Copying success is more difficult than you may think

There are 2 major problems with trying to achieve success, by copying what you see others doing.

1.You might be copying what does not work. It’s easy to see a blog with lots of comments or lots of retweets / facebook “likes” etc – and assume this means the blog is also commercially successful. It doesn’t!

All those measurements show you is that there are people who commented there or retweeted the post.It tells you zero about how commercially effective that blog is at generating new business for it’s owner.

Many of my clients come to me with large social networks and active blogs that they have worked really hard on, with nothing to show for it. You know what? People will have been copying THEIR approach too, because it looked successful from the outside!

2.Not only may you be copying what does not work, but even if you found a blog that was doing things right, the untrained eye will miss it completely.That’s because the many differences between a blog that’s an income generating machine and one that’s not, are extremely subtle.

For example, I don’t know much about golf, so when I see a golfer hitting a golf ball, that’s all I see. When a professional golfer sees that same guy hitting that same ball, they can identify exactly what’s happening – what’s failing, what needs removing and what needs to be added to the golfer’s swing etc.

When it comes to marketing, a blog is like any other tool. If used correctly, it can easily become your best source of new, targeted business. However, just like every other marketing tool, only a tiny fraction of small business owners use blogs correctly, for what they want to achieve.

The rest just dabble and as a result, it costs them a fortune in lost business and YEARS in wasted time.

In short, if you want to enjoy better results you need a better strategy. You need an effective strategy that’s been developed for; you, your business, your industry, your unique resources and what you want to achieve. Whatever you elect to do, if you are not currently getting the regular stream of new business from your blog that you deserve, please change course.

As I have said here many times before; if you are rowing your boat in the wrong direction, no matter how hard you row, you will simply end up further and further away from where you want to be. You deserve far better than that!

Improve you About page on your blog

Almost as important as your website’s home page is the about page. This is your opportunity to build rapport with your guests — a chance to introduce yourself and to explain the aim of your website. Here are 10 tips that’ll have your own page in excellent shape.

1.Offer your name. It’s a blatantly obvious addition, yet so many about pages don’t get personal.
2.Include a photo. People like to see who they’re dealing with. A smile can work wonders, too. If there’s a team behind the website, include them all (even the cleaner plays an important role).
3.If it’s just you, write in the first-person. If someone asks what I do for a living, I don’t say, “David’s a graphic designer.” Use “I,” not “he/she.” It’ll help make you seem more personable.
4.Think about your visitor’s needs. Sure, you’re talking about yourself, but imagine you’re a potential client reading about you. What does the client get from contacting you?
5.Keep it current. Check the content every few weeks or every month to ensure it’s up-to-date. Perhaps you’ve moved home/office, or perhaps you offer a new product or service.
6.Show your location. By including a photo of your office, your town or city, you let people get that little bit closer, helping build rapport.
7.Short and sweet beats long and sour. Ask someone to have a look at your page. It shouldn’t take any longer than a minute to read, and the reader should learn something new about you.
8.Keep it professional. Smiley faces won’t help you clinch that £10,000 deal.
9.Experiment with video. Letting your visitors see and hear you can have a hugely beneficial effect when it comes to building trust online. (If you’re too self-conscious, why not start with an audio podcast?)
10.Add a call to action. Where should visitors go after they’ve read about you? Your design portfolio? Your contact page? Make it easy — include a link within the text.
One more thing, don’t take yourself too seriously.

Artists who Twitter and blog

Find more photos like this on #Artwalk

8 Questions that will increase your blog traffic

8 questions to ask yourself to help identify what is working (or what might work) with your readers and niche:

• What topics generate most comments on your blog?
• What topics generate most comments on other blogs in your niche?
• What other sites do your readers visit a lot? What activities are they doing there?
• What features are readers asking for?
• What was your biggest traffic day – what brought it about?
• Which of your posts seem to get Retweeted most on Twitter and passed around most on other social media sites?
• Which of your posts are getting linked to most from other blogs/sites?
• What other sites send you most traffic? How can you build relationships with these sites?

This list could go on and on. It is all about looking for points of life on your site (even small ones) where there’s some kind of energy or positive outcome happening and then repeating them in a slightly different and unique way.

You are looking for opportunities to build on and improve on what you did previously. Good luck!

Just Getting Started in the Virtual World

What if now they're ready and they ask your advice? And, by the way, they have no real cash to spend...

Here's a list of my top ten things to consider doing:

• Use gmail to give every person in the organization that can read English an email address.
• Use a free website creating tool or even Squidoo to build a page about your company.
• Nothing fancy, but list your locations, your people (with addresses) and make it clear you want to hear from people.
• Start an email newsletter using Mad Mimi or Mail Chimp. Give the responsibility for the newsletter's creation and performance to one person and offer them a bonus if they exceed metrics in sign ups and in reducing churn.
• Start a book group for your top executives and every person who answers the phone, designs a product or interacts with customers. Read a great online media book a week and discuss. It'll take you about a year to catch up.
• Offer a small bonus to anyone in the company who starts and runs a blog on any topic. Have them link to your company site, with an explanation that while they work there, they don't speak for you.
• Have the president post her (real) email address in every invoice and other communication the company sends out, asking people to write to her with comments or questions.
• Start a newsletter for your vendors. Email them regular updates about what you're doing, what's selling and what problems are going on internally that they might be able to help you with.
• Do not approve any project that isn't run on Basecamp.
• Get a white board and put it in the break room. On it, have someone update: how many people subscribe to the newsletter, how many people visit the website, how many inbound requests come in by phone, how long it takes customer service to answer an email and how often your brand names are showing up on Twitter every day.
• Don't have any meetings about your web strategy. Just do stuff. First you have to fail, then you can improve.
• Refuse to cede the work to consultants. You don't outsource your drill press or your bookkeeping or your product design. If you're going to catch up, you must (all of you) get good at this, and you only accomplish that by doing it.

So, what are you waiting for now? Go to it!

Facebook and Twitter both Hit by Targetted Denial of Service (DoS) Attack

On an otherwise normal and happy Thursday morning, Facebook and Twitter both became the most recent high profile sites to be the target of a denial of service attack (DoS).

A Georgian blogger with accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and Google's Blogger and YouTube was targeted in a denial of service attack that led to the site-wide outage at Twitter and problems at the other sites on Thursday, according to a Facebook executive.

The blogger, who uses the account name "Cyxymu", the name of a town in the Republic of Georgia, had accounts on all of the different sites that were attacked at the same time, Max Kelly, chief security officer at Facebook said.

Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and the usual online services provided to customers.

Twitter. 'We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate.'

Facebook: "We have restored full access for most people," the company reported. "We’ll keep monitoring the situation to make sure you have the reliable experience you expect from us.