Remarkablogger » Blogging Tutorials

Why Your Customers Might Be Your Biggest Untapped Resource

Michael Martine — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 08:55:27 +0000

This is a guest post by Nathan Hangen. Be sure to let him know what you think of it in the comments!

Businesses rely on trust and authority to survive. If your customers don’t trust you or believe that you have the goods, then they aren’t going to buy from you.

Big corporations generally don’t suffer from this because they have money to throw around. This allows them to create the illusion of authority, which for most people is good enough. Small businesses though, especially those based solely on the internet, don’t have it quite so easy.

Overcoming these issues can be tough for new businesses especially, which is why blogs are such an excellent marketing vehicle. Over time, you get the chance to display your knowledge and expertise, winning your prospects over one by one.

It works.

From Slow to Fast

The problem though, is that it takes time. You have to keep your foot on the pedal and keep grinding away until you reach critical mass or the level at which word of mouth and buzz marketing takes over for you.

Considering that sales are the lifeline for any business, the longer this process takes, the more you’ll struggle to improve that bottom line.

But what if I told you there was a way to speed up that process, and build trust and authority almost overnight? What if I told you that you have access to a resource that can not only help you create social proof, but was also free?

Sounds good, right?

Let Your Customers Speak for You

Well, the good news is that if you’ve ever sold a product or service, then you’re in luck, because all you need in order to take advantage of this strategy is customers.

Sure, you can let your web copy or direct mail convert your leads into clients and customers, or you could simply let your satisfied customers do it for you. Consumers trust each other more than they trust the guy trying to make a sale, so it’s a natural fit.

By placing your customers in front of your prospects, they immediately put down their guard and listen to the message, and not the methods. As an example, just take a look on Amazon.com or any other site that lists product reviews. I don’t know about you, but when I’m considering a purchase, I scroll through the reviews before I do anything else. If they’re good, then I move on to the product details, and eventually…become a customer.

The same is true for your products or services. Reviews speak louder than bullet points.

How to Get the Goods

The easiest way to do this is to simply ask for a review, but if you haven’t been building an email list, then it’s going to be tough to reach your customers…so make that a priority if you haven’t already. You could also use a simple contact form on your website that allows customers to submit reviews. Contact Form 7 is a great plugin for this.

You could also open up for comments on your product pages, and let the reviews come in uncensored, which might sound scary at first, but proves that you aren’t hiding anything.

The big kahuna

Although text reviews are great, the most powerful reviews are those in audio or video format. When prospects can see and/or hear your satisfied customers, they are much more likely to identify with them. Video reviews especially, are an extremely powerful way to create social proof and disarm those that are loaded with objections.

Incentive

If your customers aren’t biting, consider offering an incentive in exchange for a review, such as a discount coupon or a free sample of another product. I’ve had success just offering to link to their blog or website on my review page.

However, if you’ve really delivered and your customers are satisfied, then you should have no problem getting at least a few reviews.

Create a showcase

Reviews are only powerful if they are easy to find, so highlight them whenever possible. Link to them on all of your sales and product pages, and consider embedding them in the sidebar or footer of your blog. Create a separate page just for customer testimonials. Make them easy to find…first impressions mean everything.

The Authority Hack

I know this sounds simple, but the truth is that most people aren’t tapping into their biggest resource, and it’s costing them time and money. Your products are great and your customers are happy, so why not show them off? The more you have the better you’ll be, especially if you can get your hands on a few video or audio reviews.

Reviews act as the social proof needed to convince your prospects to give you a shot. They help struggling businesses get over the hump, and help strong businesses become even stronger.

So, what are you waiting for?

Nathan Hangen is an entrepreneur, social media consultant, and co-authored the book Beyond Blogging. You can follow him on Twitter @nhangen.

How to Use Windows Live Writer

Michael Martine — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 23:41:08 +0000

To put it simply, Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer is absolutely the business. If you’re using Windows XP or Vista as your operating system (no Macs), you need to give this blog software a try. It’s a free download from Microsoft.

This video shows you everything you need to know about how to use Windows Live Writer blog software to write posts on your blog. If you can’t watch it in your email or reader, watch it on Viddler or the blog.

Windows Live Writer Features

Works with any popular bogging platform (WordPress, Blogger, TypePad) and even some not-so-popular platforms (Microsoft) , which saves you from dealing with the quirks of multiple platforms.
Write posts, pages, create categories/labels, and insert pictures for multiple blogs from one application, which saves you a lot of time. Like, I couldn’t possibly overdo this point, so I’ll just leave it at that.
Can have more than one copy of Windows Live Writer open at the same time, which makes it easy to copy from one window and paste into another.
Image uploading is a joy instead of a nightmare, and this alone would make the software worth paying for, but it’s free.
You get cool stuff like picture special effects and easy video embedding.
You can reuse links by adding them into the link glossary, which saves tons of time.
You can download and install extensions that enhance and extend the functionality of Windows Live Writer.

