This is a guest post by Tim Brownson, who apparently couldn’t be arsed with putting in links or subheadings, so if he doesn’t like what I did with it, well… tough shit for him. Please note all the links below to his new book are affiliate links. Because I need beer money, of course.

Even though core values are highly subjective, contextual and almost entirely a product of our upbringing, I’m still fairly sure if I told you that on my blog I exercise core values of respect, integrity, excellence and communication you would be impressed.

After all, who doesn’t want to read a blog that strives for excellence, respects its readers, operates with integrity and values the fine art of communication?

In fact, who wouldn’t want to run their business in such a fashion? In the almost 20 years spent in corporate UK employed by some major blue chip organizations, I rarely saw such values demonstrated on a consistent basis.

And therein lies the problem. Telling people what you value either as a blogger or a business owner is not the same as living by your values.

The values I mentioned above were the ones adopted by Enron and plastered all over their corporate website and offices.

Now they don’t seem so genuine and appealing, do they?

Mission Statement Propaganda vs. Core Values

At this stage it would be easy to be cynical when looking at blogs and companies that claim to live by their values and jump to the erroneous conclusion they are just telling people what they want to hear.

I have no doubt that like mission statements and vision statements, value statements can, and in some cases are, written to mislead. But they can also be incredibly useful, especially for small business owners or people looking to profit from writing a blog.

Knowing your values allows you to make business decisions that are consistent with who you are as a person and how you want your blog to operate and be perceived by your readers.

I have done the exercise to help clients align themselves with their core values literally hundreds of times. But only recently have I started to do the same process for small business owners and bloggers and it’s proving incredibly valuable.

Not only does aligning with your business values give you a greater sense of purpose and increase your overall satisfaction levels, but it also allows you to get a clearer idea of what you ideal reader and client looks like, something that is crucial to your success.

For example, as a Life Coach I have inquiries from a broad spectrum of people, but I simply don’t have the desire to work with every person that contacts me. In my early days that wasn’t the case and presuming the person wasn’t obviously madder than a very mad March Hare I would take on more or less anybody willing to pay me.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that this approach wasn’t working with some clients and for one very specific reason.

How Misaligned Core Values Hurt Your Business

Even though my job is incredibly important to me I have to confess to not taking life itself very seriously and humor and fun are core values of mine. Whenever I took on a client in the early days that didn’t share my playful attitude and left field sense of humor it always seemed like a slog. It seemed like hard work and I almost never got in the flow.

About three years ago I made the decision that if I was suspicious that a client wouldn’t be fun to work with and I knew they found me through either a referral or directly from a Google search, I’d ask them to go and check out my blog.

This was a calculated risk because I knew there was a chance I would never hear from them again. Like Michael, I don’t pull any punches with my blog writing and use a lot of humor, forthrightness and even sprinkle in the occasional ‘F’ Bomb.

Some people (rightly or wrongly) believe that’s not a very professional approach to Life Coaching and this was my way of weeding those people out. If you are going to get all huffy and offended because I think most self development gurus suck, or because I swear, or heaven forbid I quote Monty Python, then I was never the right Life Coach for you in the first place.

There are a number of values that come up more than others. I’m far more likely to see ‘significance’ than ‘justice’ and ‘connection’ is mentioned more often than ‘spirituality’ when it comes to blogging.

Also you probably won’t be surprised to hear that ‘honesty’ appears on the vast majority of clients lists.

The Bullshit of Honesty

Just lately though I have been wondering if bloggers that claim honesty as a core value aren’t just setting themselves up for a fall. That like stability and security, total honesty is largely an illusion in modern society.

I had cause to phone the technical support department of a large computer manufacturing company recently. In fact I had to call them several times and every single time I got the message that they were experiencing a higher than normal call volume, and as such, my wait time would be over 15 minutes.

I hear this message a lot from all types of business and I’ve heard it at almost every time of day too. I often wonder:

“What is a normal call volume?”

The definition of normal is something that is typical, average or expected. Therefore, you can’t have something be abnormal if it’s happening frequently.

I also hear the message, “Please listen carefully as our menu options have recently changed” quite a lot and I know one business that has had that same message for well in excess of a year.

What does recently mean? A week, a month, a year?

Get Your “House” in Order

I love the TV program ‘House’ and especially the eponymous character played by the excellent and highly sarcastic, Hugh Laurie.

It seems that after almost every episode the trailer for the following weeks program tells me something along the lines of, “You will not believe what happens next week in House’s most challenging case to date”.

The weird thing is I always do believe what happens. I can’t ever remember the end of an episode and turning to my wife and saying “I don’t believe that, do you?”

And usually the cases are similarly challenging with House getting an insight into the problem 5 minutes before the end after broad-spectrum antibiotics and a diagnosis of Lupus has failed for the 73rd consecutive patient.

You may think the examples above are trivial, and in many respects you would be right, because in the great scheme of things they are, but they also undermine credibility and confidence.

If honesty is genuinely a core value of yours rather than something you want people to think is a core value, then do everything in your power to demonstrate brutal honesty and let the chips fall where they may.

Don’t slide in affiliate links without telling people. Don’t promote clients without full disclosure. And above all, don’t try and pretend you have skills and abilities that you really don’t possess.

Sure, like I did with my client approach,  you may lose a few bucks in the short-term, but in the long-term you build credibility and authority.

The Upside of Core Value Alignment

And the upside of operating within your values (whatever they are, because honesty actually may not be that important to you) is absolutely huge.

You know where you stand. Your readers know where you stand. And most importantly, your potential customers know where you stand. Those that admire your values will soon move from potential customers to customers, to rabid flag waving fans.

Not a bad return for simply being the person you already are.

About the Author: Tim Brownson is a Life Coach and NLP Master Practitioner who has been unsticking people for 7 years. You can check out his blog at A Daring Adventure. If you would like to know more about aligning your core values click the link.

Note from Michael: I’ve been through Tim’s core values alignment exercise and I have to say it’s an eye-opener. Living in misalignment with your values is a constant source of unrecognized stress in life. To discover your own core values and live in alignment with them, you should get Tim’s book.

A young Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, co-founders of Apple.

