Thoughts on Business, Marketing & Creativity

A Story You Might Recognize

Bob used to work for a Big Corporation as a product manager, but he recently decided to make a change.  Bob joined the team at Medium-Sized Business Ltd. (MSB).  MSB is a dynamic, up and coming, growing manufacturer of custom-made, high-end wall units for home entertainment systems.

Bob’s boss is Joe.  Joe started MSB five years ago, as a one-man show.  He would build units on commission for family and friends, and eventually his reputation grew.  Now, Joe has a team of 50 people working for him.  MSB is known as a premiere boutique shop for high-end living room furniture in the metropolitan area where it is located.  While many other boutique shops are going out of business due to tough economic times, MSB has only seen a slight dip in revenues, and Joe, being a savvy businessman, sees the downturn as an opportunity.

Joe wants to expand MSB.  He has the high-end market segment locked down, so he has decided he wants to make a play for the mass market – the middle-class consumer.  He knows that to do this, he will have to compete with the big box stores, and he will have to make changes to his product line.  That’s why he hired, Bob.  Bob knows what it takes to sell to the middle-class.

Bob spends his first couple of months at MSB, crafting a product line that he believes will be a big hit with the demographic Joe wants to target.  It’s cheaper than MSB’s customized offerings, and as a result is far less customized.  It’s a basic product line, with only three options of colors, and a handful of configuration options.  Because the products are more standardized, MSB can churn them out at greater scale, for less cost, and can afford to sell them at prices that appeal to the middle-class consumer. It will stand apart from the products of the big box store because it has MSB’s reputation behind it, and because despite being cheaper, it will still be well-crafted.

Bob thinks they have a winner on their hands, so he presents the plans to Joe, and Joe is onboard.  Initial investment begins to create the infrastructure needed to add to MSB’s current custom business and bulid a standardized product line parallel to the custom line.

Two weeks before the launch of the new product line, Joe calls Bob into his office.

“Bob, I was talking to Sally from sales, and she’s really concerned that we’re not offering chestnut as a colour.  She thinks that if we don’t have chestnut, which has been one of our signature colours on our current products, we might lose our customer base.”

“Uhh…  Joe, we launch in two weeks.”

“I know, but I need you to find a way to add a chestnut colour option.”

Bob runs out of Joe’s office spends three sleepless nights at the office, but eventually figures out a way to add a chestnut colour option to the product line, and still launch on time.

A week before the product line launches, Joe again calls Bob into his office.  Joe looks anxious, which is unusual for Joe, normally a very calm and collected man.

“Bob, I was talking to Tim from sales, and he’s concerned that we don’t have a $50 piece in the new line.”

“Uhh…  Joe, we launch next week.”

“I know, but Tim thinks that without a piece at a bargain price-point, we’re not going to be able to get the bargain hunters.”

Bob has always prided himself on getting things done, and so he runs out of Joe’s office, grabs MSB’s chief designer, and they throw together a cheap, bargain-priced unit to add to the line, just two days before launch.

Launch time comes, Bob is exhausted, also he’s worried.  The last minute changes to the line make it a lot less tight than the line that he had initially planned out.  The production process is no longer as smooth and seamless as it was, as now there are manual workarounds that had to be worked out to accomodate the last minute changes.  There’s possibilities for human errors.

Sales start coming in, and Joe is ecstatic, they’re getting the sales from the mass-market segment they were looking for, but they’re also getting tons of orders for the low-end $50 bargain piece.  Also, Chestnut is the least popular colour in the line, but there are still a decent number of orders for it.

Volumes continue to grow, and Joe continues to get happier as he sees his revenues growing.  Bob, on the other hand is getting increasingly concerned. He hasn’t been sleeping of late.  He’s been talking to the people on the production room floor and they’re having trouble accommodating the volume of the bargain-priced piece, and the cost of keeping the chestnut coloured stain in stock is straining their budget.

Soon, a few glitches start happening in the production process, and the team falls behind its production schedule.  In order to make up for lost time, they start taking shortcuts, and some of the units going out are not the quality that MSB is used to producing.  Also, the shortcuts take less time, but cost more money.  Joe’s looking at his revenues, but Bob’s looking at the balance sheet, and while it’s still in the black, it’s not looking as great as he’d hoped.

Two months into the new product line, Furniture Weekly, after five years of writing nothing but glowing reviews of MSB, has slammed their new product line as “cheap, and of poor craftsmanship.” MSB’s reputation takes a hit, and the sales of their flagship custom line start to fall.

Joe calls Bob into his office one last time and tells him that he made a mistake. “I should have stuck to what we did best.  I’m sorry, Bob, but we’re going back to making high-end furniture only.  We’re not going to need your services anymore.”

The Moral of the Story

The above story is fictional, but I’m sure anyone who has worked in business for a little while has seen variations on it many times over.

Joe did make a mistake, but it wasn’t expanding his business.  There’s a large movement towards “small is the new big,” but I think what people forget is that this doesn’t mean that small can’t continue to grow.  Joe had successfully cornered his market, and he was in a good position to unlock a new revenue stream.  He wasn’t growing just for the sake of growing.  It was intelligent growth.

Joe’s mistake was that with his new product line, he tried to be everything to everyone.  By adding in the new colour option at the 11th hour, he was trying to appeal to the customers that he was already serving with his customized product.  By adding in the bargain-priced unit, he was trying to target the bargain shopper.  Bob’s product line was not meant to target either of those consumers.  It was meant to target the middle-class consumer who wants good quality at a reasonable price.  The consumer who wants a wider colour palette needs to spend more.  The consumer who wants bargain-priced goods is going to buy from Walmart, and isn’t as concerned about craftsmanship.

When you try to be all things to all people, you weaken your product offering, and you set yourself up for failure. Bob knew this, but he didn’t say anything because he was the new guy and he wanted to please his boss.  In the end, this cost Bob his job, so Bob failed in a big way, too.  It was his responsibility to make sure Joe understood what was happening.

What does this have to do with marketing?

If you don’t understand that this whole story is about marketing, I think you should head over and read Mitch Joel’s recent post on Six Pixels of Separation on the differences between marketing and advertising (even if you did understand it, Mitch Joel is still worth reading).

