Small Business Odyssey – Page 11 – Real world advice and tips for small business marketing

December 9, 2011

Blogging Hints: Sets and Sevens

Blogging hints help you to establish and maintain your blogging frequency. The idea of writing in ‘sets’ or ‘sevens’ is designed to help you build and maintain momentum. Daily blogging, for example, is very much about gaining momentum.

The concept behind these two approaches is to plan ahead so that you can write a number of blog posts about the one topic area. You decide in advance the sub-topics, so that you do not waste time trying to think up subjects for your blog posts when you should be writing.

Let’s have a quick look at both these approaches and see how they differ and what benefits accrue from using these blogging hints.

Blogging hint 1 : Blogging in sets

The idea here is that you write a series of blog posts sequentially around a single theme. So you identify in advance the sub-themes (or let them evolve as you write). Then you write about each sub-theme in turn so you end up with a ‘set’ of blog posts covering a central theme. The sub-themes could be any number but usually they range from three to six.

The benefits of the ‘sets’ blogging hint:

you can plan a series of blog posts in advance so that you can develop some momentum
you can make the most of your thinking and research around a particular topic and thus save time
you can create a critical mass of content around a theme which may result in higher search engine rankings for the relevant search terms
you can readily cross-reference to the related posts thus creating valuable internal links
you can provide your reader with digestible pieces of information about a topic (rather than trying to cover the sub-themes superficially in one single post)
you can write some posts in advance to assist you to maintain your daily blog publishing schedule
you can provide your mailing list with a coherent set of posts on a single theme.

An example of the ‘sets’ approach is my set of four (4) posts around the theme of ‘Webmaster Tools‘.

Blogging hint 2 : Blogging in sevens

The concept in this blogging hint is that you first identify and write about seven (7) aspects of a single topic, e.g. the seven benefits of blogging daily, the seven reasons to have a blog, the seven ways to promote your blog. The first blog post canvasses each of the seven aspects briefly to introduce the issues and to act as a ‘teaser’ to encourage the reader to explore further. Then you write about each of the seven aspects in separate blog posts.

This blogging hint requires sound knowledge about a topic area but it enables you to focus on each aspect in turn and to tease out more fully the implications of that aspect of the main theme of the blog posts.

The benefits of the ‘sevens’ blogging hint:

the ‘sevens’ approach to blogging generates the same benefits as those listed for the ‘sets’ approach
you typically create more posts on a single theme (eight in total) than with the ‘sets’ approach
the individual blog posts are linked via the introductory post as this explains how they are related
readers tend to relate to things that involve the number ‘seven’ (some deep psychological reasons)
you have clarity at the start, as a writer, about the relationship each post has to the initial main post and this assists your writing.

These two blogging hints, ‘sets’ and ‘sevens’, have a lot in common in that they help you, as a writer, gain and sustain momentum in your blogging and make it easier to increase your blogging frequency.

[Photo credit: Thee Ducks by mape_s]

December 9, 2011

How to Develop the Habit of Daily Blogging

Over the past 30 days I have been blogging daily (with the odd exception due to work/travel commitments). To blog daily takes a concerted effort and systematic planning. However, the benefits of daily blogging are well worth the effort. Persistence pays in small business marketing.

It is possible to work up to a daily schedule by gradually improving your current blogging schedule. Alternatively, you can aim for a daily blogging schedule with some advanced planning then adjust your technique as you go.

Whatever approach you use, think about how you are going to achieve your blogging goal and develop some strategies to make it easier for yourself.

Strategies to achieve your daily blogging goal

These strategies are based on my own experience and underpin my daily blogging routine:

Take time out to do a brainstorm of topics relevant to the theme of your blog. If you can’t come up with 20 or more topics then you might have to rethink the focus of your blog
Add to your brainstorming list on a daily basis (I use ‘Notepad” or my phone’s ‘notes’ application for this)
Plan the night before what your topic will be for the next day – you will be surprised how busy your sub-conscious mind becomes overnight so you wake up with a potential post
Give blogging a priority over web surfing or processing your emails (unless work-based urgent ones are involved)
Undertake focused reading – blogs, articles or e-books to stimulate your thinking
Watch videos or participate in web conferences in moderation – beware of the trap of an obsession with learning at the expense of doing (blogging)
Listen to podcasts when doing other things such as walking or house cleaning (your iPod comes in handy here)
Write whenever and wherever you can, even if it is only notes on a topic, e.g. while riding on a train or ferry or while flying to a destination (I wrote this blog post and the previous one while flying from Brisbane to Townsville – a two hour trip. The photo above was taken from my Townsville hotel room looking across to Magnetic Island as I keyed up what I wrote on the plane trip. The photo was taken from the 17th Floor with the 8 MP Camera in my Samsung Galaxy S II Smart Phone.)
Use a technique that enables you to capture your ideas on a topic at different times of the day – you could write notes on paper, on your smart phone or on your computer (use your preferred mode that helps to increase your productivity)
Match your blog post to your available time or access to your computer. If you have limited time on a particular day, don’t choose a topic that requires in-depth research. Choose something that you can write off the top of your head if time is limited
Develop a schedule for writing. Identify an ideal time that matches your body clock and creative energy flow (e.g. if you are a morning person write in the early morning)
If daily blogging is currently beyond your capacity, aim to increase the current frequency of your blogging to an achievable level, e.g. from monthly to weekly, from weekly to twice weekly. The existence of a new goal will help you increase your blogging frequency. You have to be realistic if you have limited capacity because of work/family commitments, writing difficulties or limited knowledge
If you see a stimulating email or link to a great blog post that is relevant to your focus, store it in a readily accessible folder so that you can use it later as a catalyst for a blog post
Store your resource material (e-books, podcasts, videos, checklists, images) in accessble folders under topic headings related to your focus
If you have responded to a query from someone on your mailing list, convert your response to a blog post
Actively focus on improving your productivity online
Try to get ahead of the daily schedule by writing a couple of posts in one sitting – this will give you a bit of breathing space when you need it and, if your have a WordPress blog, you can set the publish date for sometime in the future
Where possible, encourage a guest blogger to make occasional contributions – as you become established you may want to open the guest blogging option to a number of people as my friends have done at SquidLog.net
Above all else, don’t beat up on yourself if you don’t achieve your blogging target. Persist but don’t punish yourself. Review why you missed your target, adopt corrective strategies or amend your goal if it is unrealistic.
If at first you don’t succeed … try, try again (This is my 3rd attempt to create a daily blogging schedule).

Daily blogging can enhance your authority in your niche and build web traffic and sales, but it requires focus, discipline and sound techniques to develop and maintain the momentum.

December 8, 2011December 8, 2011

How Often Should You Blog?

The question of the desired frequency of blogging often comes up in the context of small business marketing. In my experience, the more often I create blog posts, the more visitors I receive and the more income I earn.

Google values currency of information and will give more weight in search results to a site that is regularly updated. This, in turn, leads to more traffic and more sales.

The fundamental challenge, then, is to find a topic that is (1) relevant to your business, ((2) incites your interest and passion and (3) taps into your knowledge base. If you don’t have the requisite knowledge base when you start, you can always build your knowledge as you go, provided you have the interest and passion (which sustain you during the tough times).

While blogging at least weekly is considered a minimum frequency, the more successful bloggers argue the case for daily blogging.

Benefits of daily blogging

There are a number of significant benefits that arise from daily blogging. They relate to your recognised expertise and visibility, your productivity and satisfaction of customer needs for information. Here are some benefits of daily blogging that I have identified to date:

You establish your credibility and demonstrate your depth of expertise
You make your mark and stand out from other bloggers because so few bloggers are able to, or willing to, commit to daily blogging
You increase the opportunity for potential customers to find your blog because of the wide range of search terms (keywords) you will invariably cover while blogging with such frequency
You give your readers a reason to re-visit your blog – because they know that you will have fresh material on a regular basis
Blogging becomes easier the more you blog – a universal rule about writing
You develop a momentum that feeds off itself – like any habit it builds energy and commitment
The more you write the more topics come to mind – I find that for every blog post I do, I get two or three more ideas for other posts
Once you start daily blogging your conscious mind is constantly on the alert for relevant topics that you can write about – you start to see things that you overlooked before
Blogging provides a real foundation for small business marketing online as it generates content to share on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Squidoo.

Daily blogging brings its own rewards – not the least of which is that you are creating valuable online real estate by generating current, original content on a regular basis.

December 6, 2011December 6, 2011

What Do You Know About Your Customers?