I’ve used Macs before and I have an iPod Touch. I use iTunes on my PC running Windows 7. I get what Macs are all about and have Jobs to thank for why Windows is now a halfway decent operating system. Microsoft has always been a systematic copier/usurper. Despite their huge research budget and facilities, Microsoft receives virtually zero accolades for leadership or innovation that I can think of (that may not be fair or even true, but it is common perception). Apple constantly drives design and mind-blowing features forward in every product, so much so that any other company’s efforts look like amateur plagiarism. Apple’s products had identity, the products of other companies did not: they were merely trying to catch up to Apple.

Having said all that, you might wonder why I don’t use a Mac. I’m far too invested in the PC/Windows platform and I like to tinker & build. PCs are hot rods, Macs are the beautiful cars you buy as-is off the showroom floor. I’d rather be a hot-rodder. Also? Games.

At Apple stores all over the world and at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California, people are leaving memorial gifts in acknowledging and paying homage to a man who affected their lives for the better.

This may seem macabre, but I wonder if, despite all the great he’s also done in the world, if Bill Gates will be treated the same. Or pick any “giant” out there such as Richard Branson or Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg. Will they get sacrifices and spontaneous memorial gatherings around the world at their passing? No one can say for sure but something tells me no.

What is the difference? Love.

People love their Macs and their iPhones and iPads. They love Apple software & hardware. And… they loved Steve Jobs. I do not love Windows, I do not love Bill Gates. I use Windows and I appreciate it more now than in the past, but I don’t love it. I admire Gates for his business acumen and his philanthropy, but I don’t love him the way people love Steve Jobs.

By now, you’ve probably seen Jobs’ Stanford commencement speech and the old Apple “Think Different” commercial all over your social streams. I’m sure traffic to those videos is practically melting YouTube servers right about now. But if you watch them you get an important glimpse into what drove Jobs.

You might notice something different about this version, though. It’s not narrated by Richard Dreyfuss. It’s narrated by Steve Jobs. It never aired.

Steve Jobs died at the age of 56. Right now I’m 42. If I were to die at the same age Jobs did, that means I only have 14 years of life left to me.

While I certainly hope to live longer than 56, this gives me pause.

And I hope it gives you pause, too.

What the hell are you doing? Why? What will be your legacy?

May Steve Jobs continue live on inside each of us.

And what is your blog doing for them?

One huge problem I see time and again is people blogging for and interacting with their peers instead of their prospects.

But even for those who are smart enough to not make that mistake, they may be making another one: trying to get new clients by blogging and social networks.

Wait a Minute! What Did You Just Say?

Did I just say you may be making a mistake if you’re trying to get new clients via blogging?

Yup. I did.

But haven’t I been saying all this time that’s exactly what you should be doing?

Yes, it is.

What’s going on, here?

Well, keep in mind that what works for one person may not work for another person at all, but in some cases, I’m beginning to rethink the notion of client attraction blogging as It’s been presented up until now.

There may be another way.

Play to Your Strengths

Trying to shore up your weaknesses is a waste of time. Getting even better at what you’re best at is where it’s at, as far as I’m concerned. Over a year ago I was speaking with a client who wanted to improve his lead-generation and was having a tough time getting his blog to help with this objective. Turned out he had a great pipeline of referrals from existing customers, but there was a bottleneck: the person who was moving these prospects from warm to hot only worked for him part time. And she was the only one.

I suggested he triple that effort and strengthen what was already working well for him instead of trying to figure out something new that wasn’t working at all. He wanted to know what the blog was for, then. I suggested he use it as a resource to send referrals to as part of the process of bringing them on board. Make it serve his strengths.

Months later he sent me a note telling me it worked like crazy and he had doubled his business.

And then I just sort of forgot about the whole thing, until began coming up again for a few other clients. Now I’m starting to see a pattern emerging. If your business relies heavily on referrals, then trying to acquire clients from the web may not be helping you at all. It may be a drain on your time and resources. And it may even be hindering your referral process if referrals visit your blog and what they see doesn’t resonate with them. It may be giving them pause instead of encouragement and confirmation.

Are Referrals More Important than Strangers?

For many freelancers, coaches and consultants, their clients come more by word-of-mouth than by random strangers visiting their website.

Let’s really think about that for a moment.

If most of your clients are coming via referrals… who should your website be for?

All those strangers who never become clients? What’s the point of that?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to create content which serves to confirm you as the right person for the job when a warm referral comes visiting? And if so, what does that look like?

Referral-Friendly Content

• Client success stories
• Process stories
• Vision posts
• Inspiration posts

Referral-Friendly Home Page Design

• Clear, immediate and apparent benefit
• Clear identity
• Encourage the interaction

Referral-Friendly About Page

All the stuff I said in Create an About Page that’s a Secret Freelance Sales Weapon applies here.

Maybe Not for Everyone.. But Possibly Perfect for You

Have you felt frustrated with blog marketing and suddenly this makes perfect sense? Or does this make no sense at all to you? This post is really more question than answers, and I’m curious what your thoughts are.

Image by NASARobonaut.

I’m running an experiment at the minute on my personal blog, where, instead of having a traditional blogging niche, I am working on a series of blogging projects.

How Do I Define A Project

A project is a series of focused blog posts on a particular topic that go in-depth. The project has a set start and end point. Once the subject has been covered completely, the project is finished and I move onto my next project.

This is different from a blog niche, where the same topic can also be covered in-depth, but there is no defined start and end point, and no real structure to the postings.

loosely Coupled

I’m using the computing term of loosely coupled to describe my work, the projects are related under my high level tag line of working online, but a project is a complete piece of work, it can stand alone. The next project could be similar, but does not need to know anything about the contents of another project.

Freemium Model

My projects will follow the freemium model I will be creating a lot of content for free as blog posts, but I will also be creating a deeper coaching or information product to accompany the project for people that want to go deeper.

This way I can focus on building multiple streams of income on a variety of subjects and I am not limiting myself to one niche.

The creation of information products and coaching services cause me a lot of “stuckness” I’m a procrastinator (well I think I am, I must look up the meaning of that word one of these days) and I think the momentum of a project will get me through the reasearch and out the other side to build a saleable information product.

Why Am I Experimenting With Projects?

