ProBlogger: The Secret to Using Your Blog to Generate Sales

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The Secret to Using Your Blog to Generate Sales Posted: 30 May 2013 08:42 AM PDT This is a guest contribution from Karl Staib of Domino Connection. You've probably been at a party where some fool is talking his face off at everyone he meets. He talks about his trip to Spain and how he is such an amazing photographer. He never asks, "What you do or what interests you?" He just blathers on and on about himself. On a good day I silently chuckle at this guy's lack of social common sense. On a bad day I snap and scream, "PLEASE listen to me for just 10 seconds!" When all you do is talk about yourself, you send people running in the other direction. If you don't care about other people they for sure won't care about you. This was how the old school way of marketing worked. Megaphone style. Image by nem_youth Many of you might not think of your blog as a business and I understand, but one day you might want to create a ebook, product or use your blog to leverage a new career. When you improve your engagement your blog it becomes a tool to help you level up your life and career. Spray and Pray Back in the day, companies used to spray and pray. They sprayed their message in as many places as possible (magazines, newspapers, TV, radio, etc) and prayed that they picked the right advertising spots. Larger companies could afford to pay for market research, so they were able to make sure most of their efforts paid off. Smaller companies didn't have this luxury. Straight out of college, I worked in the marketing department for a high pressure valve company. They grossed about 10 million a year in sales. Not too shabby, but nothing compared to the bigger players in the industry. We had to carefully choose our national magazines and our marketing company told us who read the magazines and which ones we needed to advertise in. We had to believe them. We had nothing else to go on. This style of marketing has been turned upside down due to blogging and social media. Every business has the opportunity to measure their engagement on their website, email and social media accounts. The problem with all these new tools is we have the wrong attitude toward them. Companies are afraid to be transparent and engage with their customers. Why? Because it's hard work. Truly Listen Mr. Blather Lips, from the introduction, had a great time at every party he went to because he didn't have to gauge people's emotions. He just blathered on until he found someone to listen or it was time to go home. Now businesses actually have to listen to their customers because if they don't, a social media storm comes crashing down upon them. Just ask Netflix if they wished they had a better plan for when they doubled their prices. Listening to your readers isn't just for dealing with social media storms. It's also so you can anticipate them and avoid them before they even happen. Now, every business has the opportunity to do market research. You can ask specific customers if they would be willing to fill out an online survey. You can ask them direct questions on your blog or social media that help you figure out what they want from you. You don't have to guess what you think people need. You can ask them directly and find out. You can even include them in the process of creating your product. Invitation to Join In  Threadless created their million dollar t-shirt company from this idea. They have people send in t-shirt designs, have the users vote on which designs they would like to buy and print only the most popular ones. They already have a built in audience for their t-shirts. It's a win-win for everyone. The company prints the most popular, making some good cash and the buyers get a limited edition t-shirt that they are proud to wear. Even the winning t-shirt designs are helpful to the designers. They can add this accomplishment to their resume. You probably knew that engaging your ideal people was wise, but now what? Now you have to go out and find them and start a conversation, but before you do you need to find out where you can connect with them. Write a description of the ideal client for your product You have to ask yourself some specific questions to help you gain clarity: What does she look like? What motivates her? What does she do for fun? What are her career goals? Where does she hang out? (Facebook, conferences, Twitter, etc.) How do you engage with her? (light banter, philosophically, monetarily, etc.) The hard part is making the mental switch from talker to engager. I'm not just talking about being a better listener. That's a good start, but to engage with people you have to be listening and asking great questions. It's part art and part science. If you want an example of someone who understands her community then visit Mayi Carles to see how she is creating content that engages and builds trust. You'll notice that she creates content around branding and business building. All a perfect target market for her. Engage Your Readers Image used with permission If you want to engage your readers, start by asking questions to show them how much you care about their success. Ask them: What topics they would like you to cover? What products you could create to help them? How you can improve your services? By keeping the focus on your readers you'll improve engagement, find new ways you can help them and use your blog to grow your influence. You will also learn the type of language they use. It's this copywriting trick that you need to use to engage your ideal readers. Using the language they use in the copy on your sales page will increase your conversion rate. It’s that simple. For example, let's say Problogger gets a lot of questions on how to create content for their blog. His ideal people might not reference the word "copy" they might use the word "write" or "blog". If this is the case then the key to writing a great sales page is to insert these words into the page so they feel comfortable with the sales copy. Your Turn  How have you learned to increase your visitor's engagement on your blog? (Please share in the comment section.) Check out Karl Staib of Domino Connection and his e-course "How to Create an Amazing Product Launch," You can also click here to download the Domino Connection sales page checklist for free so you can create a compelling sales page that converts potential customers into buyers. Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger The Secret to Using Your Blog to Generate Sales

