You’ve heard about the great income to be made writing a blog, and you’re wondering whether you can create a successful blog. You can – if you follow the strategies used by top bloggers.
A major strategy top bloggers use is setting goals.
In this article, we’ll look at three easy steps which will ensure you achieve blogging success by setting goals for your blog.
Let’s look at focus, because that’s the first goal you should set for your blog.
1. Focus is vital for your blog – it will win you readers
Focus is at the heart of your blog. Imagine you’re at the supermarket. You buy a can of mushroom soup. The next day, you open the can and you find it contains peas. Would you be annoyed? Of course you would. You want what’s on the label.
The same applies to your blog – your readers expect you to stick to the focus of your blog. With millions of blogs available, disappointing your readers even once is fatal: they’ll never return.
So decide on a focus and set a goal for it. What’s your blog about? Write it down: “My focus for my blog is about how to train your dog for dog shows.” Or “my focus for my blog is about how to buy a home”.
2. Set a income goal for your blog – and make plans to achieve that income
Your next step is to decide on how you want to make with your blog, and to set goals for achieving that income.
Some bloggers choose to accept advertising on their blog, and this earns them an income over time. However, with advertising, the more content you have the more income you will make, so you won’t make much income in your first few months of blogging.
Other bloggers use their content to pre-sell products on which they earn a commission. Using this strategy, your blog can start earning an income for you almost immediately.
Of course, you can combine both these strategies. Do some research and discover how other bloggers are earning an income.
Once you have some experience blogging, you can blog for others, selling your services as a blogger.
So write down your goal of how much income you want to generate with your blog, and your methods for achieving that income.
3. Break your goals down into tasks and schedule all the tasks related to your blog
You’ve set your goals, and now it’s time to break your goals down into daily tasks. One major task is adding content. Readers who come to your blog expect to see plenty of content. So, especially in your first few months with a new blog, content is vital – make that your primary task.
After adding content, your next most important task is to market your blog so that you get traffic. Set tasks for that too.
Enter all your tasks into your calendar program: schedule your tasks as appointments, to ensure that you keep them.
So there you have it – a goal-setting strategy for creating an income-producing blog.
5 Secrets to Selling Products & Services to Your Audience
Marketing Articles | July 7, 2005
1. Know your audience. How can you tailor information to your audience if you don’tknow who they are? In almost every article, book, or manualon publicity and marketing you’ll hear this one–and yet fewpeople heed it. When I spoke at the Los Angeles Gift Show itbecame evident that many retailers and buyers didn’t knowtheir audience. Fellow speaker and communications expertKare Anderson (http://www.sayitbetter.com) polled over 60exhibitors and discovered that only 2 felt they knew thetype of person they were targeting. Huh? How can they sellproducts to people they can’t even profile?
To serve your market you’ll want to know what problems youcan solve for them, and more specifically what your audiencelongs for. Most of us have what we need, but desire more orless of what we have–or we yearn for something different orbetter. A poem by the Japanese Haiku master Basho describesthis essential state of the human condition–this longingfor something other than we are or have.
Even in Kyoto- Hearing the cuckoo’s cry- I long for Kyoto.
Give people what they are longing for and you will find apermanent place in their hearts.
2. Test, test, then test again.
Many webmasters don’t test your shopping cart on differentcomputer platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux), with differentbrowsers, or with various computer configurations. This isessential!
The $10,000/hour speaker discussed above insisted that theshopping cart on his website worked from his computer,though he admitted that he’d heard from a number of peopleit was often *down.* I tested it on my Mac and Windows PCwith both Netscape and Internet Explorer and couldn’t get itto function at all.
Understand that I’m no techie (biggest understatement ofthe year) so these were the most basic of tests, all donefrom a marketing vs. technical standpoint. If you are yourown webmaster, have your friends and associates test yourecommerce sections, and your website in general, before youunleash your brilliance on the world. It’s amazing all thethings that can go wrong on a web site, including thingsthat you or your tech help hasn’t thought of. While it’simpossible to go through every conceivable configuration, itis possible to take care of all the major ones.