I’m doing this experiment for a number of reasons:

Flexibility to change projects – we live in a very fluid world, things change, online business tactics are moving at warp speed, I can work on Google+ for a couple of months, when the new flavour of the week social media platform comes into view I can start a new project and be very agile.

My goldfish like attention span – I get very bored, very quickly, projects will give me the starters enthusiasm every few month. I run a service business at wpdude.com, I have written about WordPress for more than three years, I find it very hard to write new blog posts about a topic I have covered in-depth for that period of time, whereas I’m enthused about writing my new project.

I get to delve deep – like the dwarfs in Moria I get to mine a project deeply and get to fully understand a topic. One of my favourite things is self education. Reading other people’s work as research for my project is something that excites me. Let’s just hope I don’t dig up a Balrog when I am delving deeply into my project.

Future proof – much like the flexibility option I think projects allow me to future proof my work, my main job is to build an audience under my high level topic of working on-line, then to create projects to solve the problems within my topic. Things change, and I am not sticking with one niche that may become redundant. Did anyone spend a ton of time building a MySpace presence for example?

Inability to multi-task – It can be argued that if I have multiple niche blogs I can create exactly the same results, but a personal inability to multi-task make me think that focusing on one site, building traffic to one site and making a name creating projects for people who work online is better for me than diluting my time over multiple sites and multiple audiences.

Sell projects – projects can become saleable assets once they are complete, they are a packaged piece of work. I could wrap them up as an e-book, or an information product, or spin them out to a separate website which can then be sold as an entity free from me and my main site.

Projects can be cancelled – if I choose a project and it is not resonating with my audience, I can cancel the project, this is not the case once you have selected a niche, you are in for the long haul or you need to abandon your blog.

People change -Neil at 20, is not the same Neil at 30 and definitely not the same Neil at 40. I worked in big corporate IT departments throughout my early career, I was focused, I wanted to climb that slippery pole. Now that pole looks more like a torture implement that people are crucified on. I’m all about the flexibility of solopreneurial enterprise, working on things I love, the Neil at 50 may be all about building an online enterprise that my daughters can join as a family firm; neil-matthews&daughters.com. Projects can change with me.

Renaissance Person 2.0

Michael wrote about the renaissance person 2.0 earlier this year, and I think projects are a brilliant way for the polymath to work on their variety of subjects.

If you have something to say on a lot of topics, projects are a brilliant way to work in a number of fields you are passionate about.

What Do You Think?

Is your blog niche too narrow for you, do you want to move onto different work, but your niche and your audience has an expectation of you to retain the status quo.

Let’s talk in the comments.

About the Author: I’m Neil Matthews, and you can see my work at the imaginatively titled Neil-Matthews.com, my current project is all about Freelancer Marketing, how to bring a steady stream of clients into your freelance business.

On a business blog, where you’re marketing your business and not “just” writing a blog, you do not write a post out of the blue, hit the publish button and call it good.

Unless of course you like wasting your time and getting lackluster results for your efforts.

If you want to see real influence and traction from your blog posts, though, you need to understand the life cycle of a blog post. Once you understand it, you can find ways to take advantage of it to get the maximum return possible on your marketing efforts.

Check out my thoughts on this subject below.

Pre Publication Steps

• Editorial Calendar: The post you’re going to write fits into your editorial calendar. You have an awareness of how a particular post fits into your overall publishing schedule. This helps you create topics that people want to subscribe to because they don’t want to miss the next one. It helps you figure out which previous posts you want to link to it or vice versa, which improves your SEO.
• Research: You may need to do some research. Can you cite examples of what you’re talking about? Can you prove and back up what you’re saying? Incidentally, this is one area where most bloggers could learn a lot from old-school journalism.
• Purpose: Decide what is the purpose of the post. Is it to spur discussion? Get sign-ups? Direct visitors to a product or sales page? Decide what you want people to do when they’re done reading your post, and then tell them to do it.
• Engage: Ask questions of your friends & followers on your social networks and encourage them to ask you questions, too. I see very few people doing this, but what I have seen has proven effective when the post is published. I’ll admit I could do this a lot more myself, and will make more of an effort to in the future.

Writing and Publication

• Write First, Edit Later: In today’s webcentric world of immediate satisfaction, some of the best writing advice from yesterday often gets ignored—and the result is nothing less than crappy writing. But see, having an editorial calendar and knowing in advance what you’re going to be writing means you can take a lot more time to make it your best work.
• Publication Times: There’s been a lot of research and discussion about the best times to publish and that’s great. I love that we have some general data to go by. But it’s just a starting point. What’s generally a “best practice” may not be so great for you at all. And you won’t know unless you look at your social network and site analytics. I use HootSuite (affiliate link), Klout and Google Analytics, mostly.
• Consistency: Having a deliberate posting day and time is important not only for getting the most traffic, comments and social shares, but also because your readers and customers value consistency. Just banging something out and immediately hitting “publish” may not be such a hot idea. Consistency builds trust.

Post-Publication

• Social media automation: If there’s any time when social media automation is appropriate, it’s when you want to promote your own content. You want to create post-dated entries in your social media marketing dashboard (again, HootSuite to the rescue) that will auto-post to Twitter and Facebook. Because people live in different parts of the world and are in different time zones, the only way your stuff is going to get eyes on it is if you send out at least three social network messages to drive traffic. Space them out throughout the day and also for the next few days if you don’t publish every day.
• Comments: Even if your purpose for the post was something other than a strong discussion in the comments, you’ll still get them and you want to nurture that and use them to help extend the lifespan of your post. One way I like to do that is to share a quick note about comments with my friends on social networks. For example, I may tweet out something like: “Interesting discussion on this post. Come have your say.”
• Email: Sure you probably have RSS subscribers to your blog, but the beauty of having an email list is that you can send out an email letting everyone know you have a new post up on the blog. I do not recommend that you just have the whole post go out via email because that does not send your site traffic (and generally traffic has to be on the site to buy something or convert in some other way).
• Backlinks: Can you think of useful ways to link back to this post in later posts you write? This goes back to the notion of having an editorial calendar above. When you’ve got a bird’s eye view of your publication timeline for a longish stretch of time, it’s easier to post topics that are related enough to each other to deserve backlinks. And again, that’s awesome for SEO.
• Resharing: Is “resharing” a word? It is now! Writing “best of” and “round up” link collection types of posts are a great way to reshare older content and give it some new life. A plugin like Tweet Old Post is a great way to automate this so you don’t even have to think about it once you’ve got it set up. So are “most popular posts” or “most commented posts” style of WordPress plugins (be careful not to clutter up your blog design, though).

