Dare To Be Different

October 31, 2009 By Leave a Comment

When we first start our business, we are told to research, to find out what works for others and to determine how we are different.  But many of us are afraid to take that step that would keep us from being  just “more of the same.”  We copy what works for others in our industry and are afraid to be different.

Fear of being different is often what keeps us in place and keeps our business from standing out in the crowd.  Fear stands between us and success. 

Do you really want to be successful in your industry?   Do you want to be what Seth Godwin describes as a “purple cow in a field of brown cows”?  Then. . . . ..

Don’t be afraid to stray from the proven patterns created by others!

What worked for other people, might work for you. But it might not also.  It might make you just another one of those brown cows munching away in the field instead of the “purple cow” that gets the attention.  If you want to stand out from all the other gift companies, then find the unexplored paths. Lead people to places they have never visited before! Try new things.  Add new products.  Create new markets.  If it doesn’t work, try something else.

Don’t be afraid to be yourself!

It’s your business and you are your business.  Don’t try to be something you are not.  Let a little bit of “you” show through in your website and both your online and offline marketing.  It makes the business less commercial and more friendly.  And, best of all, it creates TRUST. 

If you’re writing a blog, and have an opinion, state it.  If you’re not comfortable with your own opinions and viewpoints, don’t blog. Blogging is about being personal.  It’s not about being more of the same. Your voice is YOU and is different than all the other voices in all the other blogs within your industry.   Even if all of the bloggers in the gift industry say the same thing, your voice is what will make your statement stand out and be different.

Don’t think you can please everyone all the time!

Because you can’t.  If you’re blogging, your opinion is going to be different than that of others.  That’s a chance you take when you let YOU show through.  Without intending to, you may offend someone or they may read something entirely different into your meaning.   If you’re operating a business website, there’s no way you can offer something for everyone.  Even the way you have your site set up may offend some.  A Bible verse may turn off those who are not Christian while those “Naughty” gift baskets that you offer on Valentine’s Day may offend the more conservative.  Sure, whichever direction you take, you may lose a few customers along the way.  But you will be yourself and, by daring to be yourself–even if it’s different than the standard– you may attract even more customers.  You may even discover a whole new market that you never thought of targeting before.

Don’t be afraid to dream!

Dream. Hope. Believe! If you continue doing things the same way all the time, you will achieve the same results.  Act on those dreams or  you’ll never achieve them. Believe in yourself and understand what makes you different.  Don’t just march in the gift industry parade or even in the parade of life.  Step up and LEAD THAT PARADE!

The leader of every parade is someone who  DARED TO BE DIFFERENT!

Filed Under: Blogging, Gift Baskets, The World Around Us Tagged With: , , , ,

Blogging –Tips for writing blog posts.

June 19, 2009 By 1 Comment

A lot of you probably say that you don’t have time to start a blog because you don’t have the time or creativity to write long posts on the blog.  My answer to that is:  Blog posts don’t have to be long to be valuable.  Some of the most read posts on this blog were fairly short.

So just how long does a blog post need to be?

And the answer is:  As long as necessary to get your point across without boring your reader.  Some tips to consider:

  • The attention span of your readers.  Most readers won’t spend very long reading each post so only write a long post when you have something important to say.
  • Search Engine Optimization.  Most web pages should be at least 250 words long for maximum SEO.  You could apply this to blog posts as well since each post is considered a page.  But only write posts that long when you have that much to say.
  • Quantity of posts on the blog.  If you write frequently, you might want to write shorter posts than if you only write an occasional post.
  • Variety is the spice of life.  So mix short posts with long posts to keep the reader interested.
  • The topic you are writing about.  Sometimes you’re writing about a topic that just needs to be longer than other topics that you may write about.
  • Statistics.  As you blog, keep track of your statistics and see which posts are the most read.  If the most read are usually short and to the point, you might consider writing more in that style.

Very few people read word for word.  Most scan for content.  Keep that in mind when writing your posts (or even your website pages) and make them easily scannable.  This is easy to do if you incorporate a few things such as:

  • Lists (like this one). 
  • Using bold, italics, CAPITAL LETTERS, and underlining to vary your text.  Just make sure you don’t overdo it.
  • Use headings and subheadings to break up a page.
  • Pictures,  that are appropriate to your subject, will draw a reader’s attention.
  • Sometimes put an important bit of text or a quote inside a box or indent it.
  • Use short paragraphs.  A single sentence or even a single word can create an effective paragraph.
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Is Internet Progress Overrated?