On a more precise note, however, the same lesson needs to be applied to all your marketing strategies.  Know your target market, and target them with a single-mindedness. Don’t get distracted by those that kind of look like your target market, but aren’t quite it.  The bigger your target market, the broader and more generic your messaging has to be.  The broader and more generic your message becomes, the less attractive it is to your target market.

Resolve to Treat Your Target Audience Well

A new year will be starting soon, and you’ll probably be making some resolutions.  Include in there a resolution to treat your target market with respect, and not get tempted to market to the world.

Happy Holidays, All. I hope you’ll all be taking this time to spend with your families, and enjoy some downtime, no matter your beliefs or religious denominations.

It’s the end of December, and the internet is flush with year-in-review blog posts. As much as I despise being a conformist, this blog WAS a one-year experiment that started a year ago. As such, a review of the past year, and an evaluation of how the experiment went is required.

Barefoot Running: After several years of trying to become a serious runner, but consistently being held up by minor injuries, I made a purchase this year that changed how I run, changed how much I run, and definitely changed the way people look at me. Vibram Five Fingers are quite possibly the ugliest shoes on the market, but they quickly became my favourite thing to wear on my feet (I am wearing my VFF Sprints as I write this). I highly recommend them if you don’t mind strangers whispering things about you as you go by.

Twitter: This year, I hopped on the bandwagon and started using Twitter. It took me a little while, but I eventually got the hang of it, and while I’m far from being an addict, I do enjoy logging in for a few minutes a day to see what’s happening. The great thing about Twitter is that its simplicity means the only limit to its usage is your imagination. It can be a tool for businesses, for writers, or just for having fun.

Personal Life/Social

There were no major events in my personal life this year, and I’m okay with that. My relationships, with family, friends and girlfriend remained the same, or got stronger. I realized that the most important people in my life have not changed for at least five years, and most of those, I’ve known far longer. Change is good, but sometimes, stability is better.

Overall

I may have come short of my goal to write 52 short stories, but in many other ways, in both writing, and outside of writing, 2009 was a good year for me, and I’m going to spend what’s left of it being grateful for that.

So, now that the year’s over, what happens to 52SS? Well, I think it’s going to stick around. I think I’ll extend the experiment, and I enjoy having a spot to share my thoughts. Expect the next post to come in the new year, and to talk about what’s in store for 52SS, and for me, in 2010.

How was your 2009? I’d love to hear what you’re proud of having accomplished in 2009, so please share in the comments.

In my last post, I told you all why I think more businesses need to focus on the local, and move into the global.  As a follow-up to that, I want to talk about one of the primary ways local businesses can use the web to promote themselves: search engine marketing (SEM).

SEM/PPC (pay-per-click) has become synonymous with Google’s PPC product, Google Adwords. Adwords accounts for over 90% of Google’s annual revenue.  The majority of that revenue, however, has been generated by larger, national or multinational advertisers.  Google has had a harder time penetrating the local market.  There are a number of reasons for this, but one of the bigger ones is that creating a SEM ad campaign for a local business requires different techniques and different strategies than creating a campaign for a national advertiser.

With this in mind, let’s take a look at 10strategies for improving the SEM campaign for your local business.

1. Don’t stop at Google

Google owns a little over 80% of the search market in the US, and 90% in Canada.  With such a vast majority of the market covered, there is a big desire to simply forget about the other search engines.

That’s silly, especially for local businesses.  Google’s primary advantage from a paid search perspective is its massive distribution network, and the huge amount of traffic available.  Local advertisers don’t benefit very much from the distribution network (see #6 below), and they typically have smaller budgets, as such, they can’t touch most of Google’s traffic anyway.

Most local businesses could easily spend their entire budget on Yahoo or Bing paid search. There have even been various studies that have been conducted that suggest that both of these engines convert better than Google. While I’m skeptical of that fact, one thing I do strongly believe is that, whether your potential customer is coming from Google, Yahoo, Bing or Dogpile.com, he is still arriving at your site through a relevant ad, based on a search he performed. Why should you care where he came from?  Would you turn away business from a newspaper ad because you really just wanted to focus on your television spot?

I also haven’t mentioned the primary reason to use search engines other than Google: the clicks are cheaper.  Because all paid search engines run on a bidding system, the more competition there is for keywords, the higher the cost of a click.  Yahoo, MSN, and even smaller, second-tier search engines, can provide you with traffic for a fraction of the cost of Google.

This being said, while most of the strategies that follow can be used on any platform, they will be written from the Google perspective for the sake of simplicity.

2. Target locally, target nationally

No matter how many times Google tells me they’re doing all kinds of cool things to determine the geographic location of a computer, I can’t quite bring myself to believe them, and here’s why: I live in Montreal, and I consistently see ads for Toronto, a city that’s 600 km (400 miles) away.  The reason for that is that the primary way that search engines determine a user’s geographic location remains through his IP address.  A user’s IP address is determined by where his internet service provider’s hub is located.

While this works well in most cases, there is still a large number of cases (such as mine), where geographic targeting of a campaign is inaccurate.  As such, the only way to ensure that your campaign remains truly local is to build two campaigns.

The two campaigns will essentially be identical, but the targeting on one campaign will be local, and the targeting on the other will be national.  Obviously, you don’t want traffic from all over the country, so in the national campaign, you will only use keywords that are modified with local modifiers.  So, while in your local campaign you might have the keyword “plumber,” your national campaign will include local variations of this word, such as “plumber nyc” or, “plumber manhattan.”

3. Include a local phone number in your ad texts

Users who search for local businesses are often bombarded by irrelevant, non-local results.  One of the easiest ways for you to make an impression on a user is by showing him a local phone number.  He knows his local area code, so he knows you’re a local business.  I’ve run a number of large scale tests on this, and it works almost without fail.  Don’t expect to save a ton because of people who will just call instead of clicking, though.  Remember that user behaviour on search engines is often driven by a click-happy, information-hungry, user-base that want more than 70 characters of description before they call you.

Also, be aware that toll free numbers don’t work as well for this kind of thing for the same reason that local numbers do: they don’t scream local.

4. Modify keywords with landmarks as well as cities

When modifying your keywords for geography, don’t stick to the city level.  While many users will search with a city name, others will search using the name of a region, a neighborhood or a landmark.  So, in addition to “plumber nyc,” try things such as, “plumber in soho,” or, “plumber near central park.”