One word of warning: Microsoft is Microsoft, after all, and they treat this program like bait. They will try to get you to sign up for or download other Microsoft Live services and stuff you probably don’t want. So be careful: read the prompts carefully and make sure you know what you’re agreeing to and downloading. There’s nothing wrong with this, but it’s easy to not pay close enough attention to what you’re doing. I’m very happy with this software, and I use it daily. It saves me huge amounts of time and makes my in-post pictures look great.

WordPress tags: To create WordPress tags, click on the little double arrows to expand the category/publish date bar at the bottom. In the expanded area, you’ll see a field for “keywords.” That’s where you can put tags for a WordPress blog (comma separated).

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Hereâ€™s to your blogging success!

Michael Martine, Remarkablogger

Blog Marketing is what I blog about, Blog Consulting is what I doâ€“How can I help you? Click here to learn more.

How to Add Video to a WordPress Blog Post the Easy Way

Michael Martine — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 11:28:54 +0000

You’re new to this whole blogging thing. You want to put a cool video in your post like you see everywhere on the web, but you haven’t figured out how to do it. I got your back. Everything’s easy when you know how, right? So watch this video to see how it’s done the easy way. Here’s what you’ll get out of it:

What NOT to do (the “Add media” buttons are wrong)
Where to get the embed code on a YouTube video
How to customize the embedded movie player
How to embed the movie the easy way, WITHOUT extra plugins

So enjoy (you may want to go full screen but the quality’s not as good as Viddler–since I used YouTube in the video, I wanted to use them for this post).

If you can’t see the video in your email or reader, it’s on YouTube: How to Add Video to a WordPress Post.

Also of Interest

Since I’ve written this post, many people have asked questions in the comments below and I’ve done my best to answer them, so please do check them out and leave a comment yourself if you have a question.

I have a few more posts on video blogging you may also find interesting if you found this one helpful:

Secrets of How to Write a Post in WordPress – Video Tutorial

Michael Martine — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 12:40:08 +0000

Are you missing something in WordPress? You can learn the basics and even learn a couple of secrets at the same time. They’re not really secret, of course, they’re features you may not yet be aware of. Here’s what’s in the video:

How to edit the post “slug”
How to insert hyperlinks
How to upload and insert pictures
How to resize your pictures
How to reveal the “kitchen sink” toolbar
How to create subheadings in your posts
How to paste in text from Word so that it looks nice
How to split your posts so they’re continued after a link
How to select categories for your post
How to enter tags
How to set the post publish date into the future
How to enter information into the All-in-One SEO Pack area for better post search optimization

If you can’t see the video in your email or reader you can watch it on Viddler.

Should You Squidoo?

Michael Martine — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 09:56:30 +0000

Should you… what?

Squidoo is the brainchild of the well-known marketer Seth Godin. Squidoo is a multi-user site where, in a very user-friendly structured way, you create web pages on any topic you like. The web pages you created are called lenses. You don’t need any technical knowledge to create a Squidoo lens.

Why Create a Squidoo Lens?

If you already have a blog, why would you create a Squidoo Lens? One reason: backlinks. Backlinks are links back to your site from other sites. They are a measure of your site’s authority and popularity to other people, and to Google.

When you’re a new blogger, almost nobody is linking to you (except maybe others in your blog pack), so you can create links to your blog from Squidoo Lenses. These links are a portal for traffic, but they are also crawled by Google and added to its search index. You can put many links back to your blog in a Squidoo Lens, and you can create as many Squidoo Lenses as you like.

Legit Content or Gaming the System?

Squidoo has been in trouble in the past for being a haven for spam content, and it’s easy to abuse it in order to create a slew of backlinks to your blog. But think about what you’re doing, and what happens to people who try to game Google: your reputation may suffer, and Google is constantly improving in the fight against junk links and spam content. Remember: think Jedi blogger, not Sith. Think about what you want to achieve, not what you can get away with.

If you’re going to use a tool such as Squidoo as part of your blog marketing strategy, use it for the reason it has been created: content creation. Your strategy should be build a miniature empire of satellite content to the main “mothership” of your blog. That satellite content needs to be as carefully considered and useful as the content you create for your blog.