June 15, 2009 By 1 Comment
computer-user

computer-userHas progress on the internet taken us to a better place?  Has it helped us grow our business?  Are all the new-fangled opportunities for “social networking”, videos, and streaming javascript worth the time and effort involved in using them?

I’d say “yes” and “no”.  The internet has provided us the opportunity to operate a business model that can compete with the big corporate giants that are able to outspend and outemploy more than we ever could.  The internet allows us to expand outside our local market and sell to people all over the country–or even around the world, if that is our goal.  Yes, the internet has definitely helped us grow our businesses.

Social networking and all the other new-fangled ideas, such as blinking pictures, videos, podcasts, flash pages, streaming javascript (which allows us to have constantly changing photos or text on our site) are another story however.  They’re cool! They’re neat!  They’re fun! But do they really increase traffic and sales conversions?

My answer is a resounding NO!  That is why, even though we have the knowledge and capability to do so, we don’t incorporate most of these new techniques in the websites that we own and seriously want to convert.  And the reason is simple.  These are gimmicks that are intended to make a website look “professional”, “up-to-date” and “cool” .  But, in reality, except for the “under 30 age crowd” (which are only a very small minority of my customers), most customers dislike them.  And, unless they are incorporated very carefully by someone who understands search engine spiders very well, most search engines dislike them even more.

Many users of the web are technically-challenged.  That’s true of even many of our gift basket company owners.  They don’t understand all this new-fangled stuff and prefer to avoid it.  But it’s all too easy for a webmaster, who enjoys adding this type of glitz to a shopping website, to convince you that it’s the thing to have if you want to be “up-to-date”.  But what is much more important is how does it help you convert visitors to buyers?  Does it make more money for you?

If used correctly and you have the time to spend on it, social media  has its place and can help to a degree.  Social media doesn’t yet come close to competing with search or email in terms of effectiveness. But marketers are still asking themselves whether that is because social media is ineffective or simply because, despite the hype, a huge percentage of people online aren’t actively or regularly engaged with social media sites and channels. 

By social media, I’m referring to Facebook, My Space, Linked In, Twitter and the many others out there.  These social networking sites can be used to promote your business.  I use them for that purpose.  But they are just a tool and are not nearly as effective as other means of driving traffic to your website.  There are ways to automatically post your blog posts on your Facebook wall and as a Twitter.  But you have to understand how they work and how best to use them.  And learning that takes more of those precious minutes.

Forums and Blogging are two other forms of social networking that can be very effective.

How much time do you have to spend on all these sites?  When I asked the members of my Gift Basket Network what their biggest problem was, the most frequent answer was “Not enough time in the day to do everything that needed to be done for their business”.  Add to “not enough time” such activities as posting “I’m going to my son’s ballgame tonight” on your wall on Facebook or “Today is a beautiful day.  Just don’t have time to enjoy it” as a Twitter post and what do you have?  Not more traffic to your website, that’s for sure.  You’ve just deducted precious minutes from those hours that were already filled with your “have to do” list. 

Blogging, posting on related blogs, and posting in forums can help build your business…once again, only if used correctly.  A blog, that is built specifically to drive traffic and is properly optimized, is a fast, effective, and efficient way to communicate with your customers and prospects  — just as I am communicating with you.  It can make you “real” to those customers and help them to get to know you as a person.  It can also be used to sell products if done right.  But you need to know the techniques necessary to do it.  Posting on blogs, that are related to your website and have good search engine visibility, can help your own website’s seach engine optimization by providing valuable links to your site.  And you don’t have to have any technical savvy to do that.

Forums that are related to your industry can’t be beat for effective communication with others in the industry.  In the gift basket industry, there are a number of them that you can participate in.  You need to be selective and use those that are used by others who have information to share.  But, as with anything, you must give in order to receive.  Just signing into a forum, reading what others have shared, and signing out is not enough.  You need to contribute as well if you hope to receive that info you must have when the time comes and you’re desperate for an anwer to a question.