What You Need to Do Now

Get a snapshot of your current analytics: stuff like general site traffic and visits to blog posts over the course of a week after publication. Then try these ideas out for several weeks and check your numbers again. I’d love to hear it goes for you, so make sure you leave a comment here and let me know.

This is a guest post by John Hoff.

Sucky blogs tell.

Good blogs teach.

Great blogs have impact.

Blogs that make an impact on readers and the blogosphere shine the best when they do one or both of the following:

• Solve something
• Share something

But just because you do those things doesn’t mean your blog is going to have an impact on your readers.

So let’s talk about a few ideas that you should consider if you want to own one of those “great” blogs and become the best blogger you can be.

Who Did You Say Your Blog is For?

Many people think of their blog as a tool they will use as a means to their own end or purpose.

For example, they might have started a blog to attract potential customers to their site in hopes they would buy something. In other words, the blog is a means to the owner’s end.

But I would challenge that idea.

Instead, I want you to think of it like this:

Your blog should be a tool you use for a means to someone else’s end. By thinking about it in that way, you will be positioning yourself and your blog as a reliable and valuable resource for people to come to for information, advice, and/or coaching.

And when they see you as a positioned authority, your blog will begin to make an impact on people’s lives.

It might be monetarily, physically, or a psychological impact; but either way, it’s making an impact on people’s lives… including yours.

Take Lifehacker.com, for example.

The site is all based around one thing… making your life easier, smarter, more efficient, successful, and so on.

The site is so successful because A) the information there is rock-solid and works and B) they do a great job at focusing on the reader and their needs.

Your job then as a blogger is to generate new ideas and tell your readers in a way which adds value to their lives.

So how do you do that?

Well if you haven’t figured it out yet, the first step is to realize that everything you do online is for someone else, not you.

In other words, don’t engage in “Me Marketing”.

Discovering Your True Self

I suggest you do this before you dive into any profession.

What you as an entrepreneur need to do for yourself is discover who the real you is.

Question your beliefs.

Why do you believe in what you believe? Was it taught to you by your parents, teachers, or friends?

Try to discover what your purpose in life is because once you understand that, then you can charge ahead in whatever it is you do with full understanding of who you are, why you’re doing what you’re doing, and how you can make an impact.

And don’t stop there.

Question why you started your blog and then create an elevator pitch for what your blog is all about.

Imagine for a moment that you met me at a conference and only had a 60 seconds to tell me about you and what your blog is about.

What would you say?

If I were to ask you what lied at the end of your “yellow brick road,” what would you tell me?

By getting these essential insight out of the way, then and only then can you know that your feet are firmly planted on the ground and provide yourself with the necessary confidence, perspective, and point of view you need to charge ahead and complete your task of world domination…

Or something like that anyway.

After you know who the real you is and what the real purpose of your blog is, you’ll then want to do a little research.

Doing Proper Research

The foundation by which a product enters the market should always be built upon proper research.

Without proper research you will be taking shots in the dark trying to find those readers who will connect with you, grow to trust you, and ultimately buy from you.

Two days of intense research and thought could potentially save you two years of discovering things by trial and error.

Here are a few things you will want to include in your research about your target customers before or even after you have started your blog.

Understanding and visualizing your target customers and readers

Whom are you trying to reach?

If your answer is “everyone”, then your blog will most likely be for “no one”.

The only traits every human being on this planet share are the physical traits of our species; so unless your blog has the answers to eternal life, then it’s best to narrow that “everyone” down to “these people here.”

As I mentioned before, success is also rooted in self discovery.

Create that elevator pitch I mentioned a moment ago for your blog so that you can better know which group of people you will be wanting to research.

It amazes me how many bloggers think they know who their blog is for but in reality, they only know half the story.

A blog about “WordPress tips and tricks” is not good enough.

I bet the less experienced blogger who puts that as their tagline thinks anyone and everyone who uses WordPress would like to read their blog.

… No!

Remember, a blog for everyone is a blog for no one.

What level are we talking about here? Are they tips for people looking to make money online and are using WordPress as a means to get there?

Because there’s a huge difference between those WordPress users and the ones who are PHP programmers looking for slick tricks they can use to enhance that WordPress theme they are building.

Once you know who your blog will be targeting, try to answer questions like:

• What age group am I targeting?
• Where do they live and what do they do for a living?
• Are they living hard lives or are they among the privileged few?
• What nationality are they?
• Do they believe in God?

The better zeroed-in you are on who your readers and potentially customers are, the more of an impact on people’s lives you will have because your message is the message they are looking for.

And by having a basic understanding of who they are and where they are coming from, you can tailor your message to speak their language.

Remember, your blog is for them, not you.

In order to make an impact on someone’s life through your blog, you’re going to need to try and figure out the best you can the following things about them.

What are their:

• needs
• wants
• desires
• problems
• concerns

You’ll also want to know what information they are looking for online and in what format they might be looking for it to be in.

Might they be looking for videos, audio, text only, Kindle format, books, etc.

By giving them what they want and in the way they want it, you’ll be getting what you want.

The key ingredient when it comes to customer and visitor research is empathy.

Do your very best to empathize with your visitor and look at what they might be learning from you from their point of view.

But before we close out the topic of customer research, it’s important to note one thing…

The impossibility of customer research certainty

In his book, Landing Page Optimization, Tim Ash references Larry Marine (founder of Intuitive Design & Research) on how a single person can never fully capture the perspective of others.

Larry pointed out the difficulty of our task of “knowing our visitors and customers” as online marketers.

He said…

• Everything you think you know about the user is probably wrong
• The users aren’t who you think they are
• They do things differently than you think
• They have different reasons for needing your product than you think

Here’s the thing.

Although you can look in your analytics program to figure out things like where in the world people are coming from (which could imply nationality and religion), there are way too many variables which come into play for which you will never be able to know.