5. Use Google Local extensions

Under the campaign settings tab in Adwords, Google allows you to add a local extension to your ads.  To use this feature, simply add your business’ address in the local extension form.  Your ad is now eligible to serve in Google Local results, as well as show the address in regular search results where it is relevant based on the user’s search query.

6. Avoid the content network

Google’s distribution network, known as its Content Network, works well for large national advertisers, because they don’t really care where their potential customers are, but for local customers, using the Content network efficiently is very difficult.  Unless you can choose individual placements on sites that you know are locally relevant, you’ll likely be wasting your time and money on the Content Network.

7. Target mobile

By default, Google allows you to serve ads for people on all platforms.  I used to recommend removing the option for “mobile” because the odds of getting a conversion from someone browsing on a regular mobile phone were slim to none.  Now that smart phones have become the norm, that logic has flipped on its head.  Phones have the most accurate geographic recognition from a search engine’s perspective, larger screens, and click-to-call power that make mobile phone users the ideal targets for a search marketing campaign.

8. Take advantage of negative keywords

Because local advertisers tend to have smaller budgets, it’s important to keep the focus of a SEM campaign tight.  Some of the ways this can be done is through the use of carefully selected keywords set to exact match.  The other way to do this is to liberally use negative keywords in both broad and exact match.  In order to determine good negative keywords, use Google’s keyword tool, and run regular search query reports withing the Adwords report section. Add nonsensical keywords as negatives.  Look for irrelevant queries in your reports, and add those as negative keywords.  Also, be sure to include nearby locations that you don’t do business in as negative keywords.  This will prevent someone close, but not close enough, from mistakenly clicking your ad and costing you money.

9. Use day-parting

Most local businesses have operating hours.  If your business has opening hours, and you can spend your SEM budget while serving ads only during those hours, do so.  While you can get good leads from customers who find your business after hours, and return to your site, or take your contact info down, visits that occur during business hours, are that much more immediate, and are that much more likely to lead to an immediate action by the user.  That added proximity and immediacy makes leads during business hours, more valuable than those after hours.

10. Optimize your landing page for local

You can have the greatest campaign in the world, but if your landing page is not optimized, it’s useless.  Be sure to optimize your landing pages specifically for local traffic.  This means including elements that speak to the location of the business, such as maps, driving directions, nearby points of interest, etc.  Users looking for local businesses, are likely looking for a more “traditional” experience (ie. talking to a person), so make sure your contact information is prominently displayed and easy to access.

Explore More

The above were just ten of my favourite SEM strategies that are particularly useful for local, but there are many more.

What are some of your favourite local web advertising strategies?  Have you tried SEM for a local business?  What were the results?  Let’s chat in the comments.

The other day, a colleague came up to me and said, “Can you take a look at this client’s search marketing campaign?  He wants to target all of North America.”

“What’s his budget?” I asked.

“Five hundred dollars per month.”

This got me thinking about how small businesses perceive the web and the opportunities that it presents to them.

Going Global

Not too long ago, a small business was, by definition, a local business.  Expanding beyond local was expensive.  It required infrastructure, logistics management, more inventory, and more resources.  Small businesses didn’t have any of these things.  Today, for the most part, small businesses still don’t have any of these things.  The difference is that now they don’t need most of them.

The first thing that allowed small businesses to expand beyond the local was the availability of cheap shipping.  This opened up the door to business models that included a centralized location, but that could service a wide area.  Amazon would not be the largest book seller in the world if it weren’t for carriers like UPS, FedEx, DHL and more, competing to bring down the price of bringing goods to the consumer’s front door.

With a distribution network already in place, the ubiquity of the internet made going beyond local a breeze.  With a home on the web, you could just as easily be found by your neighbour, one block over, or by a Texan rancher, or by a Tokyo yuppie.  The dream of going global was no longer reserved for the multinational.

Hugh MacLeod, the copywriter turned artist, turned small business author (affiliate link), often writes about the global microbrand.  The global microbrand is the manifestation of a single individual turning himself into a brand that he can market across the planet.  It appeals, particularly, to creative entrepreneurs like artists and writers, who often have a hard time finding a big enough market for their goods locally.

Hugh has built himself a global microbrand, with little financial investment, and a whole lot of hard work and perseverance.  Still, Hugh has always been quick to point out that while he has become “internet famous,” he has yet to strike it rich.  As sales of his books and his art increase with the size of his audience, it may only be a matter of time, but it hasn’t been easy for him to get there.

Hugh’s story, and stories of those like him, have showcased that it is possible to go global with a small business and be successful. But, I can’t help but feel that going beyond local too quickly makes this process harder than it needs to be.

The Advantages of Local

Before the internet and cheap shipping made it so easy to start a global business, the ordinary route for expanding beyond local went something like this: Start a local business.  Develop a reputation as a trusted member of the local business community.  Grow revenues.  Use revenues from your first location to open a second location.  Wash.  Rinse.  Repeat.

Going global, was a slow and tedious task, especially if every location you opened took as long to grow as your first location.  No wonder people wanted to skip all that and turn to the web.

The thing that we forget is that growing beyond that first location isn’t a direct line of growth, it’s an exponential growth curve.  Sam Walton started off owning a single general store in Arkansas.  Today, Wal-Mart is the biggest retailer in the world, and the Waltons are one of the wealthiest families in the world.  Every single store they opened after the first store got progressively easier to open.  the simple reason for that is that the reptuation from all of the previous stores, made expansion easier.  Today, if you find out a Wal-Mart is opening near you, regardless of your feelings towards the chain, you know exactly what the expect.  Decent, but not excellent, quality goods at everyday low prices.  You just know that.

There are certain advantages to starting locally, and the biggest all have to do with reputation.  When you start your business locally, you know the people around you.  You know your market.  You know your customers.  In fact, when you start locally, you probably knew your customers long before they were your customers.  In many instances, you start off with a built-in group of customers.

Those customers learn your reputation, and they spread it to those closest to them.  They talk about it at the office, at the bar, at Sunday barbecues.  Word of mouth is really easy to achieve locally.  Getting brand awareness locally is also really easy.  How easy?  Start wearing a T-shirt with your business’ name on it, and walk around your city.  If you don’t think that’ll generate leads, then there’s an issue with your business, not with your city.

Aside from that, in the local space, we all already have pre-established networks that we can use to spread the word of our business, all of which contributes to its success.