Post Foods ran a Shredded Wheat ad recently that asked this very question about progress and answered the question with:
 
” Honestly, what thanks do we owe progress?  We’re up to our necks in landfill, down to the wire on resources, and climate change is out to get us — or at best leave us with a nsasty sunburn.  Historically, civilizations are destroyed by progress.  Just ask the Pharaohs…”

And, just as the ad went on to say, “That’s why at Post Shredded Wheat, we put the “no” in innovation”, we, as owners of Gift Basket Network have also said “no”.

I created Gift Basket Network about six years ago.  One person (me).  One ingredient (professional gift basket company owners that wanted more traffic to their websites).  One website.  It was simple to navigate.  No add-ons or plug-ins.  Heck, it was even built in basic html and optimized following the severe requirements of the search engines.  We didn’t give it a fancy name or a lot of glitz.   Our market was not the gift basket company owner.  Our market, at that time and still is, the potential customer who is ready and willing to buy a gift or gift basket and is just looking for a place to do it.

We market to the gift basket company owners in other ways.  One of these was in the form of Gift Retailers Network after we had clearly established Gift Basket Network  one of the top gift basket directories on the web.  This blog that you are reading right now is another way that we market to you.  It is our way of demonstrating to you that combining the tried-and-true methods of internet marketing with a few carefully selected “social networking” methods is using progress to build your business. 

Does it work? History has proven it to be true so far.  But time will tell.

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Blogging — How effective is it really?

June 13, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Since starting this series on blogging, there has been a lot of interest.  And one question that I’ve been asked several times is:  How much traffic can a blog really generate?  Another question is: Doesn’t it take a long time to make it worthwhile or to be effective?

The answer to the first question depends on your blog, how you have optimized it, and how you market and use it.  The answer to the second question is the same as the answer to the first one.

If you provide content that people are really interested in and let people know that it exists, you can generate much traffic within a short period of time.  I can’t guarantee you any results with your blog but to give you an idea of the possibility, this blog attracted 2591 visitors during its first 2 and 1/2 months of existence (from launch date of March 19th through the end of May).

How do I know this?  I check the stats for this blog regularly.  They tell me how many visit the blog daily, where they come from, and which blog posts are the most visited.  They also tell me which links are clicked on each day.

So how effective is it really?  I consider 2591 visitors in a 2 1/2 month period pretty effective.  How about you?

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Blogging without a Blog

June 13, 2009 By Leave a Comment

You don’t have to have your own blog to be able to use blogging to your advantage and increase the number of incoming links to your website. 

Most blogs welcome comments and allow you to leave your website address when you make a comment.  The way to use this method of “blogging without a blog” is easy.  Find blogs (including this one) that are related to your business and post comments when you have something to say.

Since there are so many spammers on the web that have software capable of automatically leaving spam comments, most bloggers install “askimet” as a plug-in.  This little tool recognizes suspected spam and requires the blog owner to approve the post instead of it just magically appearing.  Also blog owners can manually delete posts that are nothing more than an ad for the commenter’s website and have nothing to do with the post they are commenting on.

Like anything on the web, commenting on other people’s blog posts can be a valuable tool if not abused.

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Blogging — Keep it Simple for Maximum Results

June 12, 2009 By Leave a Comment

In our other blogging posts, we talked about why you should blog and some things to consider when starting a blog.  These are all important but I suspect you’re reading this series because you want to profit from your blog by building your business.

Remember that your blog will be different than all the others out there because you are different.  You have different goals and ideas and you are a different person than all the other bloggers out there.  So don’t make the mistake of trying to copy someone else’s blog or even comparing yours to others.

Your blog is going to be unique and your blog’s appearance will help determine its uniqueness.  If you look at a lot of blogs, you’ll see that many of them are a scrambled mess of links, widgets, ads and distractions that make it hard to focus on why you clicked on that blog in the first place. 

Keeping your blog simple will make it easier for your readers to focus on what you are trying to tell them instead of wandering off to another site. 