Effective small business marketing relies on a sound knowledge of your customers (current and potential). Survey tools, such as SurveyMonkey, can help you gain the necessary knowledge about your customers.

To be effective, small business marketing must be targeted and this requires a deep knowledge of your customers. For example, with LinkedIn Ads you can target job title, organization or professional group. With Facebook Ads, you can target your advertising based on gender, age and interests of your customers.

How well do you know your customers?

What do you know about your customers’ typical characteristics? Have you any idea of the demographics of your customers, their preferences or their typical behaviour in different situations?

The following topics might give you some idea of what information you could gain about your customers (current and potential):

gender
age grouping (e.g. Generation X orY, Baby Boomers?)
interests (hobbies, sports. films)
where they find their entertainment
whether they work from home or in an office
how they use their mobile phone
where they live (city, country, local or global)
what they are willing to spend their money on
how they behave in different economic conditions (e.g. in a recession)
what kinds of presents they buy
close relationships – married/ de-facto, family size, same sex couples
how they spend their holiday time
where they converse on the web via social media.

If you lack information about your customers, your small business marketing activity will be untargeted and costly. However, one way to overcome this lack of information is to survey your customers (current and potential).

Survey your customers with SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is a dedicated online survey service that is free for stated levels of service. At present, the SurveyMonkey service is free where you are using no more than 10 questions per survey and receiving no more than 100 responses per survey. When you work on a likely response rate in the vicinity of 10-30%, then this is a generous offer.

Even at this basic free level, SurveyMonkey enables you to design a web-based survey with an introduction explaining the survey purpose and different types of questions, e.g. fixed response or open-ended questions. It is super easy to use and you can very quickly design a survey that will increase your knowledge of your customers.

The basic level service of SurveyMonkey enables information collection via a weblink, email or Twitter; through a website pop-up; through embedding the survey on your website; or by placing the survey on your Facebook page.

SurveyMonkey will collate your results and give you access to the responses online. At the free level of service, you will receive some basic analysis of results but you need to upgrade to get more sophisticated summaries and analysis (e.g. charts such as bar chart or pie chart). However, for small business marketing you can often get by with the basic analysis of results.

Here’s an example of the analysis of results for a simple ‘work type’ question that I used to survey a group of readers of my e-Learning Blog:

Other questions in my survey on SurveyMonkey covered the frequency of access to the blog, how the information on the blog was used and suggestions for changes. This was a blog that I was contracted to write for the Queensland Department of Education over an 18 month period, so I needed to know the relative make-up of my audience, how the blog was being used and what improvements I could make in the information provided.

Your potential survey activity is limited only by your imagination and your willingness to find out more about your customers. Earlier this year, when my joint venture partners and I were developing Wizzley.com, a community for online writers, I used SurveyMonkey to find out the ‘article categories’ that members of my mailing list would like to see included. This helped us to round out the more than 3,000 categories for articles for our site. So through the survey, we basically established what topics my current email subscribers would like to write about on our new site for social networking and article writing.

Effective small business marketing requires a deep understanding of your customers and tools like SurveyMonkey help you to gain the requisite knowledge to achieve target marketing in a cost effective way.

December 5, 2011December 5, 2011

How to Create LinkedIn Ads: The Basic Steps

Linkedin Ads is a great medium for targeted advertising for business-to-business (B2B) marketing or where the market for your small business can be segmented by profession, job title or company. Now with over 130 million members, the LinkedIn professional network allows small businesses to get their message across to a highly targeted audience.

Good conversion rates and leads can be generated from LinkedIn Ads – as long as you have the right tools and the right people to tailor your message correctly. There are plenty of blogs and articles that can teach you how to create a great online ad campaign to achieve a high return on investment (ROI), but this blog post gets down to the very basics of creating Linkedin Ads.

What do you need to do first? How do you set up a Linked Ad? What are your options? This blog post will address these questions and more by spelling out the basic steps to get your LinkedIn Ads up and running.

Step 1 – Getting started with LinkedIn Ads

You must have a Linkedin profile to start. From there, you can go to Linkedin Ads by clicking the link located at the top left hand corner of the page:

You can also create a Business Account if you have created a company page. By doing so, you can add additional people to control and monitor your campaigns. This runs separately from your individual LinkedIn Ads account, so you can choose to run a campaign for yourself and then run a company campaign. These are also billed separately.

