

4. You can work for 4 hours a week writing a blog and make money

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen this in the sales hype of some internet marketing guru’s squeeze page. I have never heard of anyone who works this little and reaps massive rewards, it just doesn’t happen. If someone offered you an office job working just 4 hours a week which earned millions of dollars, would you trust them?

Be realistic in your objectives and plan how much time you will spend on your business. There is simply no substitute for hard work when it comes to internet marketing.

5. You don’t need any technical knowledge e.g. HTML, PHP etc

It’s true that you can achieve a lot on the internet with very little technical knowledge these days. There are lots of freeware options available for those that need help writing copy in HTML. Having said that, some basic skills will increase your confidence and help you to continually improve your site, blog and other online materials without incurring extra expenses. You should also become familiar with new software such as FTP, WinZip etc which are all essential for running an online business.

My advice here is to spend some time hitting the books and learning some basics. For more advanced programming challenges you might be better off finding an expert and I suggest you head over to Rentacoder.

6. You don’t need to be good at writing

This is another golden nugget that is more fallacy than fact. People like to read well researched, well written content, whether it’s on a blog, an ebook, an article or even your website. If you are selling your content rather than giving it away this is especially important. Ask yourself if you’d be happy paying for a magazine that’s full of grammatical errors, typos and misspelled words.

Again, take some time to learn the basics from a grammar book. Alternatively you could hire a professional to edit your text and provide guidance on how to make improvements. You could also hire a professional to write the content for you and there are lots of options available online for finding copywriters.

7. You can make money on the internet writing about anything

In actual fact much of the advice you’ll read online about internet marketing is how to make money selling internet marketing products. Bear that in mind before you consider internet marketing for your particular niche. A great piece of advice I read recently comes from CapForge.com that suggests to make money online you need to prove a solution that people are having a problem with. For example:

Your house is on fire, and I am selling buckets of water. The problem is clear, concrete and immediate, the solution is available, complete and demonstrably effective

8. High traffic = high profits

Not necessarily true, in actual fact you need well targeted traffic, good products and a well functioning website or blog to capture sales. It’s not all about getting traffic, although of course this is important.

So how do you get highly targeted traffic? See above.

9. The money is in the list

This is every Internet Marketing gurus mantra and it’s easy to buy into this. Surely the more people you promote your product to, the greater the number of sales you will get? Talk to any direct marketing professional and they will assure you this is not the case, the money is actually in the quality of the list.

Think carefully before you buy lists, participate in joint ventures or other list building schemes. It will be far more profitable in the long run to grow your own list by offering quality and well targeted content and products.

10. It’s free to run a business online.

It’s easy to sell the idea that making money online is free, but it’s simply not true. As with any business you will incur start-up and ongoing expenses including, but not limited to, buying your domain name, web hosting, broadband internet connection, PC / laptop, books / literature on IM (believe me, you will buy some!), software (FTP, WinZip, Photoshop, others that aren’t standard), AdSense advertising and more.

Be realistic about your internet marketing business. This links back to the planning stage, think carefully about what you will need to spend to get your business rolling and then add a contingency fund on top. Granted the costs are lower than if you opened a shop on the high street, but don’t consider this to be a free exercise.