Here are some tips for keeping your blog simple and easy to follow:

  • Choose a template that will brand your blog.  You don’t need a fancy design.  There are many free blog templates to choose from if you’re using a free blogging service and thousands to choose from if you have chosen to use wordpress.org and have the blog hosted on your own domain (as this one is).
  • Keep your layout simple.  Unless you know what you are doing, a two column format is easier to simply and a three column format should be tha absolute maximum.  Your main and widest column is for your blog post and the other narrower ones are for navigation and any extras that you include.
  • Should you use a right navigation or a left navigation format?  This is a personal decision but remember that the eyes of most readers on the web read from the left to the right.  Since I consider my blog posts to be the most important part of the page, I use a right navigation so that they read the posts first.
  • Choose widgets (add-ons to blog pages) carefully.  There are so many widgets to choose from (and we’ll talk about some of the more important ones in a later post), that the temptation is to add lots of them.  But I suggest that you consider each one carefully before adding as less is usually better unless the widget serves an important purpose.
  • Keep your feed options simple.  By feed options, I mean giving your readers the opportunity to subscribe to your blog either via email or via an RSS reader.  Most of your readers will have no idea what all the many options are so don’t clutter the feed options area with a lot of different options.
  • Should you have a blog roll?  Blog rolls are standard on many templates.  But beware.  They those links can leak out valuable SEO ability.  Unless they benefit you, why include them? 

In our next post, we’ll talk about how to design your blog posts for maximum effectiveness.

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Before Blogging – Some Things to Consider

June 8, 2009 By Leave a Comment

One thing I’ve learned is that no one feels comfortable when they first start blogging.  That’s why I suggested in the previous blogging post (What is Blogging?) that you might want to get your feet wet slowly by creating a trial blog at one of the free, simple to use blogging sites such as blogger.com.  My first two blogs began there and then died. 

This is true of so many people who start blogging.  They don’t know what to write about.  They don’t know what to say or how to say it.  They don’t have time to make regular posts.   I’ll discuss what I’ve learned about how to prevent this meltdown in a later post.  But before we get into all the bells and whistles or the technical aspects of building a blog that will draw traffic, let’s start with the basics.

Before starting your blog, you should consider what your goals are.  If you want it to be a money making blog within itself, it will be set up differently than a blog that is meant to send traffic to your ecommerce sites. 

Whether you already have a blog or are considering starting one, you’ll save yourself a lot of time if you consider some of the following:

Who is Your Target Audience

Think about who will be reading your blog. A tech-savvy reader is more likely to understand and use such things as RSS and Digg than a mom who is looking for favors for a kid’s party. If your readers are business owners or corporate execs in a hurry, they’ll skim through your post looking quickly for the meat of it. If your goal is to sell products, how do you reach the readers who are ready and willing to buy those products?

Your target market will determine the layout and graphics of your blog, your content and even your wrting style.

If you already have a blog, look at it and see if it is attracting the kind of audience you want? Is your audience clicking through to the products that you are trying to sell with your posts, if that is your intent? What image are you protraying and are you happy with it?

Plan Your Blog From the Very Beginning

Most of us started our first blogs by just launching it and hoping for the best.  But I did it differently with this one and it has made a world of difference.  I took the time to determine who I was trying to reach, why I wanted to reach them, and how I was going to set up the blog.

Some things that I considered were:

  • What was it going to be called?  (Creative Entrepreneurs)
  • Who was my target audience? (Business owners in general and gift business owners in particular)
  • How frequently was I going to post? (At least three times per week and more often when possible)
  • What would be my writing style for this blog? (An informational style without being a know-it-all)
  • What topics would I cover? (Anything related to general business, gift business, and gift basket business)
  • What advertising would be allowed on the blog? (My own gift business websites plus other honest businesses that I felt comfortable recommending to my readers).
  • Would I write all the posts? (I decided to include posts from guest bloggers who had something to tell my readers that would be informative and useful. )

Think carefully about the name of your blog.  Once you’ve established an audience, you don’t want to change that name.  I had a blog that was a combination of business, personal, and information about my community in Flagstaff, Arizona.  That blog was named “Flagstaff Woman”.  I soon discovered that the name was too limiting as my market and audience was much larger than Flagstaff.  And trying to combine a variety of information into one blog created a haphazard blog.  I then made the decision to start all over again and used the same blog for Creative Entrepreneurs.  I did this for a few months but something was still not quite right and kept bugging me.  I decided that  the domain name “Flagstaff Woman” just wasn’t right for that blog. 

That is when I got serious about blogging.  That original blog was set aside.  I will go back to it later, wipe it clean, and create a Flagstaff related blog.  But to begin anew, I selected a domain name (giftbusinessowners.com) that reflected my target audience, chose a template that included places for ads for my gift business websites and other products that I trusted enough to promote, and made a list of some of the topics I wanted to cover. 