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Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

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Should you sell a course on @udemy? Posted: 30 May 2013 05:00 AM PDT Udemy is becoming quite the player in the online education market space.  They have come a long way in a very short amount of time.  I have had courses on there for quite a while and I also consulted with them a little bit (they got out of me as much as they could for free). For some it can seem like an amazing solution and to some it may seem like a rip off. I think depending on where you are at with resources Udemy can be amazing for you.  I wanted to make a post about my experiences with it. Before we jump into Udemy specifics lets talk about what it takes to sell a info product. A product (duh). Customer service. A place to host the content. Landing pages and checkout pages. Merchant processing. Affiliate Program. Here is a little more in-depth form my experience Do it yourself. The most profitable one would be to do all of this yourself.  Someone would have to answer customer inquiries, administrate your server, setup your members area and the whole username/password user level system etc etc, build/optimize landing pages, get your own merchant accounts and run your own affiliate program.  This option gives you the flexibility on every front BUT as it becomes more successful be ready to hire several people.   In my case when my original ShoeMoney System went on sale we went from ZERO to 700 units per day.  I hired 6 customer service people from the local unemployment agency just to answer the phone and give refunds.  I hired a full time affiliate manager.   My server guy and I stayed up all night to build a astrix voice over ip system.  O ya and I ordered 10 voip phones overnighted.  I did have some merchant processing but it was limited to only 180k per month.  We were processing that every 2 days.  Craziest part tho was I wasn’t really sure if we were even making money.  Took about 2 months later to see that we did make money after all.  But sad end to that story is that we lost our merchanting and canned it.  But you have full control.  In most cases when you do it all yourself you DO NOT clawback against affiliates.  If a refund is made its on you and not the affiliate. Hyrbid yourself + Clickbank or JVZOO: The next way to do it is to use something like JVZOO or Clickbank.  You still have to host your own content and landing pages but they take care of the affiliate program for you and also merchanting.  For this service they take 7.5% of the price PLUS $1 per sale.  This is before anything goes out to affiliates.  Clickbank affiliate program is pretty flexible.  Allows you to give affiliates 25% to 75% of the sale price. Ok now lets get to the Udemy way: Udemy does everything for you.  But they take a heafty 30% of the price tag.  15% for people who use your coupon codes.  Affiliates get a flat 50% of the price AFTER Udemy takes their cut. But is it that bad? Price wise Its a GREAT DEAL.  You get 70% from sales that Udemy gets for you.  Sound hefty? QUIT WHINING this is just free money for you. You get 85% from sales that you make.  They determine this from sales that come from a code. You get 35% of the sales made by affiliates. Now instead of looking at all the things they do for you lets just look at what you do.  You upload content… promote it on your site and thats it.  Sometimes you answer questions from students but not too much.  No customer service to worry about,  no affiliate management,  no merchant processing issues, and best of all no server issues. But here is what I don’t like about it.  You may or may not feel the same way. You have no way to email your buyers.  This pisses me off cause when I update a course or something or even when I put out something new I can’t blast out and let my users know.  This is B.S. cause I have a right to email them as they have done a commercial transaction with me. With that said your users can follow you and you can message them on Udemy… although not sure how they would like me “messaging 5,000″ people at once.  Its still dependent on them getting notifications from Udemy. YOU ARE BUILDING THEIR BUSINESS.   just keep that in mind.  I have sent them thousands of buyers of my products.  These are all users they horde and will spam them promoting new products… of which they earn 30% of the money that they make. Most annoying thing about it is the messaging system.  I miss a TON of questions from my students because there is soooo much spam from other “instructors” asking you to promote their stuff.  But  I digress. So really in the end,  even after my complaints,  I would advise to probably 99.9% of the people out their who want to put a product online to use Udemy.  Would I use it for new products?  Nope.. but I will use it for older ones that I don’t want to maintain the web hosting and all that for. The real deal is that this platform is really just what it says its for, teachers to create courses and sell them to students.  And they make it very very easy. Trying to increase your Google rank that is like no other?

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