There is an additional registration required to create your LinkedIn ‘Business Account’ as indicated in the following image:

Step 2 – Create a LinkedIn Ad campaign

To create a LinkedIn Ad campaign you need to understand the basic terms used by LinkedIn:

Ad campaign: Covers up to 15 Ad variations and a single target audience.

Ad Campaign Name: If you intend to segment your audience, name your campaign accordingly for easy tracking and easy metrics beyond the campaign, e.g. as seen in the image below – ‘Performance Conversations for Networks/Groups’ ([Training Workshop Name] for [Targeted Group]):

Ad Destination: You can link the Ad straight to a page on your website or to a page created from your LinkedIn account. If you are going to send visitors to your website, ensure the link in your Ad takes them directly to the related page – do not send them to your homepage and expect them to look around for the right information. That is an easy way to instantly lose a possible sale.

If you have created a page from your Linkedin Company Page, you can also send people who view your Ad to the address of that Company Page. For e.g. a job advertisement you’ve posted, or a service that your company offers.

In addition to the above terms, you need to understand the LinkedIn Ad structure. This covers items such as image for your Ad, headline and description:

Image for your Ad must be 50×50 pixels.
The headline must be no more than 25 characters. Unlike Google Adwords, the headline for your LinkedIn Ad does not have to be “keyword specific”, so you can use a title that will catch your audience’s eye.
The description must be no more than 75 characters (but you have two lines to be creative with these limited characters). With character restrictions, you must get to the point but grab attention at the same time. Some common tips are:

– Tell them what you’re selling – get to the point

– Appeal to an emotion (fear, stress, relief, excitement)

– Use a Call to Action (e.g. Register today).

To round off your LinkedIn Ad you need to complete the ‘From” field with either your own name or your company name.

Step 3 – Targeting your LinkedIn Ad

This step is what gives you the most value so be sure you know exactly who you are trying to target. Your options for targeting with LinkedIn Ads include location, company, job title, group, gender and age. You can make your targeting as broad as you want (all members from one location – Australia) or as defined as you want (only members from Brisbane, Australia AND who work for the Queensland Government AND who are in a Senior Position AND who are a member of the AHRI Network group).

On the top right hand corner of your screen you will see your Estimated Target Audience. The more defined you get, the more this number shrinks, but don’t see this as negative. If your goal is to gain awareness of your brand, keep your target broad. If you are looking to generate conversions and believe you’ll have a high click-through-rate (CTR), then save yourself from advertising to unnecessary audiences costing you unnecessary clicks (and money). The more defined your targeting, the more likely you’ll be able to convert your LinkedIn Ads to sales because your Ad will actually mean something to your audinece. To everyone else – your Ad is just another ad with no relevance or significance for them.

Step 4 – Setting the budget for your LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn Ads is a paid advertising platform. You have two basic options in terms of what you pay for:

Pay per click (CPC): You only get charged when someone clicks on your Ad.
Pay per impressions (CPM): You pay for the number of times your Ad displays for a visitor to LinkedIn (on the basis of ‘per thousand impressions’).

This choice is dependent on your goal. Linkedin will always suggest a click bid range for you. The minimum is $2.00 per click. The Bid Range is based on competition. The higher you bid, the more likely your ad will be shown over competitors who may not be willing to pay as much. Don’t worry about over-spending. That’s where the Daily Budget comes in, allowing control over your clicks so that you can stay within your online advertising budget. You need to choose whether you want to run your campaign continuously or until a specific date.

(Side note: there is a one time activation fee of $5.00 – this is then credited to your LinkedIn Ads account and used as the initial credit towards Clicks/Impressions)

Step 5 – Let your LinkedIn Ad run for a period…and evaluate

Keep an eye on your campaigns every day. It is important to monitor how your Ads are going so you can make adjustments if necessary. If your Ads aren’t getting any clicks – edit or delete them. If you’ve identified which variations of your ads are working the best – disable the others. If you’re reaching your daily budget every day and not getting any conversions to sales – lower your bid per click and/or alter your daily budget. Watch your campaign to ensure it is working for you and what you are trying to achieve.

LinkedIn Ads can be a profitable medium for small business marketing if you target your Ads appropriately and evaluate your results continuously.