Things like:

• personality type
• physical environment
• distractions (kids anyone?)
• whether or not they are at work

In other words, you can never be certain what baggage they are bringing with them when they visit your blog.

So you might know things like age, race, location, and what kinds of information your blog’s visitors are looking for, but there will always be that grey area in which you can never fully know what each individual fully needs in order for you to make an impact on them.

Put YOU Into Your Blog and Content

The best blogs and content written online, in my opinion, feel like an extension of the blog author.

This makes their blog less digitized by the Internet and let others know that there’s a real person behind those words.

I wrote an ebook awhile back called, WordPress Defender (thanks Michael for helping me with the title). It’s an ebook about WordPress security and how to secure your blog against hackers.

For most people, it’s probably one of the least fun subjects to read about.

Who wants to read about WordPress security plugins, WordPress vulnerabilities, who has the newest .htaccess security code out there, and so on.

When I first began brainstorming the idea of diving into writing an ebook on WordPress security, I was faced with two difficult issues I knew I’d have to “take on”.

1. The subject seemed very dry, boring, and nearly 100% technical (and we all love reading technical manuals, don’t we?)
2. For online marketing, it’s typically easier to create a product people are actually looking for rather than creating a product people “should do”. In other words, I would have to educate them as to why my ebook and the WordPress security subject was so important to them.

But then I realized I had a great true story to tell.

The reason I educated myself on the subject in the first place was because my wife’s website got hacked and we went through a lot of grief, time wasted, and money spent trying to undo what someone so viciously did in one day.

While that did solve number one listed above, it still didn’t answer number two; however, I figured I could help people who needed it so I went ahead and wrote the book and launched the site.

By reaching out to others and describing the pains and triumphs I had gone through and centering my ebook’s content around the reader’s education through my own personal journey, my ebook made an impact on a number of people’s lives.

The point I’m trying to make here is that when you put your own personal experiences, pains, and triumphs into your blog, people will have the ability to relate to you.

And when they can relate to you, the possibility opens up so that you can make an impact on their lives.

But you have to do it in a way that’s not about you, because it’s never about you. It’s about your reader… always.

Keep in mind, however, that although you should focus on putting more of you into your blog, you also need to remember that customer research you did above. What you don’t want to do is talk over their heads.

I probably know more about WordPress security then most of you.

But the second I start talking .htaccess rules and PHP coding, I bet I’d lose 95% of you.

Now if my blog’s target readers are at that skill level, then fine. But keep in mind that many times an authority in a given field has a higher understanding  of a subject then their followers do.

So it’s important to relate your topic to a reader in a way that they can understand it.

Always Tell the Truth

There’s a very popular notion circulating around the blogosphere these days. It’s the notion of how your content is about storytelling.

While true, it is about storytelling, there’s one more concept I’d like to add to that statement.

Telling the truth.

So a revised version could state that creating great content online is based around telling true stories.

If your story is made up or it’s an example which is too farfetched, then you’ll begin to lose your reader’s trust…

… and when you lose their trust, it’ll be almost impossible to make an impact on them.

Be Passionate

You have to care about what you’re writing about.

If you don’t care, odds are that your readers will pick up on that and who wants to read a blog authored by someone who doesn’t care what they’re writing about.

Your passion for a topic can be infectious and lead others to follow you because they want some of what you have.

Be Original

In my experience, new bloggers go through these three phases when it comes to this topic:

First they figure they’ll dive into blogging because they have so much knowledge in their area of expertise and they feel they can make a contribution.

Second, one day they’ll come to a point where they realize that the topic they are blogging about already has a large number of blogs discussing the idea, many of which are authored by professionals with a greater knowledge or experience then they have.

What the blogger soon comes to realize is that even in the blogosphere, there’s nothing new under the sun.

Third, at that point they start wondering how they can create a blog which makes an impact.

Take into account, too, that there’s been billions and billions of people discussing topics and ideas for thousands of years.

So how in the heck are you supposed to be original?

Assuming you’re one of those bloggers who makes it through the dip, you’ll come to realize that out of thousands of years and billions of people all discussing topics and ideas, there’s one thing you’ve got which they don’t.

Your perspective.

How can you give a fresh perspective to an already talked about topic? How can you reimagine topics and ideas and give them your point of view and experience?

In journalism they call it, Man Bites Dog.

In other words, how can your perspective shed new insights to a topic or turn what’s otherwise thought of as normal and ordinary on its head and really get people to start thinking.

And when you get people to think, you can then…

Invoke Curiosity

Remember, as informed bloggers, our job is to convey our information to our readers by telling true stories.

But what story can’t be strengthened by adding an element of surprise or the unexpected?

Doing such things can invoke curiosity with your readers which in turn can deepen your relationship with them.

Case Example

Not too long ago I wrote an article and sent it out to my newsletter subscribers.

But that particular article came out of left field for many of my followers… up to the point where I actually had about a dozen or so emails of people telling me, “John, I had no idea you knew all this”.

What did I do?

I gave them something they weren’t expecting, and they got it from someone they didn’t expect to get it from.

I gave them a link to download a free ebook I had written (at first for them but now available for everyone) on the topic of search engine optimization.

At first glance you wouldn’t think that’s all that special or unexpected because there are tons of people giving away free ebooks, usually in exchange for an email address.

But here’s how mine made an impact: It wasn’t expected.

Plus, it wasn’t what’s typical with free ebooks. This was a comprehensive guide which provided quality information and real life examples of what tools I use and how I use them to rank in Google.

The list I sent this link out to at the time were only on my list because they bought my WordPress security ebook, WordPress Defender, and up until then all they really ever heard from me in my newsletter were WordPress security-related topics.

In their eyes, I was a WordPress security authority.

What most of them didn’t realize though is that I’m not just some WordPress security guy. I’m actually a content marketer (and, ironically, not a copywriter) who has a number of websites and articles which I’ve had to rank in Google in order to make me some money.

After downloading my ebook, I had a number of people reply to my newsletter article telling me they had no idea I knew this much about SEO.

A number of other people asked me why I gave away all this information for free, because they would have bought it from me.

But here’s what many people didn’t realize right at first: it’s a funnel.

I wanted to transition and reposition myself in the eyes of my WordPress security  followers from one idea of what John Hoff is to another.