Even My Pitiful Lens Helps Me

I have a handful of sad little Squidoo Lenses, all of which are badly neglected and need updating. But the one I created for blog consulting has a Google PageRank of 3 and contains several followed links back to here. Do I get traffic from it? Almost none. But it is one more backlink with the anchor text I want, and that counts for something. Yes, I am nearly a complete failure at Squidoo, and I’m using that to teach you something valuable. That’s kinda cool, when you think about it.

I have tried to create legitimate content that isn’t just duplicative of Remarkablogger, but I know I could do better. Much better. Why haven’t I?

You Get Out What You Put In

Because I simply haven’t taken the time to bother with it. If I made this lens (and my others) into little powerhouses of great content, updated them often, and participated more fully in the Squidoo community, there is no doubt I would see even more benefits from my Squidoo Lenses.

In fact, it would be quite easy for you to go out and do a much better job at this than I have! Just make sure you have the time to devote to it–that’s always the crux: time. My priorities mean I spend my time on other things than my Squidoo lenses, like working for clients and putting together Gateway Blogging. But for the person who wants to take the time, creating great Squidoo Lenses will supply the important benefits I described above, plus something else.

One More Thing

When you create a Lens on Squidoo, you can set options for getting paid a share of any advertising revenues from clicks on ads in your Lens. Squidoo is basically paid for by Google AdSense. Squidoo is, in fact, a giant money-making AdSense machine for Google. Whether you will see any of that money or not depends on how many popular lenses you have and what their subject is.

While true you can make money from ads on Squidoo, the main benefit of Squidoo is not ad revenue, but to extend your online presence, drive traffic, and create backlinks.

Knowing Your Way Around the WordPress Write Screen

Michael Martine — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 14:58:02 +0000

Guest Blogger Week continues at Remarkablogger with Joel Williams of Blog Tech Guy

With the launch of Wordpress 2.5 many things in the Wordpress admin dashboard have changed. However some things remain the same, and one of those is how each part of a Wordpress post affects what is displayed on your blog. For ease of use, I’ve used a screenshot from version 2.3.3 as this will be the one most familiar.

The WordPress Write Post Screen

Number 1 is number one for a reason. The title of you blog post can actually appear three times on a post page (see later screenshot). For this example, the title of our post is “Blog Post Headlines”:

The post URL. If you have permalinks set to include the post name, then this title will appear in the URL of your post e.g. www.mywebsite.com/blog-post-headlines. Search engines like this as it tells them, and their users what the post it about.
The title bar of your browser. At the very top of your internet browser window is the name of the page that you are visiting. Depending on how you have set this up this could say Blog Post Headlines by My Website Name
The actual title of the blog post, either in H1 or H2 title tags. Title tags are what makes the text size larger than that of the text in the post, and search engines place more importance on them as it gives an indication of what the page is about.

Number 2, the Post Slug, shows you what your permalink URL will be, as mentioned above. It cleans up commas, quotes, apostrophes and other punctuation in your title. If you wanted to have a different URL to your title, you can actually change it here, but usually it’s nice to be consistent.

Number 3 is the text of your post. Whilst I won’t get into the details of search engine optimization here, your post should contain your keywords in a natural way, be on a specific topic, have associated images with descriptions relevant to your post, and most of all be unique, interesting content for your readers!

Number 4 and Number 5 are a way of organizing your posts can can also act as keywords for your post, so it’s best to make them relevant to your post to again help people find it. I like to think of Categories as broad definitions, for examples, Dogs, or Cars, with Tags being more specific, such as Irish Wolfhound, or Toyota Camry. This organization is up to you, but think about your post and what important areas you are talking about.

The image below shows where each of these actions turn up on your blog page. You will see that the tags (Number 4) are not visible on my theme. they appear as my meta keywords for search engines. Number 3 appears below my categories.

There are many things you can do to improve how your post reads to the reader and also how it appears in search engines. Enjoy your blogging!

Joel Williams runs Blog Tech Guy, a blog technical support website, reclaiming your time to concentrate on writing and promoting you blog.

What Rock Band Can Teach You about Business Blogging

Michael Martine — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 10:51:12 +0000

Guest Blogger Week continues on Remarkablogger, with Naomi Duford of IttyBiz

Recently, I spent an incredible sum of money on the PlayStation game Rock Band. While this new addition to my living room has probably caused both my business and my blog to suffer — like Twitter, Rock Band shares many traits with crack — it has also taught me a few things about my business blog.

