CoachStrategies

The Power of Numbers

Rob — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 01:54:34 +0000

I’ve been reading Michael Gerber’s book, The E-Myth Revisited and have picked up many good ideas. There is a particular quote I wanted to share with you:

Because without the numbers you can’t possibly know where you are, let alone where you’re going. With the numbers, your business will take on a totally new meaning. It will come alive with possibilities.

I’ve written before about how important measurement is when it comes to your website. It is absolutely crucial which is why I’ll continue to write about it.

I still find that the majority of people don’t have the slightest idea how their web site is performing. No idea of incoming traffic, no idea of returning traffic, no idea of how many sites link to their site and only a faint idea of how many actual leads or sales the site is producing.

If you don’t have numbers, how do you know that you’re investing wisely in your web strategy? How do you know if site updates are helping or hurting you?

You can sign up for Google Analytics for free. If you don’t like Google, you can sign up at http://www.statcounter.com/ for free. Both work in a similar fashion and both are quick and easy to use. You’ll never regret the 10 minutes it will take you to register and start tracking your sites.

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Links: Google AdWords, Landing Pages, Keywords

Rob — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 21:01:14 +0000

Mastering Google AdWords in 3 Easy Steps. [From: Early to Rise] If you haven’t used Google Adwords yet, this article from Early to Rise is a must-read before starting.

There are more than 387,000 Google AdWords advertisers, and new people are jumping on the program in droves. I think it’s fair to say that most of them are unsuccessful - meaning they end up spending more on their Google AdWords than they generate in sales.

Rev Up Your Sales With a Google AdWords Campaign. [From: Early to Rise] This is the perfect companion to the article above. Traffic > Offer > Conversion.

If you make your visitors work too hard to find what they’re looking for, you’ll lose them.

Create unique landing pages specific to each Ad Group. The more relevant your landing pages are to your ad text, the better your conversions will be - whether they be sign-ups, leads, or sales.

Keyword Research for Bloggers: A Comprehensive Guide. [From: Copyblogger] Although you may not do much blogging, keywords are crucial to your online marketing regardless.

Keyword research, at its essence, is market research. It tells you what people are interested in, and in what relative numbers. Better yet, it reveals the actual language people are using when they think about those topics, which provides you with insight on how to converse with them via your blog.

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The Cost of Confusion: Website Usability is Important

Rob — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 19:05:20 +0000

Imagine you are on a road trip. You pull off the highway into a small town and decide to stop at the local grocery store to get a quick bite to eat. But this is no ordinary grocery store.

Once inside the store you are perplexed and disoriented. First off, there are no shopping cars or baskets: you must put everything in a wheelbarrow.

Also, nothing is in isles, just piles.

You inspect a few of the piles:

One pile has beans, butter, beer, bacon, batteries.
Another: more beer, eggs, hot dogs, soda, pita pockets.
On to another: eggs, cheese, soy, tuna fish, beef, chicken, nuts.

These piles are labeled with obtuse descriptions that read like a Jeopardy board:

Things that start with the letter ‘B’.
Comes in packages of 6, 8, 12, 18 and 24.
Protein.

If that wasn’t bad enough, there is a separate checkout for each pile. If you want something out of a pile, you buy it at that pile and put it in your wheelbarrow before moving to the next pile. You decide you are wasting your time here. So you leave.

What is going on here?

Nothing is following established conventions.
Things are not labeled in a way that makes sense to you.
It is difficult for you to do what you need or want to do.

Why did I make up this dumb little story?

To illustrate the fact that without things like conventions, clear labels and descriptions or attention paid to ease of use, life becomes difficult—quickly.

If you encountered such a store, would you shop there? Probably not. Especially not if there was another store that was less of a hassle just a moment away.

If your website doesn’t make use of existing conventions, doesn’t label things clearly or makes it difficult for visitors to take action, they aren’t going to stick around. They’ll click away to your competitor.

So how do you make sure your site is easy to use? I’ll tell you soon. In the meantime, start thinking of possible ways in which your site may be driving visitors to your competitors.

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10 Reasons to Give Away Valuable Content on Your Site

Rob — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 18:45:06 +0000

When people ask me how to get traffic to their site my answer is often a variation of the following:

Give other sites a reason to link to you by filling your site with valuable content.
Make other sites aware of you.

This is never what the person wants to hear. They immediately start asking about shortcuts. When I was starting out I did the same thing so I understand. It’s hard work to create good content and get the word out. It takes a lot of effort, a lot of time and there is no quick payoff to keep you motivated. It is easy to get started and then give up after the first real challenge because you are not seeing immediate results.