So, that’s great for getting that first location up and running, but how does that help in going beyond local?  Quite simply because now you have a history when you open your second location.  You have experience, you have testimonials, and you can point to all of these as social proof that what you do works.  This makes the second location that much more likely to succeed.

The Problem with Skipping the Local Step

The big problem with skipping the initial local step, and going global first, is that you’re removing all of your pre-existing advantages.  The web, and the world are huge, scary places, and most of us don’t have many connections “out there.”  If you’re concentrating on making worldwide sales, your backyard barbecue probably isn’t going to do you a whole world of good as a networking event.

I concede that there’s no reason why the people who would have bought from you if you were local won’t buy from you if you’re trying to go global, but the fact of the matter is, companies trying to go global have a different mindset.  They start thinking of their market in terms of generalities, and oftentimes, this isn’t the best way to attract local buyers.

The other big issue with skippling the local step is that while many of the problems of going global have been resolved by modern conveniences, some still remain.  True, you only need a single warehouse, and can ship around the world relatively cheaply.  Alternatively, you can use drop shipping services.  You don’t need physical locations all around the world, you can take orders from a single website.

But what about our client from the beginning of this article?  Is he ready to go global?

You’ll notice that the first question I asked my colleague wasn’t, “What does the client do?” or “Where is he located?”  Instead, I asked, “What’s his budget?”

The internet has done some incredible things for marketing.  It has lowered the cost of marketing to the point where a small business can realistically compete with a multinational.  However, it has not caused miracles to happen.  A $500 budget for search engine marketing campaign is still a small budget, and while you can and should see good results for that budget on a local scale, it simply doesn’t make sense on a continental scale.  It’s the classic definition of spreading yourself too thin.  Yes, search engine marketing is a pay for performance medium.  Yes, you only pay when your ads are clicked.  Yes, mathematically speaking if you convert 10% of all visits on your site, it shouldn’t matter where those visits are coming from.

But it does matter.

Your clicks will be spread across an entire continent.  You’ll get single visits from various places. And, while mathematically, a 10% conversation rate, should mean that 10 out of every 100 visitors will convert, in practice, when all 100 of your customers are sitting in different locations, it rarely ever works that way.

Furthermore, none of what you learn from your campaign has any meaning because your data isn’t significant.  In order for data to be significant, you need to have a certain quantity of data.  Not only that, but all of the data points in that data set need to be similar.  When you’re targeting a wide area with a small budget, all of your data points are different.  You never get significant data, so it’s impossible to optimize your marketing.

The bottom line is that in many media, it still takes bigger budgets to broadcast on a wider scale.

Start local, hit your stride, then bust out of your local market.  Not only will it be easier to do, but you’ll be better prepared to take on the hyper-competitive global market.

What’s been your experience in the local vs. global game?  Have you gone beyond local?  Have you purposely chosen to stay local.  Share your story in the comments.

Ten years ago, the question was does a small business need a website?  Not everyone agreed on the answer to that question, but as the internet grew and took on more importance, the “yes” crowd steadily got bigger.  Recently, though, that crowd is starting to shrink.  If you reframe the question to, “Does a small business need a web presence?” you’ll rediscover the big “yes” crowd.  However, no longer does it seem that that web presence needs to be a website, in the traditional sense of the word.  One alternative to a small business website is a blog.  Nowadays, many small business have a website and a blog. Are blogs the new websites? Does a small business need a blog?

While I firmly believe that every small business can benefit from a web presence, the question of the blog isn’t so clear to me.  Let’s look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of blogging for small businesses.

The Advantages

1. It’s cheap

Small businesses don’t have huge marketing budgets, and so anything inexpensive is worth looking closely at.  Whether you have a website already or not, creating a blog is quick and can be free.  If you want to host your blog on your own domain, then you’ll need to purchase the domain from any number of places.  Then, you have to decide which blogging platform to use.  All of the major blogging platforms are free: WordPress, Blogger, TypePad (micro), Tumblr.  I have played around with each of these, and I think that WordPress is the way to go for the small business.  The interface is powerful, and the ability to add plug-ins makes it infinitely extensible.  Even if you just want to set up a simple blog, it is painless to do in WordPress, and you have room to grow.

If you want something more customized than the basic themes offered by WordPress, there are tons of free WordPress themes out in the wild, and there are developers who specialize in creating WordPress themes if you want to go the route of spending a little money on your blog.  The other option is to tweak an existing theme.  AdamDiStefano.com is built on WordPress and runs a modified version of Chris Pearson‘s free Copyblogger theme.

Even if you do decide to hire someone to create a theme and setup your WordPress for you, these kinds of jobs are considerably less expensive than building a website, because the framework already exists.

2. Creates a rapport with a customer

I keep hearing that customers want to buy from a business that they can connect with.  While, I’m still not convinced that this is the primary thing that customers are looking for in a company, providing a little transparency to customers can’t hurt.  While I may not care if the person I’m purchasing my new rocking chair from is my friend, some insight into that person’s craft can go a long way towards convincing me to purchase from him.

Aside from that, one of the biggest advantages that small businesses have over big business is that they have a human face.  Big business is catching on to this and many big companies now have brand advocates whose entire job is to make the business look human through the use of social media, blogs and other humanizing devices (there is still something strangely creepy about this process).  Oftentimes, these efforts can come off as forced, and rigid, with a corporate blog reading like something between a press release and an annual report.  Small businesses have the advantage of already having that human aspect, and so blogging will serve only to cement that.

3. Establishes you as an expert

Returning to the example of my rocking chair-making friend, by blogging about his craft, he is building authority.  If he produces quality content that educates and informs, this will be recognized and add credibility to sales pitch.  I imagine that there is considerable skill involved in making a well-crafted rocking chair.

Because small businesses often have to deal with the customer’s fear that they are not as professional or reliable as corporations, building this authority and credibility is essential for reassuring customers and attracting them.

4. Creates a way to be found (SEO)

In a previous post, I explained how search engine optimization works on a basic level.  Blogging helps with three major factors that determine a site’s ranking on Google: content, regular updates, and popularity.

Content speaks for itself.  By blogging, you create content.  Content is what search engines index.  Likewise, by its very nature, blogging provides the regular updates of relevant new content, that search engines like to see in sites.