I wanted to introduce them to the real John Hoff.

And the surprise I sent them deepened my relationship with many of them.

In other words, I made an impact on their view of me.

So the question then is, what can you do to make an impact on your readers? Have you done something which has generated a big response?

Go back and analyze what you did.

Chances are you weren’t thinking about why it made an impact on your readers as much as the results the impact had.

About the Author

John Hoff is the guy who really really hates malicious hackers and is for a limited time offering Remarkablogger readers a 50% discount on his WordPress Security book and videos.

Use Promo Code remarkablogger.

What did you sell today?

It’s easy to feel like you did a lot because you plowed through a wall of unread and unanswered email, spent hours going through your feeds and social media streams looking for awesome content to curate for your ideal customer and spent hours wearing out your keyboard as you banged out a blog post worthy of the gods.

But…

Did you sell anything, today?

Did you at least do something that directly leads to bigger numbers at the bottom line?

• Create information products to augment your coaching/consulting
• Create coaching/consulting packages to augment your information products
• Seek out referrals from existing customers
• Check with existing customers to see if they need anything new or have feedback so you can improve a product of yours (and then make those improvements and reissue/relaunch)
• Improve your conversion rate on specific pages of your site
• Make an offer somewhere (Twitter is great for this: I sell a lot of ebooks by simply remembering to tweet about the book)
• Increase the frequency of your offers (don’t be afraid to amp it up a bit)

Image by Striatic on Flickr

This is a guest post by Tommy. As in “just Tommy no last name Tommy.”

What do you do?

No, actually you know what? I don’t care what you do. What can you do for me?

Come to think of it, I don’t really care what you can do for me either.

I have 10 million people a day telling me what they can do for me.

Do you understand the problem that I’m having?

Now we might be getting somewhere.

The biggest problem with online businesses.

Well, business in general, is that everyone is so eager to tell you what they do.

Tell me if this looks familiar

“I help entrepreneurs make their business awesome” “I teach solo business owners how to engage with their customers and increase their bottom line”

“I help bloggers make money on the internet”

There are a million other templates I could use, but you get the idea. Everyone is telling you who they are, what they can do, and how awesome they are.

But guess what? If everyone’s doing it, it’s not interesting.

And the truth is, online is the only place in the world where people who specialize in a certain area are so eager to impress you to get your business.

If we were to see specialists in other businesses be so eager, it may actually creep you out.

And because we’ve trained the marketplace to expect this sort of “Just let me prrooooove myself to you mentality” it actually marginalizes your ability to actually help people.

Going to the Doctor.

To really demonstrate what I’m talking about here, I’m going to tell you my most recent story of going to the Doctor.

Over the past few weeks, my stomach has been killing me. I eat, it hurts. I breathe, it hurts.I poop, it hurts.

Finally, I decide that it hurts enough to go to the Doctor.

I tell my doctor that my stomach hurts, and immediately he gives me 5 different medications.

He tells me to take these medications, “just in case” then schedules me for an operation to have a piece of my stomach removed.

Then proceeds to tell me that he’s done this operation 50 times in the last three weeks, to remove a piece of my stomach is “actually not has hard as you would think” and with every single one of his patients he’s pretty sure they’ll see total success and after the recovery period.

Of course, I’m a little hesitant, so I ask if I can get the names and numbers of the people who have had the surgery so I can vet the quality of his work.

I also ask if he can do a different smaller, no risk, operation on my toe, “so I can be sure he knows what he’s doing”

He agrees, so now I have a list of names to call, and that nasty hangnail is finally taken care of (surely now I’m ready for that stomach operation right?)

Of course this is false.

And if the medical industry worked like this, we’d be even more screwed than we already are.

Yet, when it comes to online marketing, and by extension blogging, this is exactly what 99% of people are doing.

You tell me how awesome you are, how much you can fix my problem, how you’ve done it for so many other people, but really you’ve never taken a second to shut up and actually listen to me.

In the case of the doctor visit above, had I gone to my doctor he would have asked me a million and a half questions, poked at my abdomen, and finally asked me to drop trow and turn my head and cough.

Is it embarassing?

Maybe, but if I know it helps me to fix the problem, than I’m probably going to do it.

And let’s say that he felt a lump in my abdomen, if it were even just an indication it could be cancerous, you can guarantee that he’d have me scheduled for a biopsy, and if it meant I would just know it was cancer, you bet I’d be asking if they’d be willing to dig in tomorrow.

Diagnosing the problem.

Now let’s think about this for a second, if your doctor told you it was possible you had stomach cancer, you’d probably be all for the biopsy too, just to find out.

You’d be willing to let them cut you open and take a piece of your body out, with the only guarantee being your specialist could “learn more about the situation.”

How profound.

Now let’s apply this to your business.

How well are you diagnosing the problem on a case by case basis?

Or better yet, with your blog how well are you helping people to identify they even have a problem?

In most cases, people don’t know they even have a problem or how serious their problem actually is.

The only thing they’re really familiar with is the immediate pain they’re having right now.

So if you’re using your content to tune them into the pain and show them just how serious that pain is, they can only assume you’re so familiar with the pain, because you know how to fix it.

So for example: Which sounds like something a normal human being can identify with?

“I help you get more comments!”

vs

“Without feedback, your businesses relevance is slowly eroding.”

If you picked number 2, congratulations!

You’re a normal human being.

The second option is relevant. It’s something you’re familiar with. It’s something that might be keeping you up at night.

If you’ve been noticing that your feedback is dwindling and your sales are started to taper off, you might be wondering if your business is still relevant to it’s customers.

And as a service provider, while your specialty might be “Get more comments” the context for the conversation you have with your prospective customer is wildly different.

In the first instance, ” I help you get more comments!” your prospect is coming to you with their arms folded thinking “Yeah right, says you and every other jackass with a computer and a Twitter account”

But in the second case, “Without feedback, your business relevance is slowly eroding.” Simply by coming to you, your prospect has put themselves in the position of, “I need help”

Which I don’t know about you, but I like working with the people who know they need help, not people who are defensive from the very beginning of our relationship.

This also keeps you out of the position of constantly having to “prove yourself” and allows you to actually dig deeper into the problem to find out what exactly how the service you provide can solve that problem.