It is similar to getting in shape. Somebody asks how to get in shape and somebody else tells them:

Drink enough water.
Get enough sleep.
Get enough good exercise.
Eat good food.
Keep bad food to a minimum.
Be patient: it can take time to see results.

Then the person that asked the question starts asking about supplements, diet pills, 30 minute abs, celebrity diet plans, etc. They immediately want to know what shortcuts exist.

Good results are rarely due to shortcuts. Good results are often a simple matter of:

Doing the right things.
Doing them consistently over time.
Being patient and finding ways to move forward despite challenges and setbacks.

This is just the price that must be paid. You have to get started, build momentum and keep things going.

I want to help you get motivated. Here are 10 reasons you should invest the time to create valuable content and give it away on your site:

Social network traffic. Great content gives other people a reason to talk about you and to link to you on forums, blogs and community sites.
Search engine traffic. More content, more keywords, more people linking to you: better search engine results.
Frequent search engine indexing. Frequent updates get your site indexed by search engines more often.
Return traffic. Keeps users coming back because they know your content addresses their needs and desires. They bookmark your site and keep coming back.
Credibility. When you help readers solve their problems and give them the knowledge they need and want—knowledge that helps them get results—they come to view you as an authority.
Familiarity and trust. Consistently exposing readers to your personality through your content makes them feel like they know you better and can trust you.
Selling without selling. You are silently selling yourself and your expertise without being salesy.
Content re-purposing. You can re-purpose all that content for content sharing sites, your coaching programs, tools, books, audio programs, etc.
Clarity. The act of developing content for your site often forces you to think through what you know and helps generate new insights.
Low cost. It is often inexpensive to develop valuable content for your site. You already have the expertise. The only costs are the amount of time needed to put the content in the right format to distribute and the cost of any tools you need to accomplish that task.

And in the spirit of providing value I’ll give you a bonus reason:

It’s a proven strategy. Featuring valuable content is one of the most fundamental principles of online success. Ever heard the phrase “Content is King?”. Good content is king and has been since the beginning. This is the grandfather of web site marketing strategies.

Consider this: you can keep searching for shortcuts and secrets and see where that search leads you or you can take action today and put yourself on the path to results. I hope you choose the path that leads to results.

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Why Social Media is Hot

Rob — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 19:31:46 +0000

Social media, social networks and communities are nothing new.Bulletin board systems (BBSs), AOL and sites like Bolt.com (from the late 1990’s and early 2000’s) are good examples of online communities. Amazon and other sites have made use of community features such as user submitted product reviews for some time. Message boards, newsgroups, list servers, forums and dating sites have been around for a while too and allowed people to build relationships, share content, photos, videos, etc.

A few things have changed during the past few years though:

It’s now incredibly easy and inexpensive for regular people like you and me to generate and publish content. The tools are easy to use and in most cases free.
More of us are on the web now and we are more knowledgeable and capable.
The tools used to create social media platforms have become easier to use and less expensive.

The barriers that existed to user-created content have fallen and continue to fall. The same goes for barriers to developing new forms of social media and social networks.

The results of these developments:

More people creating content.
More social networks springing up.
New forms of social media being created.
Traditional sites increasingly making use of social media features.

As social media becomes widely present across the web, its ability to reach people increases. That is why it is becoming such a powerful promotional tool and social media marketing is getting so much attention.

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Instant Insight: Why Your Online Strategy Isn’t Working

Rob — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 13:29:18 +0000

Image credit: masochismtango.

I use a simple model to help me troubleshoot problems in online strategy. Generally I use this model to help people understand why their site is not performing and give them suggestions of what to do about it. Although I most often use this to troubleshoot strategies promoting a client’s site, you could substitute the concept of site with a blog or some kind of profile on a social media site. The principles are the same.

Keep in mind that this is just a model—not a definitive reference of How Things Work. The point is to use this model as a tool to identify problems so you can develop a strategy to get better results.

At a high level it has three components:

Traffic > Offer > Conversion

Let’s look at each in more detail:

Traffic. The number of people coming to your site. Measured in number of visitors coming from:
- New traffic.
- Return traffic.
Offer. Everything you have to offer visitors. Consists of:
- Content and resources.
- Your services/products.
- How well you present your services/products.
- How easy it is for visitors to take action (includes site design and navigation).
Conversion. The number of people that come to your site and actually take a desired action. Usually measured as a ratio of the number of people that took a desired action to the number of visitors (traffic).