Blogging helps the site’s popularity because if you’re doing it right, you’re creating content that people will want to link back to.  These back links are the currency that search engine algorithms are built on.

All this boils down to ways people can find you.  Whether it be through search engines, or through those back links (which people sometimes forget are more valuable in and of themselves than as search rank juice).  More visitors to your site means more potential customers.

The Disadvantages

1. It’s time consuming

Writing a blog takes time.  Contrary to what I’ve heard some claim, it takes lots of time, especially if you want to do it right.  You need to brainstorm topics.  Outline posts.  Research information that goes into those posts.  Write a draft.  Proof and edit that draft.  Post the final version and do any necessary formatting.  Then there’s the process of promoting the blog.  All of this adds up to a sizeable chunk of time.

Unfortunately, time is probably the one thing small business owners have the least of, right next to money.  And as we’ve already seen, time is money.

2. It doesn’t make sense for every business

I’ve heard proponents of blogging claim that everyone should be blogging.  I don’t agree.  First of all, if you’re not comfortable communicating with your customers, you shouldn’t blog.  Some will tell you that you can learn the skills necessary to blog, and yes, you probably could, but the idea behind blogging is to be authentic.  If you’re not being authentic, don’t bother.  Or if the authentic you is not someone that you think will draw customers in, don’t do it.

There are also certain industries where I just can’t see much sense in blogging.  The way I see it, the ideal is to be sharing expertise with potential customers or with people who will refer potential customers.  The problem isn’t so much that the service or product you provide doesn’t require much expertise, because if you’re in business, you’re adding some kind of value.  Instead, the issues arises more when the area of expertise is related to something that people don’t particularly want to learn about.  For example, I use dry cleaning services, and I’m sure there’s a whole science behind the process, but I really can’t see myself or (anyone else for that matter) reading a dry cleaner’s blog.  And the people who will read the blog are unlikely to be customers.  There’s a better chance they’ll be people looking to start their own dry cleaning business, or looking for DIY home solutions.

For some businesses, running a blog just doesn’t convert.  A blog just like any marketing tool, should have a measurable return on investment (ROI).  If there’s no ROI, there’s no reason to do it.

3. Risk of abandoning it

Worse than not having a blog is having an abandoned blog.  You see them all the time because they are littering the internet.  A blog that’s online is there for all to see.  If a user finds your blog and sees that it hasn’t been updated for six months, this immediately raises alarm bells in that user’s mind.  The same user finding a static web page that hasn’t been updated in six months doesn’t have those same concerns as long as the info on it is current.

Whether, justified or not, an abandoned blog conveys lack of professionalism, poor management or fear that the business no longer exists.  if you start writing a blog, you need to be certain you can keep up with the commitment, otherwise, it will do more harm than good.

Conclusion

Blogging is not for every business.  To decide whether it’s right for you, you need to evaluate the above points and do the math.  However, even if you decide not to blog, you should still have some kind of online presence.  This can be a static website, an active presence on Twitter (warning: also time consuming if done correctly), a Facebook fan page, a Google place page, landing pages as provided by online directories, etc.

Blogging can be a powerful marketing tool, but it’s not for everyone.  Find what works for you, and use it.  And beware those who promise one size fits all solutions.

In my previous post, I talked about the growing trend towards do-it-yourself in business.  With all these tools available, it’s easy for business owners to get distracted by how much money they could save and try to do everything themselves.  However, in some instances, it really is advantageous to hire an expert.  What follows are six reasons that you might want to hire an expert.  If after going through the list, you remain unconvinced, then chances are you can do it yourself.

1. Expertise

Okay, so this might seem blatantly obvious and ridiculous for being included, but oftentimes, we tend to forget that experts (real experts), actually do possess knowledge and expertise that the rest of us do not.  That’s how they became experts.  In some cases, you absolutely need that expertise.  Also, how much expertise you need is a function of the severity of the situation.  If I need to change the oil on my car, I can do that myself.  If I need to change the transmission on my car, I need an expert.

In the world of internet marketing, it’s no different.  You may be able to write pretty well, and you might be able to throw together a half-decent looking site using some free resources.  For many people that may be all they need.  However, if you really want to maximize the potential of your website, a good professional copywriter has the expertise necessary to write you copy that will sell.  You can write, but he is an expert at writing.

2. Time Savings

“Time is money.”  I have no idea where that quote came from, but its truth for any businessperson is undeniable.  Every hour you waste fiddling with your website, or your Adwords campaign, or your analytics reports, is an hour you’re not spending making the products that make you money.  Saving $2,000 on hiring a consultant is not savings if you could have spent the time you were using doing the consultant’s job making $5,000.

Not to mention that entrepreneurs work notoriously long hours, and sometimes, the money spent on an expert is worth it even if all it means is that you have a little more time for yourself, for your family and for your life outside of your business.

3. Money Savings

This might seem counter-intuitive, because you spend money on experts, so how can they save you money?  Well, if you’ve ever tried to do something yourself and screwed it up royally, then you understand.  A friend of mine once tried to save some cash by remodeling his bathroom himself.  He paid for the materials, but saved on labour, and he had the extra time on his hands to do the renovations.  All was going well, until in the course of remodeling, he burst a water pipe.  He had to hire a contractor to fix the resulting damage caused by flooding.  Total savings?  Negative.

The same thing can happen with your marketing.  If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can potentially waste thousands of dollars on ineffective advertising.  That’s not to say you can’t figure it out.  You can, but you have to accept the risk that something might go wrong, and that could cost you far more than hiring an expert would have cost you.

4. Learning Experience

Something I look for in any expert I hire is someone that is willing to share his experience and educate me while still doing the job I hired him for.  This is particularly great if you want to learn a new field or just further your knowledge in a certain field.  Perhaps you can learn enough that next time around you’ll feel comfortable doing the job yourself.  True, not everything can be taught in the course of a short relationship.  My mechanic just wasn’t willing to talk me through how he went about changing my transmission.  However, in small business marketing, where most experts fulfill a consultative role, their goal should be to help the client learn.

5. Benefiting from Connections

If you go to a foreign country on vacation, and you look like a tourist, it won’t take you long to feel like you’re getting screwed.  You always get the sense that there’s two prices.  One for the locals, and one for the tourists.  That’s because there is.  Dabbling in do-it-yourself is a lot like that.  When you venture into the world of internet marketing, you’re a tourist.  You will go to the tourist attractions, and you will pay more for less.