Take the Damn Tutorials

In Rock Band, in blogging, in business, and in pretty much every other facet of life, there are handy and free tutorials available to help you get started. Donâ€™t be a hero and say youâ€™ll figure it out on your own. You wonâ€™t. OK, maybe you will, but youâ€™ll take about five years longer than you need to. Subscribe to Remarkablogger, Problogger , Copyblogger, Skelliewag, IttyBiz, and follow their — OK, our — advice. Honestly, we know what weâ€™re talking about. We wouldnâ€™t lie.

The System Works for a Reason

Rock Band is incredibly simple. All you have to do is play the notes it tells you to play, when it tells you to play them. Not exactly rocket science. The same is true for business blogging. There is a system. Social media activity, interacting with your readers, offering valuable advice, being consistent — these are all the things that turn a boo into a cheer. Donâ€™t try to reinvent the wheel. The wheel is just fine the way it is.

Donâ€™t Pay Too Much Attention to the People Around You

Because we donâ€™t live in Rock Band Communist Utopia, some band members are better than others. My husband is a mean guitarist and vocalist, but neither one of us could drum our way out of a wet paper bag. If you base your guitar strumming on my drumming, youâ€™ll be booed off stage before you can say â€˜Blitzkrieg Bop.â€™

In blogging, in business, and especially when you combine the two, your esteemed colleagues will lead you off a cliff if you give them a chance. Donâ€™t give them a chance. If youâ€™re going to start doing what the guy at the blog next door is doing, make sure he has a clue. How many subscribers does he have? Whatâ€™s his comment section like? Is he doing better or worse than you are? Focus on what youâ€™re doing, and ignore the rest of the noise.

Play What You Know

There was a time, many years ago, when I sat watching one scene in Wayneâ€™s World, rewinding my VCR over and over for hours, just to memorize the lyrics and intonation of the song â€˜Ballroom Blitzâ€™. (Please donâ€™t ask. It involved a guy I was trying to impress. I donâ€™t want to talk about it.) Anyway, because of this, I learned to sing the song really, really well. Itâ€™s the only song on Earth that I can sing, but I can sing it.

Because itâ€™s the only song I can sing, itâ€™s the only song I do sing.

If youâ€™re not funny, donâ€™t try to be funny. If youâ€™re not poignant, donâ€™t try to be poignant. If youâ€™re not an expert, donâ€™t try to be an expert. People will respect you much more for doing your thing and doing it well than for trying to be something youâ€™re not just because itâ€™s trendy, or popular, or in-demand, or a potential money maker. If you donâ€™t know shit about productivity, please God, donâ€™t write about productivity. Write about plumbing or knitting or deep sea diving instead.

Start On A Small Stage

In any endeavor, you will always fail in the beginning. Always. You will fail brilliantly and boringly. You will fail in ways that make a great story later and in ways that youâ€™ll never want to think of again. This is a guarantee.

However, the effects of your failure are mitigated by the size of your audience. If you start small and allow yourself to grow naturally, youâ€™ll fail in front of a much smaller group of people.

Always Remember Who Has the Power to Boo

The crowd is your boss. Thatâ€™s all there is to it. If you do not give the people what they want, they will leave. This doesnâ€™t make you a bad person or even a bad blogger, but it does mean youâ€™ll have a blog with no readers and a business with no, well, business.

When I started blogging, I gave a lot of marketing tips. While those were the posts that got the links, they didnâ€™t get a lot of reader participation and they certainly didnâ€™t get me fan mail. Then I did a piece that was really embarrassing and made me look like a total idiot. People loved it. I got comments and emails and even a couple of presents in the mail. (Iâ€™ve since removed my address from my website.) People were throwing their virtual panties onto my stage.

It changed the way I blog, and it should change the way you blog, too. Not that you should tell hilariously embarrassing personal stories involving emergency room visits and drinking wine out of a bag — thereâ€™s a limited market for that. But listen to what your fans want, and then give it to them.

Playing Guitar on Rock Band Does Not Make You a Guitar Player

Itâ€™s pretty easy to blog, and itâ€™s pretty easy to play Rock Band. Blogging about the business youâ€™re in — whatever business it happens to be — is the Rock Band guitar version of the music industry. Nice, but pretty far removed from reality. You become an expert by doing, not by blogging about doing.

Any moron can hook themselves up with a domain name and start shooting their mouth off. They might even find some poor suckers to read what they write, but that doesnâ€™t make them gurus. You are what you do, not what you blog about.

It Gets Harder As You Go Along

If youâ€™ve read the tutorials, youâ€™ll know what to do. Youâ€™ll respond to each commentator. Youâ€™ll send personalized emails. Youâ€™ll participate in group writing projects and network on Twitter and maintain an active profile on StumbleUpon and Digg and God knows what else. You will be The Perfect Blogger.