3. Take the annoyance out of shopping.
In other words, make buying from you a pleasure. I was on a*professional marketer’s* site to scope out a product hesells for $97. I muddled my way through a century of copybefore I could get to the actual *click to buy button.* Iknow he and other Internet marketers like him think thisdirect marketing technique (long copy, addressing everyobjection, the illusion of giving away meaningfulinformation) really sells the product–but it doesn’t workif they don’t make it easy to get the product in the basket.
After about 5 minutes of clicking forward and backward, Igave up. (By the way, women have less patience on theInternet than men). Chalk up another lost sale for him.
Use the fewest number of clicks to get a buyer to wherethey’re going (to the checkout). This means in navigatingforward, toward the final sale, or backward to add moreitems to their cart. Don’t have your potential customerwaste time and effort trying to figure out where or what toclick, because they won’t–they’ll simply leave. Modelyourself after amazon.com who makes the process simple andeasy.
Also, explain every step of your ordering process so thatpeople feel confident of where they are going and what theycan expect from you. This means everything from screens thatverify the information is correctly filled out on forms, toemail messages confirming and precisely explaining theshipping method and timeframe.
4. Don’t sacrifice image for speed.
Think about it. If someone is paying you a substantial sumfor your services and your website comes across like a poorpauper, do you think they’ll retain their confidence in you?
It’s important to concern yourself deeply about the kind ofimage you’re projecting before you slap something up on yourwebsite that you’ll be sorry for later. Donald Rumsfeld, ourcurrent Secretary of Defense, former chairman of the*transition team* for President Ford, and the former WhiteHouse chief of staff, gives this advice, *Think ahead. Don’tlet day-to-day operations drive out planning. Plan backwardas well as forward. Set objectives and trace back to see howto achieve them. You may find that no path can get youthere. Plan forward to see where your steps will take you,which may not be clear or intuitive.*
Some questions to ask to help you get clear:
Is what you’re offering soft or hard-edged enough for thekind of audience you want to attract? What are the qualitiesyour audience is looking for from you? Is what you docompletely clear? Are the products you sell filled withknowledge and information (or in the case of 3-D productsoriginality and true value) your buyers can’t get from yourcompetitors? Do you make it easy to buy? Remember that mostinformation can be found elsewhere, but your wisdom cannot.
5. Your website image must match everything you *do, say andare.*
Create continuity, in person, on paper, and on the Internet.You must come across as professional, trustworthy, andknowledgeable. When I was interviewing people for my book,*Sell Yourself Without Selling Your Soul,* I turned to theexpertise of a professional PR listserve to which Isubscribe. One woman, whose knowledge and online manner I’dcome to admire, was first on my list to call. I visited herwebsite to research her background before I contacted her. Iwas baffled to find little dolphins and other silly-lookingcharacters that had nothing to do with a theme or anythingelse for that matter, on her site. Needless to say heresteem dropped in my eyes. I never called.
On the other hand, my client Leslie Kirk Campbell, Founderof the Ripe Fruit School of writing, took the time toruminate over her website for months. She carefully chosephotos that gave her potential clients a real sense of heras a teacher and leader. She poured over hundreds oftestimonials to select just the right ones that captured theessence of taking a class or going on a writing retreat. Andshe thought intensely about what it was that people whosecreativity was stifled, stalled, on brief hiatus, or in fullroar, would need from her. Her site isn’t *perfect* and it’sstill in evolution, but the basics for what her audienceneeds are there. See what she came up with that representsher teaching/living style and her love of language at:http://www.ripefruitwriting.com
A Wall Street Journal article about the best Southern porkbarbeque,illustrates my point. Restaurateur Wilbur King whogot started doing mail order Bar-B-Q by sending carepackages of his *Kingston, N.C., ‘cue to displaced locals,*said that he didn’t want to make his website too slick.*People have an image in their mind, and if it’s not threerednecks over a pit in the woods, they think it’s not thereal deal.* Smart marketer this Bar-B-Q salesman.