Hiring an expert is like getting a local guide.  He knows the lay of the land.  He knows where the best deals are.  He knows who to go to get a quality service, and who’s just going to rob you.  This knowledge, these connections and this network come from living and breathing the stuff that you’re just dabbling in.  When you hire an expert, you get to take advantage of all that.

6. Growing Your Own Network

You know all those connections and that network that your expert used to help you when you hired him?  Well, if you play your cards right, you’ll be able to use some of those connections and part of that network even after the relationship with the expert is over.  In the world of business, the cliche is that who you know is as important as what you know.  By using experts, you get introductions to the right people who may be of service to you in the future.

To Hire or Not to Hire?

After going through the above list, what are your thoughts?  Do you still believe that experts are a waste of money?  Or would you never even consider undertaking a project in unfamiliar territory without the help of an expert? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

Traditional advertising was pretty straightforward.  You decided where you wanted to advertise, decided what you wanted advertised, and then you paid someone to do it for you.  The nature of the media dictated that you needed to pay someone to do it for you, because business owners and entrepreneurs didn’t have the skill sets to create TV spots, or full-page magazine ads.  New technologies and new media are changing that.  Advertising is more self-serve than ever.  As a result, small business owners and entrepreneurs are doing more themselves, and saving money.

In all this excitement over the free advertising opportunities provided by the web, and social media, people often forget to factor in one cost: their own time.  Keeping up with a marketing strategy that involves blogging, posting on forums, checking Facebook, checking Twitter, running your own PPC ad campaigns, etc., can easily become a full-time, forty-plus hour per week job.

The fact is that while you’re running your marketing strategy, you’re not doing everything else that needs to get done in your business.  It’s easy to read blogs like mine and forget that there are other aspects to running a business than marketing.  You still need to create a product or service to sell.  You still need to keep track of the financials.  You still need to manage your supply chain.  So, while you’re spending all this time on web marketing, what else could you be doing?

Small business owners and entrepreneurs quickly find out when they start out that running your own business is easily more time consuming than working a full-time job, but what they often forget is that running your own business doesn’t mean that you need to do everything yourself, or that you have to do everything you think you do.

Before you jump into all these “free” forms of advertising with both feet, do a quick mental calculation.  How much is your time worth?  The best way to figure this out is to figure out how much you would pay yourself per hour for the work you do (sometimes, the hourly figure can be a little bit depressing, but bear with me).  Once you’ve figured out what your time is worth, figure out how much time you’re spending on running your “free” marketing.  Now, multiply what your time is worth by the number of hours you’re spending on marketing.  Suddenly, all these wonderful free forms of advertising aren’t so free.

Ask yourself if your time might not be better spent doing the things that you are actually making money from.  If you’re a plumber, maybe you can make a few more calls a week.  If you make custom furniture, maybe you can churn out a couple more pieces a month.  Remember that what makes your business is the product that you’re selling, and your expertise lies in that product, so focus on your area of expertise.

“But what about my marketing?” I can hear you asking.  “It’s not going to take care of itself.”

No, it’s not, but now that you know what it’s really costing you, maybe you should see if it might not be a wiser investment to use traditional media?  Or perhaps to hire a consultant or an agency?  It’s almost sacrilegious to suggest such things on the web where there’s an intrinsic virtue associated to “free”, but from a dollars and cents perspective they’re the logical course of action.

In my next post, I’ll talk about the real value of using an expert for your marketing needs.

What do you think?  Am I completely out to lunch?  Is there really no value to traditional media anymore and businesses should focus as much as possible on free media?  Let me know in the comments.

Folks, the post you’re about to read is a little different than the posts you usually see here.  It is longer, and rantier than anything I’ve ever posted here before. Despite that, I promise you that if you read it to the end, you will find a handful of intelligent sentences, and if you accept what I write, you will leave here smarter than the majority of the people in the “social media game.”  And if that isn’t enough, in this post, I’ll clearly spell out how to get thousands of followers on Twitter. Then I’m going to tell you why you shouldn’t do it.

Where this is coming from

A few days ago, I logged in to Twitter to see what was going on.  I caught a tweet by Chris Brogan.  The tweet said:

“The only thing numbers do are up your odds of offending someone.”

Chris has over 100,000 followers on Twitter, and I’ve called him “the closest thing to an expert” in social media I’ve seen. I want it to be clear that what follows is not meant to slam Chris.  I’ve read his book (affiliate link), and I think you should too.  He’s a smart guy, and by all accounts, a nice guy.  He knows what he’s talking about.  But when a guy who has built a career out of social media says something like that, it’s a knee-jerk reaction to think, “Numbers also helped you get on the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists.”

It’s fine, though. I know what Chris was saying. It’s not all about the numbers. What got me to react was Chris’ next retweet:

“Ideas? RT @remarkablogger: @chrisbrogan People with low numbers don’t believe that for one second. What to do?”

I don’t believe that for one second.  I’m sure this wasn’t Chris or Michael Martine’s (aka remarkablogger) intention, but this got me worked up.  The suggestion that everyone that has low follower numbers is just itching to find a way to get more followers is false. It’s not about the numbers. Chris knows that. Michael knows that. Even people with low follower numbers know that.

So where is this generalization that everyone is chasing big numbers coming from? Simple, it’s coming from all the “experts” and “gurus” that are pimping products and services to help you and your business increase your follower numbers on Twitter.

There are a lot of people out there selling products that promise to teach you how to become a Twitter Super-Duper-Sexy-Guru-Rock Star.  The vast majority of them are trying to teach you how to get more followers on Twitter.  The same phenomenon goes on for Facebook fans, or MySpace friends, or LinkedIn connections.  Not only are these products a waste of money, they’re missing the point.

The people who are chasing numbers are the people who are doing it wrong.

Authenticity

Then I think about the people who are doing it right, like Chris, and how he’s teaching businesses to be authentic, to care about their audience, and to connect with them. The idea is to be totally transparent.  That can’t be wrong, can it?  That’s when I read a post by Naomi Dunford from Ittybiz, entitled: “Anti-Social Media: The Dark Side of Authenticity.”