Charging higher prices.

So where does charging higher prices come into play in all this?

If you’ve taken the time to understand your prospects problem more thoroughly than anyone else in the market, and you’ve helped them to really experience the gap of where they are, and where they’d like to be, offering a service at a higher price isn’t only ok, it’s expected.

Think of it this way. You’re on the person’s website that said “I help you get more comments!” and you buy a $47 ebook that proposes that it will help you get more comments, even though you make the purchase, you know that even if the information in the ebook doesn’t work out, $47 is still a pretty low investment, so no harm no foul.

(in reality what’s happening is because the investment was relativity low risk, you’re not taking the information all that seriously too, so you’ve essentially handed somebody $47 for putting a bunch of words in a .pdf you may or may not ever actually read, but more on this in a second)

However, when someone’s taken the time to really help you connect with the problem, and help you understand that it’s potentially worse than you thought, if they offer you a low risk investment for a high caliber solution, you might err on the side of caution.

Would you trust a stomach surgeon to operate on you for $500?

Not if you value your stomach.

By taking the time to really understand your prospect’s problem, offering a solution at a higher price helps them decide if they reeeeally want to fix it.

When they’ve decided to invest in themselves, they’re going to listen to every word that you say, intently.

Does everyone buy? No of course not.

But if one customer pays the same as 10 customers, then guess what? You’re doing 1/10th of the work and making the same amount of money.

The trick.

Target people with money.

Don’t believe everything you read. Just because Chili’s is offering 2 meals for $20 doesn’t mean Billy Gates is strapped for cash.

And it doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a problem you might be able to solve.

But if you’re charging “common man” prices, it does mean he’s not going to take you seriously.

There are some people in the world who want “only the best” and will only work with people who consider themselves “the best”.

Under pricing limits your chances at being attractive, or being taken seriously by someone with money.

It’s all relative, right?

If you’re making 50K a year, there’s no way a $9 ebook would help you solve your issues.

If you’re making $500K a year a $47 ebook would certainly never be able to address issues that are relevant to your business, no matter how well the title seemed to target your needs.

Same goes for services, no way would a $500k/year business take you seriously at $2k / month.

They know that in order for you to also have a $500K business you would have to service 20 clients @ 2k/month. There’s no way that scales to be manageable. Even at 1 hour a day, you’d never have time for anything else, and they know it.

However, at 4 or 5 figures, that 500K business (consciously or not) starts to take you more seriously. Which is important, because they can easily afford you. Now, you just need to listen to their problems from their perspective.

Because when everyone else is pitching how awesome they are, paying attention and understanding where they are coming from is all you really need to stand out in their mind.

About the Author: Tommy Walker is an Online Marketing Strategist and host of “Inside the Mind” a fresh and entertaining video show about Internet Marketing Strategy.

You take the blue pill — the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill — you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

You are Neo and I’m Morpheus. You’re about to create a blog in order to market your business. The blue pill is typical blogging advice infesting the rest of the interwebs. The red pill is Wonderland.

Business blogging.

Business blogging isn’t pro-blogging. I know, I know, I’ve said this before. I’m going to keep saying it because it needs to be said. I’ll be the lone voice crying out in the wilderness (with prophet-like beard to match).

You may not realize how deep this rabbit hole goes. If you were writing a “normal” blog or a “monetized” blog (every time you use the word monetized, by the way, you should know God kills a kitten… by clubbing it with a baby seal) and wanted to create a list of “blogging best practices” you’d have something like this:

• Engage the audience.
• Encourage subscribers.
• Promote your blog in social media.
• Follow common SEO “best practices” (oh, oh, beware those words!).
• Write interesting or useful content (a more worthless and unhelpful directive doesn’t exist).

Goals

Audience Engagement

If there’s one area where there’s overlap between the Matrix and the real world, it’s in audience engagement. The techniques for this will work in almost any context:

• Polarize opinion by reducing and simplifying a debate.
• Ask open-ended questions.
• Don’t tell everything you know so others feel obligated to mention what they know.

Subscribers

A pro blog wants subscribers so they can keep presenting advertising and affiliate links to them. A business blog wants customers, not subscribers. I don’t care how many subscribers Remarkablogger has. I care about how many clients I have and whether or not my business is successful. I don’t want a successful blog for its own sake, I want a successful business.  I value my clients much more highly than I value readers who never or never will buy anything from me.

In fact one of my clients will be creating a WordPress-based site but in all likelihood, it will not have a blog on it! Blog consulting indeed…

Promotion

A pro blog or monetized blog (woops, there goes another kitten) basically whores itself out to every imaginable method of promotion because the goal is to build up the size of the audience and have high pageviews so advertising can be sold.

A business blog may not hardly need to be promoted at all. There are cases where the site and the blog act as more of a glorified online “business card” which is visited by a prospect after she is sent your name by a friend. In other words,  word-of-mouth referrals are a chief way of getting leads. Normal blogs don’t deal with this at all. The closest thing they have is sharing via social media or forwarding an email, but it’s not the same.

A business owner is not interested in building a popular blog for its own sake, she’s interested in selling her products or services to the right people. What she does to achieve this is not promotion so much as engaging with the right people (her market) in the right ways.

SEO

The differences here are more subtle but even more crucial. It’s important to remember content creates the audience. As a business owner, if you understand what I call the “three P’s” your content will practically write itself:

• People
• Problem
• Product

Get these right and SEO is a matter of light technical importance. You can achieve leads and sales with only a basic understanding of SEO because the truly hard work—getting your 3 P’s right—already took place. In fact if you take nothing else from this article, you can dramatically improve your business in very short order by taking a hard look at your 3 P’s and nailing them down definitively. If it still seems like mud soup to you, then you may need a blog consultant to help you figure it out. I happen to know one.

Content

This is the big one: content. Interesting content. Good content. On a pro blog, good content keeps people coming back for more ad impressions and click-throughs on affiliate links.

On a business blog, good content gets you leads and sales. You can’t even begin to create good content until you know your 3 P’s. Otherwise, you have no idea who you’re really writing for, what they care about or what you could do that’s worth more than money to them. Do clients get referred to you first and then read your blog, or do they find you online, read and then hire you? That makes a difference, too.