Another great example of how look and feel serenely match isFeng Shui expert Shannon Lee Turner’s website. Visit athttp://www.tranquilspaces.com to get a sense of how thecontent, images, design, graphics, and services arecompletely congruous. Besides offering classes and businessor residential consultations, Shannon also has a free weeklynewsletter called *Feng Shui Tips.* You’ll get manyfascinating ideas about how to run your business better withinsights on structuring your environment. Her newsletteralso perfectly matches the sensibility of her business. Tosubscribe to the list, send your name and city of residenceto mailto:tips@tranquilspaces.com
I look forward to getting this one in my mailbox. It alwayscontains both wise advice and a beautiful quote or poem. Bythe way, there is no archive of the past tips so the onlyway to get them is to subscribe.
6. BONUS TIP! Don’t give your customers too many choices.
Potential customers will log off if they’re confronted witha dizzying display of decisions. Case in point, a friend ofmine was looking to buy the Herman Miller Aeron chair on asite that advertised it for a great price and free shipping.First he needed to choose a size. Then the color of theframe. Then the color of the material. Next, the color forthe arms, and the size and type of casters, and on and on!He decided he couldn’t make a decision unless he saw thedarn chair.
The solution? Offer a few of the most popular standardsfirst. Then note that any of the items can be customized.It’s your job to help guide your customers to the optimalanswers to the most common asked questions–before they’reasked. Since you’re tracking your most popular items you canlet people know what has worked best for others. You’rehelping them make an intelligent decision. In other words,simplify the thinking and ordering process so it’s a quickand easy process.
Back to my original point. While the ordering process iscrucial, the look and feel of your website may be moreimportant than you think. It’s a surprising fact that peopleremember feelings more than the specifics of what you say.Make sure your online image matches your expertise and thefeeling you want to leave with people. Warrant that everystep someone takes on your website is in the direction youwant them to go. Finally<img src="http://www.articlesfactory.com/pic/x.gif" alt="Business Management Articles" border="0", take the time to ensure that theirjourney is the guided tour you want them to take.
Get insider secrets on publicity and marketing bysubscribing to Sixty Second Secrets. Packed full of powerfultechniques to promote yourself on and off the web. Excitingideas and stories from successful people. http://www.prsecrets.com/joinlist.html
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Susan Harrow is a top media coach, marketing strategist and author of *Sell Yourself Without Selling Your Soul* (HarperCollins), *The Ultimate Guide to Getting Booked on Oprah*, and *How You Can Get a 6- Figure Book Advance.* Her clients include Fortune 500 CEOs, millionaires, best-selling authors and successful entrepreneurs who have appeared on Oprah, 60 Minutes, NPR, and in TIME, USA Today, Parade, People, Wall Street Journal, and Inc.
<img src="http://www.buzzle.com/img/articleImages/321716-32med.jpg" width="310" height="207" alt="Customer Service Tips That Generate Referrals" class="ImgBorder" Enlarge Image
How do you define good customer service? Does that simply mean the satisfactory marketing and sale of a product or service to a customer or does it mean something else? Is providing good customer service, good enough?
In these days of below average customer service, you may think providing good service will set you apart from the pack. Well, I am here to tell you that nothing less than exemplary service will help you succeed. By incorporating the “wow” factor into every successful sale, you will achieve greater profits and better customer satisfaction.
To achieve the “wow” factor, you must be honest, knowledgeable, friendly, professional and deliver on your promises. Do not over promise, but do not under promise either.
In addition, you must be able to provide a high level of service to everyone who comes in contact with your business. If you do, you’ll also get more referrals from your satisfied clients.
“Wow” everyone who comes into contact with you and your business. You want people to be blown away by the extraordinary level of service you deliver to your clients. Demonstrate your exceptional level of customer service by showing your generosity through gift giving. Your goal should be to deliver such a high level of service that your clients can’t wait to tell their family members, friends and co-workers about your company.
Everyone who comes into contact with your business is a potential client or referrer. Reward those who refer people to you by offering them a gift. Send gifts to all business associates in order to gain favor. This is a great way to build relationships with the people you rely on to do business. Look for a reason to send these people a thank you card along with a gift.
So, what types of gifts should you send? I’ll leave that up to your imagination, but here are some ideas to help you get started:
Movie passes
Starbucks cards
Flowers, houseplants
A ticket for a free car wash
Gift candles
Favorite recipes
Gourmet chocolates or gourmet popcorn
Successful sales people always make sure their faithful referrers are regularly and consistently rewarded. Set aside the best rewards for your top referrers. This may include:
Dinner for two at a fancy restaurant
Tickets to the opera or to a rock concert
A gift card
High end fruit or gift basket
Potted plant or flower arrangement
A personally inscribed pen
Yes, when it comes to gift giving the sky is the limit. The more personal the gift, the more likely it will be remembered and it will serve as a thoughtful reminder to your best referrers the next time someone is in need of your exemplary services.