Here is the key: this model is only useful if you have numbers. If you don’t have numbers, everything you are doing is guesswork and not much better than outright gambling. Don’t have numbers? Get them. Numbers are crucial. You can’t work without them. If you are dumping time/money into your website and don’t have any numbers you are potentially throwing your time/money away.

Let’s walk through this model on a practical level with an example.

Say I have a site and the site is indexed on the search engines which means I have a couple links coming in from there. I also have some links coming in from blogs and forums. These links all send me traffic or visitors. These visitors check out the content of my site. Some bookmark the site because they like what they see or they search again later and come back.

These visitors constitute my return traffic.

I want visitors to subscribe to my blog, read my posts and eventually buy my services. When people take those actions of subscribing or contacting me, it’s called a conversion. Let’s say I got 1000 total visits to the site last week: 900 new visitors and 100 returning visitors. Out of 1000 visits, 5 people contacted me. My conversion rate (CR) is .5%. Got it?

Now that we know the terms and see how the concepts fit together, let’s take a look at the ideal situation and the worst situation.

Ideal situation: Strong new traffic, strong return traffic, strong conversion.

If this is what you are getting, you’ve done a great job. Specifically:

The strong overall traffic means that your efforts to promote your site are working well.
The strong return traffic means that your content is interesting and valuable and people are coming back.
The strong conversion means that your offer is good. The market for your products/services is good, your site’s content is a good draw for visitors that make up your market, the way you present your products/services appeals to visitors and you’ve made it easy enough for visitors to take action.

Worst situation: No traffic, no conversion.

At this point, it’s almost impossible to tell if your offer is good. You can only get conversions once you have initial traffic flow. Something is not right, most likely:

Efforts to promote site are misplaced or not working well.
Site’s content is not interesting and valuable to people.

At this point, you have to work on building good content and promoting your site.

Let’s look at some middle of the road situations:

Strong new traffic, weak return traffic. Look at your offer. Is your content interesting and helpful? Is there a market for what you offer? Have you presented your offer in a way that would appeal to people in your market and made it easy for them to take action?
Strong new traffic, strong return traffic, weak conversions. Your efforts to promote the site are good. The strong return traffic indicates that your content is valuable to visitors so they are coming back. Something with your products/services or the way you are presenting them just isn’t clicking however. Maybe you’ve made it too hard for people to take action, or the benefits of your products/services are not presented in a compelling enough manner.
Weak new traffic, strong return traffic, strong conversion. You’re probably doing find and just need to put more effort into promoting the site.
Weak new traffic, weak return traffic, strong conversion. Your offer must be pretty solid to convert. Work on promoting your site to boost traffic. If your return traffic lags, look at improving your content.

When you don’t have strong overall traffic it can be tough to know what is going on precisely. In general, if you aren’t getting strong traffic you need to focus on giving people a reason to go to your site and then promoting your site. Once you have a good flow of traffic coming in, it is easier to troubleshoot other problems with your strategy.

Start gathering numbers. Use the stats your web host provides or implement something like Google Analytics. Get a baseline by measuring performance over the course of a week or two. If you don’t have traffic, start by working to build traffic. Once you have traffic, use the model I’ve given you to understand how your site is performing. Once you know that, you can craft a strategy make the site more successful.

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What is Social Media?

Rob — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 19:08:27 +0000

Prospects and clients often ask me two related questions:

What is Social Media?

How can I use Social Media to promote my business?

In this article I’m going answer the first question: “What is Social Media?” This article will form a foundation of understanding to build on in future articles where I’ll discuss how you can use social media to promote your business.

The social aspect of social media encompasses concepts like:

User-generated content.
Sharing, contribution, participation, interaction and collaboration.
Authority-generated content and user-generated content existing together and interacting.
Relationships.

What I mean by authority-generated content is content generated by an official publisher. For example, the New York Times pays writers to publish information through the New York Times website. I’m calling that information authority-generated content.

User-generated content is content generated by regular, non-official publishers like you and me. We might comment on a New York Times article or write a book review for Amazon.com. In these examples, our user-generated content co-exists with authority-generated content.

Another big part of part of social media is discovering, connecting with and building relationships with other people. These relationships can be centered on things like locations, events, offline relationships, shared interests and shared content.

The media aspect of social media refers to the form through which we apply the concepts from above:

Online communities.
Video sharing.
Picture sharing.
Bookmark sharing.
Content sharing.
Blogging.
etc.

If our explicit goal is to create relationships, then the social media could be classified as an online community. An example of a social network that fits this description is Facebook.