If you stop reading this now, and go read what Naomi wrote, I’d probably be okay with that, because it’s that good.  If you’ve bookmarked the post and decided you’re going to go back to it later, here’s a quick summary.  Naomi writes about how a lot of the big guns in Social Media give advice about being authentic, but that we tend to forget that the big guns are usually advising big companies.  Big companies are impersonal by nature, so even when they’re being authentic, they don’t expose themselves to vulnerability the way small business owners, like herself, do.  For the small business owner, being open and authentic means you can get hurt, and this is something that small business owners need to keep in mind.

Naomi writes for an audience of really small businesses (hence “ittybiz”), and I write for slightly larger, small and medium-sized businesses, but I think the considerations are the same.  Even in a medium-sized business, if you’re really being authentic, you’re opening yourself up as a person, and that means that you’re opening yourself up to people taking stabs at you.  It’s bad enough when you’re a SMB and someone takes jabs at your product, that already feels personal.  But to take it one step further, and be truly authentic, and have people taking jabs at you as a person, takes a willingness to get hurt.

Connections

We should be transparent and authentic because that’s what people want from us, but when you’re transparent and authentic with thousands of people, you’re just asking to get slapped around.  But weh have to be authentic, and if we want to be successful, we need the numbers right? Even Naomi, in a recent post, talked about numbers being social proof.  Her argument is that as much as we would like to not care about numbers, whether we like it or not, they’re going to be used to measure our worth as experts, consultants, businesses, people.

We need the numbers, and we need the authenticity.  If we have both, we are eventually going to get beat up on, or as Chris put it in that first tweet, we’re going to offend someone.

So, what’s the answer?  Should we be slightly less authentic?  Should we give up on chasing the numbers in favour of protecting our fragile egos?

This is usually the part when you’re reading an article where the writer exclaims, “Neither!” and gives you some anti-climactic compromise between the two that will solve all your problems and allow you to have your cake and eat it too.  Sorry, not going to happen.  Instead, I’m going to tell you that you should do both.  Be less authentic, and forget about your number of followers, and you’ll be happier, and more successful.

The Problem With Counting Followers

I’m going to go ahead and do something that someone else should have done a long time ago (and maybe they have, but it just got lost in all the spam).  Remember all those products that I mentioned that teach you how to become a Twitter Super-Duper-Sexy-Guru-Rock Star, and get thousands of followers?  Well, I’m going to tell you what’s in those products, and how you too, can get thousands of followers, and I’m going to do it for free.

I am going to use Twitter as an example, but the same can be done with any social media platform. Ready?

Step 1. Create a Twitter account. Use your real name and a photo of yourself as an avatar. That makes you seem credible.

Step 2. Tweet interesting or useful links, primarily about the niche or industry where you want to develop your following.

Step 3. Use a directory like wefollow.com or Twitter Search to find people who are interested in your niche or industry, and follow them.

Step 4. Wait a couple of days. Most of the people you’ve followed will probably follow you back, either as a courtesy, or because you’ve been tweeting interesting/useful stuff.

Step 5. Use friendorfollow.com, or a similar service, to see who you followed that didn’t follow you back and unfollow them. When your following to follower ratio is too high, you look like a spammer.

Step 6. Intersperse some self-promotional tweets in with your other interesting/useful tweets, but always post at least 8 non-promotional tweets for every promotional tweet.

Step 7. Repeat steps 3 through 6, ad infinitum.

BONUS: Use a list like the Top-500-All-Follow-Back list.

Tada.  There you have it.  If you do this, even for just a couple of weeks, you’ll easily gain thousands of followers.  This information is not hard to figure out.  In fact, it’s obvious, and yet people are charging $100+ for it.

So, if this is so easy, and I know how to do it, why at time of this writing, do I not have over a thousand followers?  Because doing this misses the point!

Numbers are important, but the only thing I remember from my introductory quantitative methods class is this: numbers can be misleading.

The problem with focusing on the number of followers you have is that it’s not the right number to focus on.  Instead, you should focus on the total number of connections you have made – the total number of real relationships you have.

A few years ago, I got a Facebook friend request from a girl that I didn’t recognize.  Since my Facebook rule of thumb is that I will only friend someone that I actually know, I decided to check her out before accepting the request.  The first thing I noticed was that she wasn’t one of those spam accounts because her photo was too real (read: she didn’t look like a pin-up).  The second thing I noticed was that she had over 2,000 Facebook friends.  At the time, that was the most number of friends I had seen anyone have.  The third thing I noticed was that we had about 50 friends in common.  The fourth thing I noticed was that she had apparently gone to college with me.  I did not go to a big college. At this point, I was mildly perturbed.  All signs pointed to me knowing this girl, and yet I had no idea who she was.  So, I did what any normally obsessive compulsive would do, and I called a few friends of mine that we apparently had in common.

The result of my investigation was that I, in fact, did go to school with this girl, but didn’t really know her because she was a social shut-in.  She had no friends in school, but seemed to collect them on Facebook.  None of our “mutual” friends really knew her, they had just mechanically accepted the friend request when it came their way.  Aside from feeling sorry for the girl, I couldn’t help but feel like, she too, was missing the point.  She wasn’t using social media as a method of staying connected, or making new connections, she was just collecting “friends.”

Fast forward a few years, and that’s what people are doing with followers:  collecting them.  Well, guess what?  Collecting followers is not going to do anything to help your business, or your personal brand.

Coming to the Point

Social media is about networking and making connections.  Instead of focusing on accumulating tons of followers, you should focus on connecting with the ones you have.  Connections are important, because they’re the real value in social media.  People you connect with are the ones that ultimately end up being part of your tribe.  They are the ones who will introduce you to new opportunities.  Having tens of thousands of followers, and no connections is akin to walking into a conference, saying, “Hi my name’s Bob” to everyone and then leaving.  If you don’t delve further into that relationship, the introduction by itself is meaningless.

I don’t have a ton of followers on Twitter, a ton of friends on Facebook, or any other big number, but the people that I’ve met and connected with are more valuable to me than any random 10,000 followers.

I’ve been asked what my policy for following people back on Twitter is, because I do follow back a lot of people, but not everyone.  I follow people back who appear interesting, and who I can tell are interested in connecting. If your twitter stream doesn’t have a single @ in it, there’s a very small chance I’ll follow you.