For more referral generating customer service tips, visit our article directory: http://Mortgage-Training.Mortgage-Leads-Generator.com
About the author:
Hartley Pinn has recently created the Mortgage Leads Generator Training Course to teach people how to make over $50,000 a month working part-time (10 to 15 hrs per week) as a mortgage loan officer.
The dilemma whether your legitimate home based businesses will be a success or not can be nerve wrecking.
So evaluate all aspects of your stay at home business solution before you actually start a home business. Examine the pros and cons of money making home business; especially it’s financial and commercial aspects before starting one. The reason is most people lose money in their home based business ventures.
The market is teeming with hundreds of ideas of stay at home business. Every single day new schemes come into the market calling them money making home business opportunity. Sadly, most of the so-called successful home businesses are scams.
The right money making home business
If you are planning to start home based business, choose a stay at home business that interests you. If you are pursuing it just for kicks, sooner or later you are going to fail in legitimate home based businesses. Hence choosing the right kind of money making home business can decide whether you will be successful or not. So do your research and then decide on which of the successful home businesses suit you.
Speculate all your issues minutely
Do not leave your stay at home business solution midway and change to a stable but permanent job This is the mistake most people in legitimate home based businesses do. Once you start home based business, try to understand the nitty gritties of it. Also don’t expect that you will become successful within a few days of starting your work from home business. So stays put & work hard at your work towards making your home based businesses a grand success.
Choose the Right Partner.
Successful home businesses will bring you rewarding results in the due course of time. At the beginning, there will be certain difficulties associated with your work at home business solution which will frustrate you. Your mental and physical stress will hinder you to resolve these issues. The best solution to such a situation is a partner or a mentor who will be at your side and guide you through the difficult times.
Make failures your strength
Once you decide on a stay at home business, make sure you allocate the resources in a planned way. And in spite of everything, you keep in your mind is whether the legitimate home based businesses will actually make money or not?
There are chances of failure in every business, and work in home businesses are no exception. That doesn’t mean that you should give up all your efforts and leave everything to destiny. But if any unfavorable situation has evolved, face it bravely with confidence. Start a home business only if you are comfortable with the idea. If your financial situation doesn’t permit you to take risks then it is better to take up the idea of work at home business solution at a later time.
Remember, success of your business depends on the way you project your business to the world. The success or failure in home businesses depends on the degree of confidence you have in your home business and also on your own abilities.
Charlie Golick is a success coach, e-book author, founder of web properties and a MLM trainer/consultant and after 15 years failing in network marketing, he is now in the top one percent of successful home businesses earners. For more details please visit…http://www.whoischarliegolick.com/
free marketing Tips from Lead Generation MBA – video tutorial on how to drive traffic to your site. For a FREE Marketing Audit and many more videos and services, visit www.leadgenerationmba.com
The most important thing you can do before you write and publish a book is to make sure that someone out there wants to read it. Better yet, a couple thousand people want to read it. There is not much point to writing and publishing a book if you do not have an audience.
The good news is that there are many wonderful tools that you can use to determine if there is a demand for your book’s topic. Online keyword tools, forums, and even speaking with people in your industry will help you determine if people are actively searching for your information.
Begin by brainstorming specific book ideas. If you are using your book as a business card or a tool to build credibility in your career then you already have a place to start. If you’re starting from scratch then make a list of topics that you want to write about. It’s important to write about something that you are interested in and passionate about. Your love for your topic will come through in your writing and it will be a better book.
Once you have a general idea for your book’s topic, consider how the book is going to benefit your readers. What will they gain from reading it? Will they have pets that are better trained? Will they be able to purchase a software program that makes their lives easier? Will they be smarter, sexier, wealthier, thinner, more respected? Define exactly how your book is going to make their lives better and then write and structure your book to make it happen.