But that is now.  And, unless you are already a successful blogger, you are at the stage I was at when I started my earlier blogs.  If you’ve never blogged before, I suggest that you go to one of the free sites (blogger.com, wordpress.com, blogspot are several) and set up a blog for yourself.  The process is easy.  Don’t worry about choosing a fancy template.  This is going to be your learning blog.  I did this for two of my very early blogs and learned a lot about blogging and myself.

Make a list of things that you want to blog about and then separate them into categories.  Blog categories are like chapters in a book.  A reader can click on one of the categories and will see any posts that you’ve assigned to that category.  Just as in your ecommerce website, categories make it easy for your readers to find what they’re looking for.

Then choose a category and start writing.

This is my second post in this blogging series.  My plan is to take it slow and easy for those of you who are beginners.  But most of you may already be accomplished bloggers.  I’d like your comments on what you’d like to learn, how accomplished you are, and what you hope to accomplish with your blog.

Filed Under: Blogging, Uncategorized Tagged With:

Blogging – An Effective Way to Grow Your Business

June 7, 2009 By 3 Comments

If you aren’t blogging, why aren’t you?  If you don’t know what it means– or how to do it–it’s time to learn.  And I’m here to teach you!

What is Blogging anyway?

Blogging is an amazing way for you to share information about your business (or any other subject), state your opinions, and best of all, increase traffic to your website or local store.  Blogging for business is a very effective SEO technique and often helps with building your online business.

A  blog can be anything you want it to be. What makes it different than a regular website is in the fact that blogs are more of an ongoing conversation with the internet public, that is updated regularly.

The first blogs started as a way for people to record their visits to different websites that they liked or disliked.  The early blogs were people discussing the interesting things they found online and then linking to those sites.  These evolved into a sort of personal diary for some people.  Take a look at The Confessions of a Pioneer Woman for someone who has done a great job of using her own personal experiences, photography, recipes, etc and is making money doing it.

She has a regular following of loyal readers.  And you can too.  Once people start enjoying or learning from what you write, the chances are good that they’ll return again and again.  As you increase your content, and learn the few tricks necessary to optimize a blog for the search engines, you’ll begin getting higher and higher rankings.

And if you have advertisements on your blog, or links to products on another website, you can generate some good passive income.  But what most ecommerce and gift company owners do when creating a blog is use it as a sales pitch for their own business. . . and this can be a waste of time.

How Can Blogging Help My Business?

Blogging is a way to build customer following and loyalty by  personalizing your business and keeping  the internet public infromed about all the  new and exciting things going on with your company. Blogs are also great marketing tools but only if the  the content is designed to BENEFIT the reader, rather than solely to advertise a product or service.  Blogging  provides another opportunity for people to find your site. Often times when people are looking for a product or service, they will FIRST look for information concerning the subject.

Blogging isn’t difficult.  And it isn’t expensive.  As a matter of fact, there are websites that offer free blogs for you to set up.  Blogger.com and WordPress.com are two of the most popular ones.  If you’ve never blogged before, this might be a good way to get your feet wet but there are excellent reasons not to use the free blogging services if you’re really serious about using a blog to build your business.  We’ll talk about those reasons in a later post.

Having said that, you might want to just go ahead and get your feet wet by starting your first blog on one of the free blogging platforms.  This will help you learn the techniques and develop the ability to develop content on a regular basis.  By regular, I mean at a minimum of two to three times a week. 

This isn’t my first blog.  I learned by developing several others that weren’t nearly as successful as this one.  Then I got serious about it and decided that I would create one the right way and add content regularly.  That’s when I went looking for resources that would teach me what I needed to know.  There are some technical (not hard, just things you need to know) things that can make a big difference in how effective a blog will be.  I’m not an expert by any means and am still learning.

But throughout the coming weeks and months, I’ll be sharing some of this information with you.  But if you’ve got the blogging bug under your skin, as I did, and want to get going at a faster pace, I highly recommend a blogging membership site that I stumbled upon.  There is a series of free lessons you can sign up for but the membership is what takes you through the paces.  And the lady who operates this site knows what she is doing. 

So, if you want to step up to the next level and build your business with blogging, come back regularly as we begin stacking the building blocks to blogging success.  Shortly, I will be compiling all the information that I’ve learned into an ebook that will be available for download.  And, if you want to really get that blogging horse out of the starting gate and get a head start towards the finish line, check out my little secret.

 

 

 

 

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