If our goal is to share videos, then the social media could be classified as video sharing. An example of a social network that fits this description is YouTube.

I slipped in a new term: social network. You have likely gathered from context that this is used to refer to a particular instance or example of social media. Things are tricky here. Different people use terms like community, social media and social network in slightly different ways. These terms are somewhat flexible and overlap. In addition, the purposes and forms of the different social media themselves overlap and the features used to enable the different forms of media overlap. So don’t get too caught up in the names.

Now that we’ve gotten a feel for social media, let’s take a closer look and match up the concepts above with some concrete examples you are likely familiar with.

Below I have organized social media into 7 different categories. Earlier I said that things were hard to define, flexible, overlapped and were constantly changing. That’s true but we need to start somewhere and this is how I’ve decided to do it.

Communities/Social Networking

Photo Sharing

Video/Audio Sharing

Content Sharing

Social Bookmarking

Social News Aggregation

Blogging/Micro Blogging

(Sites like wikipedia.org and pseudodictionary.com are examples of social reference sites but they are of limited value for promoting your business so I’m not going to cover them here.)

Now we have a foundation for what social media is and some specific examples. I’ll continue to add to the lists above as things change.

Going forward, I’ll build off of this foundation by giving more detailed explanations of each of these types of social media, discussing major social networks in each area and then outlining strategies for using each type to build your audience and extend the reach of your message.

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Links: Social Media Has Teeth, Effective Marketing Principles, How to Start a Blog

Rob — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 17:49:55 +0000

Author feels the sting of social media. [From: http://www.chrisg.com/author-experiences-the-internets-mass-effect-first-hand/] Here’s an example of how social media can be dangerous. I didn’t have anything like this in mind when I wrote about it a while back. Doubtless there are countless ways people can use social media to blast somebody.

What happens when an author goes on national television and criticizes a computer game she has never seen let alone played?

In the past what would have happened is, well, very little.

Today of course is the age of the internet mob. Rather than chants, torches and pitch forks, the modern mob member uses Digg as the tool of choice. In this case the target was the hapless authors Amazon reviews.

Everybody makes mistakes and I think this author will ultimately bounce back but who can tell.

So what’s the most important part of marketing? [From: http://www.earlytorise.com/2008/01/29/the-most-important-part-of-marketing.html#main] Great presentation of what makes marketing effective by Bob Bly:

It’s the product.

By that, I don’t mean the physical product. I mean what the product can do for the customer. The benefits it delivers… the functions it performs… the problems it solves… the needs it fills.

Are you offering your customers something they truly want or need? And is it an urgently felt need, rather than one that isn’t very important or immediate?

Do the people in your market niche desire or require what you are selling?

Will buying it make a huge improvement in the quality of their lives?

If the answer is yes, your marketing will be fairly successful - even if the price, offer, list, copy, and graphics are not perfect.

Spreading ideas. [From: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/01/the-hyping-poin.html] I’ve taken this a bit out of context so the thought isn’t complete. The quote contains a valuable bit of knowledge anyway. Worth reading the entire blog post:

One more reason not to obsess about the A list in any media category. Worry instead about people with passion and people with lots of friends. You need both for ideas to spread.

What is your approach to marketing? How do you approach developing your offering? [From: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/01/tribal-manageme.html]

…the real asset most organizations can build isn’t an amorphous brand but is in fact the privilege of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who want to get them.

Instead of looking for customers for your products, you seek out products (and services) for the tribe. Jerry Garcia understood this. Do you?

Complete, comprehensive tutorial on starting a blog. Free. [http://www.becomeablogger.com/] If you want to tackle starting your own blog, this free video series walks you through the process step by step. Impressive! I can’t imagine this being done any better.

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What You Can Learn From Coach Dr. Philip Humbert’s Site

Rob — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 15:15:29 +0000

I have been going to Dr. Philip Humbert’s website, www.philiphumbert.com for a few years now. I browse his site periodically, have downloaded some of his e-books and I’m also on some of his mailing lists. What is interesting is that Dr. Humbert has taken the time to detail what has made his site such a success. How much of a success? (more…)

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Warning: Social Media is Dangerous

Rob — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 20:45:42 +0000

Ok. The headline is a bit dramatic. But it is also true.

Using social media to build relationships can be a powerful way to extend the reach of your message. It allows you to identify people receptive to your message, provides a way to connect with them, provides a way to establish and maintain a relationship. It also allows others to quickly and publicly sing your praises when you have done good for them.

The same things that make it powerful in a positive way also make it powerful in a negative way.

(more…)

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