Consider writing a sales page or synopsis before you write your book. Your sales page or synopsis will highlight the benefits your book provides and the kind of information you cover. You can then use your sales page to structure your book – your sales page will work as a lighthouse to keep you focused and headed in the right direction.
Give yourself a certain amount of time to complete your book – whether you write it yourself or not. It’s easy to let other things sidetrack you and the book you planned on publishing this year does not get published for ten years or more.
Make a plan and stick to it even if it means that you only write for ten minutes a day. It is possible to write and publish a book in a month, but you have to commit to the process.
Self publish for faster results and more money. We spend more than 14 billion dollars a year purchasing self published books. Someone is clearly making a lot of money. Self publishing gives you the power to see your book on store shelves in a tenth of the time that it takes to publish traditionally. It also gives you 100% control over your book and 100% of the profits.
You can self publish> your book electronically, in print, or a combination of both. In fact, many people that self publish go on to sign huge contracts with traditional publishing houses. Chicken Soup for the Soul started out as self published books and they have gone on to make Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen millions in sales and publishing contracts. Even better, the contents of those books are written by others!
Electronic publication is the fastest, easiest, and least expensive way to publish and market your book and it’s a great way to test the waters. It begins with a website to promote your book, a marketing plan, an auto responder campaign to distribute it via email, and a way to collect the money from your sales.
Really, it does not get any easier. You can author and publish your book quickly and easily. How soon do you want to see your name in print and reap the benefits of being an author? 20 days? 30 days? Get busy and make it happen.
If you’ve never heard of viral marketing before, we won’t blame you for thinking that it’s the FDA’s problem! This rather sinister term was coined by some very respectable people belonging to a venture capital firm called Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), who described viral marketing as a “network-enhanced word of mouth”. Simply put, that means getting your existing clientele to act as brand ambassadors for your product. And the amazing bit is that it’s quite involuntary! (Have you noticed what appears at the end of every email sent from your Yahoo account?)
Let’s see how this works. Practitioners of viral marketing leverage their customer base to pass on a marketing message to others in their network. The recipients of such messages, in turn, pass the same onto their contacts, and so on. Before you know it, the message will have touched a multitude of people, pretty much like an epidemic. We see you’re getting the picture…..
This is old-hat, you say. Nothing other than network marketing, a trick that’s been employed by legions of marketers! True. The only difference is that this kind of marketing has succeeded beyond imagination with some internet based businesses. In fact, the good folks at DFJ invented “viral marketing” as a tribute to Hotmail’s success. Not surprisingly, the term is usually associated with internet-centric business models.
Like any other trick, not all viral marketing campaigns succeed. Certainly, only very few work as well as Hotmail does.
Why did a particular program work? It has been observed that successful campaigns had some or more of the following characteristics.
Something or the other was FREE: This never fails to work. Whether it’s a free email account, or a larger mailbox or screensavers or that trial software for Arabic translation, the word FREE grabs eyeballs like no other.
It was fully transferable: Viruses love travel, and it’s the same with viral marketing. A short and sweet marketing message as a tag at the end of each email, or an easy to download graphic improves chances of the epidemic raging.
It pressed the right buttons: As with any form of marketing, this too exploits an implicit need. If you’re not part of an instant messaging group, you’re out! If you don’t blog thrice a week, you should be in a museum! At the heart of every successful campaign is its ability to create a feeling of community.
It networked, so didn’t perish: And that’s the crux of the whole thing. Social scientists say that each person has about a dozen people in his or her close network, and perhaps hundreds in an extended one. Viral marketing campaigns that find a way of entering communication between people have a better chance of making it. Riding on the back of someone else’s success is another effective way of spreading the good word about your product. Affiliate marketing programs work on the same principle, by using traffic on popular partner websites to their advantage.
Regardless of how individual programs are structured, the hook is an implied endorsement from a friend or trusted source. The power of communication technology has helped elevate this rather simplistic proposition into almost an art form. Whether your campaign makes a pretty picture or not is another story altogether!
Hi, I’m Akhil Shahani, a serial entrepreneur who wants to help you succeed. If you like to work smart, check out http://www.SmartEntrepreneur.net. It’s full of articles and resources to help you start and grow your business successfully. Please visit us & download our special ‘Freebie of the Month’!