The other reason that you should focus on making a few deep connections rather than simply trying to amass thousands of followers is that that’s just how humans are built.  Dunbar’s number theorizes that humans can really only process about 150 real relationships at any given time.  That means that once you’ve reached capacity, in order to make room for a new connection, you need to kick someone else out of your social circle.

This is where being less authentic comes in.  If you know that you can really only have 150 real relationships, shouldn’t you save your authenticity for those 150 individuals?  Maybe it’s time to be a little less candid with your 2,367 Twitter followers.  Instead, save your authenticity and your transparency for your real connections.

As Seth Godin is so fond of saying, if you find a few fiercely loyal connections, those people, those members of your tribe, will promote you to their friends, and thus begins that most sought after occurrence in business, the wave of word-of-mouth marketing.

Stop focusing on the number that gets displayed on the welcome page of your social network of choice, and start instead focusing on the number of real connections you’ve made.  Take the conversation beyond social media. Many of the connections I’ve made have started with a blog post, a comment, a tweet or a status update, and led to non-social media communication like e-mail, IM, or on a few occasions, actual phone calls. This is the place to get authentic. It’s where it matters, and it’s where it counts.

The biggest problem with accumulating tons of followers is that, usually, that’s where it ends.  Getting the follower is not the end, it’s the beginning. Now that you have that follower, it’s time for you to interact with him or her, and create a connection.  This simply can’t be done with thousands and thousands of followers.

The point is this: It’s about the people, not the media.

What do you think? Is it actually possible to connect with tens of thousands of people in an effective way? Is the social proof of big numbers more important than making the real connections? Is saving your authenticity for your real connections actually just being a wimp? Talk it out in the comments.

In the summer of my sixteenth year, I took a job with a company that painted houses.  Their schtick was that they would paint people’s houses for cheaper because they employed students to do the job.  I took the job because it paid a lot better than what I was making working part-time at Burger King, and I could think of worse ways to spend a summer than outdoors.  I didn’t realize at the time of sign up that at least half the job was going to door to door selling the company’s services.

That is how I accidentally landed a job as a door-to-door salesman.  While my career was extremely short lived, I learned a lot from that early experience that I’ve carried over into various jobs and careers since then.

1. There’s no such thing as a natural salesperson

Up until that point in my life, I had always believed that some people could sell, and others couldn’t.  I also believed that I fell in the latter camp.  I was not a big talker.  I didn’t like misleading people.  I didn’t like annoying people.  I didn’t like being rejected.  These were all things that I thought a salesperson had to be able to do.

The first night we canvassed a neighborhood, we went out in a team of five, plus a team leader. I was the youngest, the smallest and the least likely to be a natural salesperson.  A funny thing happened that night, though.  I made more sales than anyone in my team.  Not only that, at the end of the night, when our team leader called in our sales to the regional coordinator, I found out that I’d sold more than anyone in the region.  How could that have happened?

2. Talk slowly

The area we canvassed that night was a primarily French-speaking suburb of Montreal.  I am fluent in French.  However, most would agree that I speak more slowly than a native French speaker (note: only in Quebec could the speed at which I speak be considered slow). The result was that I was more deliberate and more expressive in delivering the sales pitch.

When you speak quickly, people assume that you’re trying to pull a fast one on them.  When you speak slowly and deliberately, they have the time to fully grasp what you’re saying.  If you’re delivering a good pitch, then you want people to pick up every nuance of it.

3. Don’t be over-confident

The typical image of a good salesperson is one of swaggering bravado.  Many of colleagues that night did that image justice.  I, on the other hand, was nervous.  My first attempt at pitching came out more as a plea than a pitch (I didn’t make that sale).  By the second pitch, I was more comfortable, but still not confident.  The result was that I met the clients on an equal footing.  I didn’t talk down to them.  I calmly explained the benefits of the service I was selling without bragging about how great it was.

Just as people are suspicious of fast-talkers, they are suspicious of cockiness.  Moreover, people don’t like cockiness.  They like genuineness.  Are you more likely to buy something from someone you like or someone you dislike?

4. Be personable

It only took me a few attempts before I was ad-libbing from the sales script.  The script was a great script.  It had obviously been refined through experience and by some savvy marketers.  However, if I’d stuck to the script, the people answering their doors would have only known the company, and not me.  Instead, I greeted them with a few details about myself.

By making the conversation personal, I made it harder for people to say no.  It’s a lot easier to say no to a faceless corporation than to say no to a person whom you know something about.  I didn’t tell these people my life story, but they learned enough about me to know who I was.

5. Listen

I spent longer at every single door than any one of my colleagues.  This was not because they were getting doors slammed in their face or because I was talking that slowly.  It was because I listened to every single person who opened the door.  I figured that if I was interrupting these people at home, and expected them to listen to me, the least I could do was listen to them.  I distinctly remember one gentleman who had had his house painted the previous summer by the company I was working for and had had a bad experience.  He railed on about lack of craftsmanship, as well the general lack of pride that youth take in their work.  I listened intently as he sermoned me.

The sale wasn’t going to happen, and I could have cut my losses and ended the conversation early, but instead I listened to every word.  Amidst exaggerations over the moral decrepitude of my generation, there were legitimate points and concerns that I was more well-prepared to address with later clients.

6. Earn trust

The key things that set me apart from my colleagues that night was that I earned more trust than they had.  I did this through all of the methods I mentioned above.  In essence, everything that I thought would make me a bad salesperson made me more trustworthy in the eyes of potential clients.  Building trust is the single best sales tool available.  If you have a customer’s trust, you can sell him anything.  The trick is to keep the customer’s trust, because if you really do sell him just anything, that trust won’t last long.

Other applications

Whether you run your own business, are an employee, work in sales, or work in any other field, sales skills are valuable.  I didn’t realize all of the above lessons that night while breaking sales records.  They became obvious to me years later as I pursued different careers and drew from these various skills.

So what happened to my illustrious door-to-door sales career?  Unfortunately, this story has an anti-climactic ending.  The night in question was a weeknight towards the end of the school semester.  To celebrate my great night, my colleagues took me to a bar for a few drinks.  So, at 2 am on a Wednesday night, an inebriated sixteen-year old rang his doorbell because he had lost his keys at the bar.  Thus ended the briefest door-to-door sales career in history.

What sales lessons have you learned in the course of your life experiences? Do you find sales experience equally applicable to other aspects of business? Have you ever had to leave a job because someone made the decision for you?