One of the biggest differences between a pro blog and an business blog is that a pro blog’s content is designed to solve problems and be useful, while a business blog’s content should raise questions and take a stand.

What You Didn’t Think About

After you take the red pill and live in Wonderland, you have to consider stuff that people plugged into the Matrix never even consider or will never notice:

• Conversion design – what elements on your site’s pages and their arrangement encourages inquiries.
• Secret sales pages – do you know what parts of your site really convince people to work with you? It’s not what you think.
• Product arc – do you have a master product/service timeline that matches up with the duration a customer is with you?
• Productivity and efficiency – when you have a business to run that’s even somewhat successful, you have far less time to do all the things pro bloggers say you should be doing, because you’re busy helping your clients. I actually spend very little time blogging, commenting and being on social media. The majority of my time is spent creating product and working with clients.

The One

Yeah, I suppose the Matrix analogy may be a bit worn-out after all this time, but let me make one more comparison. Neo is The One. He’s the dude who is more special than anyone else. He’s set apart from the masses, even in the gritty reality of the people who don’t live plugged into the Matrix.

In reality, few people succeed.

Very few.

Think about that.

You are the One of your world, but only if you don’t do what everyone else is doing. Most people, when given the choice, happily swallow the blue pill. And even the ones who want to know the truth—who take the red pill—are still not at the level of “the One.” That takes something not even a different viewpoint can give you.

• New social media services appear (and sometimes disappear or fall out of favor).
• New online services become available that didn’t exist before.
• Hardware gets faster and has more storage for the same dollar as last year’s.
• Mobile apps, hardware and services is evolving at a frightening pace.

Staying on top of this stuff can seem like a full-time job.

It can be enough to make you want to curl up into a ball and suck your thumb.

But you have to be able to deal with it: your entire business is made possible by this rapidly evolving technology, so you can’t exactly spit in its face or refuse to keep informed.

• Your website pretty much is your entire “business.” It’s your base of operations.
• Most of your marketing and communications is done online (I don’t even hardly use a phone, I use Skype).
• If you sell information, you’re creating information products using desktop and/or online software.
• You need a constellation of online services to operate your business: payment processing, invoicing, email list management, advertising, etc.

The main lens through which I deal with all this is blogging and internet marketing, of course. And because blogging, social media and email are your main marketing channels, too, this is also a lens looking at your experience.

• The evolution of WordPress and other blogging platforms.
• New WordPress plugins.
• The rapid changes in commenting as it crossbreeds with social networks.
• The advent of theme frameworks, and in particular the advances in my favorite one, Headway.
• Changes in social networks and new networks (hello, Google+).
• New marketing possibilities through mobile apps.

How do I stay on top it all without going crazy? How do I decide what to do and not do? Here’s how:

Technology Provides the Tools, You Have to Get the Tool Catalog

Are you still using an ax while others are using chainsaws? Did you even know chainsaws were available? There’s generally three kinds of change to keep track of:

• Hardware.
• Software.
• What people are doing with hardware and software.

If you wanted to, the third one could be sub-divided into “in general” and “for your industry.”

You don’t need to follow a million sources of information for this. For general tech, only a few:

• TechCrunch – the NYT of tech.
• Gizmodo – Gadgetry, general life-hackery and what people doing with this stuff.
• Dvice – Actually owned by SyFy science fiction network, I find this site a useful hodgepodge of “news from the near future” in many different categories besides just computers.
• Web Worker Daily – Because you work online.

No doubt there are other sites you may feel belong on this list, but since overload is what we’re trying to avoid here, try to keep your own personal list small and populated only with powerhouses or the most useful info.

What to Look for in the Firehose Stream

In order to stay on top of things without going bonkers, here’s my personal list of “filters” or criteria I apply to any headline or piece of news I see:

• Does this matter to me right now? If not, how soon will it matter? If it matters now, I learn more. If it won’t matter until later, I may only make a mental note of it and let it go.
• Innovation in usage: I look for people using things in new or unconventional ways. Whether those things are new or old, doesn’t matter. For example, using an old inkjet printer to print out human organs or the marketing power of a good old-fashioned hand-written note.
• Does this make communication between people easier? If so, it’s probably a winner. If not, it’s gonna stumble at least and at most fizzle out.
• What is being disrupted here, if anything? When it seems entire industries are practically put to the sword (newspapers and soon television and real estate) you need to pay attention. Why? Because not only will your own life change as a result, but depending on your business, there may be opportunities for you in it.
• Who is profiting from this, and how? Follow the money trail, right? For example, the advance of big box stores (disruption) appears to be killing off mom-and-pop stores everywhere, until you start looking at small shops that are responding in creative ways and thriving. There are probably lessons for you in what those business owners are doing.
• What will happen to those who struggle to adapt? There may be opportunity in that, too: pain points which serve to drive new services. For example, as large legal firms fire lawyers at an ever-faster rate, more lawyers will go solo. That’s a huge opportunity for the right people. What about newspaper reporters? Real estate agents? Shop owners? Administrative assistants? Factory workers?

Technological Change Creates Chaos, but Chaos Creates Opportunity

Technology is disrupting all manner of industry and business, and out of that chaos comes opportunity. This is probably the biggest reason why I do not fear or struggle with technological change. As human beings, we’re wired to desire stasis and we often don’t like rapid changes. However, we’re also wired to look out for ways to survive and advance. Survival and advancement are now tied to computer, software and internet technologies and services. When it’s to your obvious and clear advantage, you can change your mind about anything.

Remember What Doesn’t Change

Even though it may feel like the ground is unsteady beneath your feet, there is much that will never change and you’d do well to remember:

• There will always be rich and poor.
• People will always want to improve their lot.
• There is never a shortage of money in the economy.
• Opportunity comes for those prepared to receive it.
• People love to–need to–talk to each other, and technology enables this.
• Why people buy and how they are persuaded never changes, and technology never changes this.
• People need to have alone time occasionally (probably the most unmet need of all in this connected age).

That last point is more important than you think. One sure way to feel overwhelmed by something is to never get a break from it. Pull the plug, turn shit off, and go for a walk. Or just sit in silence. Meditate or take a nap. It’s important to not lose your perspective.

What are your tips for handling technological change? What works for you?