Small business blogging can work, if you follow established best practices. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel with every single blog idea that flits across your subconsciousness. You don’t have to be creative.
“If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative.” -David Ogilvy
What you have to do is follow what works. Do what we already know what to do and cover your bases beyond that. Meaning this: you know what messages work in your business, they work online and offline. You have to communicate frequently first, and then rrefine your message. People expect instant results, and that’s possible, but not without really top shelf communication.
So, if you’re not getting incredible results from your blog & social media, maybe you’re making one of these mistakes:
- Not having info customers are looking for.
- Not having enough information (show more leg)
- Having information about YOU and not about what the CUSTOMER gets.
- Having no contact/normal & formal business information for the customer.
- Having no social proof that you do a good job (memberships & testimoinals)
- Having old, outdated “coming soon” pages.
- Having too many placeholders
- Having too many different kinds of offers (nobody wants to deal with jacks of all trades, seem like a specialist).
- Having a messy site.
- Not having enough stuff about your company.
- Putting blogs that are all about buying now, without informing the customers.
- Putting posts out there that don’t help people understand more about what your business.
- Not responding to comments.
- Not loving links.
- Not including metadescriptions with every post.
- Not including some post structure.
- Not including a business address on your RSS feed.
- Making customers fill in a form if they want to talk and not giving them control (Really, really arrogant).
- Not mentioning what you sell & why you blog.
- Having 1000 categories with one post each.
- Having six bajilion tags (kill tags)
- Having dates all over the place on your blog.
- Not backing up claims.
- Having too many links.
There are more mistakes you can make, but take heart: it’s easy to do everything right, the path is well lit and easily viewed.
The current 2.0 obsession is personal branding. I respect some of the ideas. Make a name for yourself, do what it takes to be known. Get followers. Be a rockstar freelancer. Be buzzworthy. Be an event. Be a micro celebrity. That’s what folks want. Seem to be successful, fake it till you make it. Total Crap.
It’s mostly crap, unless it’s a means to communicate how you serve people.
Sure, being known is important. I get it. But people are focusing on getting known first. Before they have skills. Before they focus on what they are here to give, how they are here t help. “Know me.” is the entitled cry that people have. Things become about people in lieu of ideas, and the man and the work get muddled up so that an attack on the work is an attack on the man. When we are all about us, then what happens is not good.
My Dream Personal Branding Workshop
Instead of a Personal Branding Workshop on how to dress, how to appear, how to be successful, how to look good, I’d change the focus. I want to be known for helping small businesses. I want to be known as the guy that taught small businesses how to make money from their blogs. So, my workshop would focus on this: what are you giving to others.
My agenda:
- Developing a valuable giveaway to be known for.
- Creating usefulness for the public.
- Networking with other people that are giving value away.
- Putting the focus on the people you want to help.
- Creating a mindset of service, and the skillset to serve.
That’s it. Customer focused. I don’t matter to the customer. What I look like doesn’t matter. If I have a dog doesn’t matter. What matters is who I’m here to help, what I’m giving to you, and how I can be of service to you. Focusing on image first, without the heart of service will get some results. Not nearly the results though, that are yours by focusing on how you can help other people.
Personal Branding Tips That Matter
But if you focus on helping others FIRST, if you focus on making it so that people win from working on you…you get more. That’s what’s making me wealthy. When I switched my service from “what can Chris get” to “what can Chris do to help,” the world radically changed for me. That is making me financially secure faster than any skill I’ve ever acquired. My personal branding statement isn’t about me, it’s about what I do to help.
- Focus on caring first. People smell BS.
- Focus on giving more to others.
- Focus on being of service in every way.
- Focus on what service you give to others.
That’s it. The people that do this with the highest level of authority and skill are all about this simple idea are all about this. So ask: is your message making you a star, your content a star, or what you’re here to give a star? What is more attractive to others, your success, or your service?
Personal Branding For Small Business and soloprenuers has to be about what you’re doing for others. Period. I’ll hit this more often and do some case studies as time permits.
So anyway, I’m trying to figure out what I want to do with my company, what I want to believe in and I’m coming up with a few ideas that I have always believed. Since
Ryan Holiday nailed it with regard to consultants, I wanna go in the opposite direction: I’ve productized everything from Blog Design (available now) to Social Media Account Creation (coming next monday 7/27) to SEO-ification. (Available by invite now). The goal is to make EVERYTHING cheap, FAST, and include MASSIVE amounts of training videos with it all.
To not do stuff that I don’t know well. To deliver on time, to be a stand up guy, to make myself, my parents proud.
But the deal is this–I believe in the following statements with all of my heart.
- We deliver as much real value as we possibly can at low prices.
- We are the fastest company to deliver blogs & systems for small businesses to communicate.
- We Do What We Say We’ll Do When We Say We’ll Do it.
- Our customers get their investment back–and more–when they use our products.
- We give our customers training on everything we do for them.
- We work with small business owners first and are set up to honor their needs.
- We do this stuff: We set a good example when it comes to efficient content creation.
- We collaborate with others and honor our partners relationship with their clients.
- We honor people that help us.