It is very easy to master the beginnerâ€™s level of anything. But as you get better, it gets harder, sometimes faster than youâ€™re prepared for. The Digg requests and the review-my-ebook requests and the sheer volume of comments will become overwhelming. You will start to forget what youâ€™ve committed to whom. You will find yourself going to bed later and later because the things that you used to get done in a couple of hours are taking you until two in the morning.

When that happens, you have to rethink your strategy. Itâ€™s scary and a pain in the ass and it hurts to let some things go. Get over it. Realize it for what it is — a sign of growth — and rock on into the future.

Naomi Dunford runs IttyBiz, a blog and marketing company for very small businesses. Very, very small businesses. The kind of businesses that are so small they number their pets among their employees. Click here to subscribe to her blog. Remarkablogger does, and you obviously read that.

How to Create a Feed Signature with Secret Content for Subscribers Only

Michael Martine — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 10:17:24 +0000

A lot of people ask me how I created the feed signature that allows only subscribers to download my free ebook How to Start a Business Blog.

The answer is simple and… unglamorous: I use a WordPress plugin called Sig2feed and some HTML/CSS coding. Anybody can use the plugin. If you don’t know HTML or CSS, your formatting and content options for your feed signature will be pretty limited (not that having a gorgeous feed sig block is a law, or anything).

Because feed readers and email clients don’t use the same stylesheet as the blog whose post it displays, I created in-line CSS to style everything up. My logo and picture of the book are linked to on my webserver. The original purpose of Feed2sig was to put copyright information into your feed content in the event scrapers steal your content, but you can put whatever code you want in it. The result looks like this:

Sig2feed is not the only plugin that does this sort of thing. It may not even be the best one. It just so happens to be the one that I am using. I’m going to be all lazy and not go looking for the others. If anyone can suggest others they like, your no-followed comments are mighty welcome. Help make this post into a little educational frenzy of feed signature goodness.

Who Says Thank You More, You or Your Commentors?

Michael Martine — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 04:09:04 +0000

I was responding to a comment from my friend Phil Gerbyshak, telling him “you’re welcome”, when I realized that I really haven’t been saying those two words very much, lately. I’ve been thanking people myself, left and right. But I haven’t been saying “you’re welcome” as much.

Why does this matter? Who are you really writing for on your blog, and why are you really doing it? Are you providing your readers with the kind of information and resources that makes them say “thank you”, or are you blogging in a way designed to get praise from others, maybe without even realizing it yourself? I suppose people could just be kissing my ass… but somehow I don’t think so!

Your readers are not looking for another person to faun over and praise. But if they say “thank you”, that means you’ve given them something valuable. It means you’ve done something worthwhile for them. And that is something that we’re all looking for.

Big difference.

25 Pownce Invites for the first 25 Commentors, No Strings Attached

Getting Blog Readers to Convert – Say Hello to PAT

Michael Martine — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 03:24:48 +0000

Welcome to My First SlideCast

This post contains a SlideCast. If you are viewing this in a feed reader and don’t see the SlideShare player immediately below, please visit the original post or SlideShare to view it. All you have to do is click on the play button, just like a video… except you can also go to the previous and next slides if you want to.

PAT: Permission, Attention, and Trust

| View | Upload your own

Getting Traffic is Only the Half of It

There are more than enough posts published in the blogosphere on how to increase traffic and promote your blog, but fewer on converting your readers. Conversion is when a visitor takes the action we most want her to: she buys something, signs up for our newsletter, clicks on an ad or an affiliate link. I’m sure you’ve seen desperate television commercials that attempt to get you all excited about a product so that you will abandon all common sense and CALL THE NUMBER ON YOUR SCREEN RIGHT NOW! That doesn’t even hardly work for television, anymore (note the rise of the long-form infomercial and of home shopping programming). It sure as hell doesn’t work on the web.

So what does? PAT. Who’s PAT? Well, PAT’s not a person, at all. PAT is three related concepts: permission, attention, and trust. How acquire them and leverage them in order to improve conversion is what this is all about. This is the tactic and approach that I take with what I do here on Remarkablogger.

PS – This is my first slidecast, a new offering from the wonderfully cool service SlideShare. As such, it’s just a wee bit rough around the edges. I promise my next one will be better. I wanted an alternative to just “talking head” videos, something that engaged the eyes and ears together and still had interactivity. Hope you like it. You can embed them just like YouTube videos, so feel free to embed it in your own posts if you want to.