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August 29, 2006

Insider Tip of the Week - 08/30/06

Small Business Marketing Tips

Bob Serling interviews John Jantsch
====================================

Today's issue features highlights from a 26-page interview
I recently did with marketing expert, John Jantsch. John is
a marketing coach, author and award-winning blogger. His
Duct Tape Marketing blog was chosen as Forbes
Magazine's favorite for small business, and was recently
named the best small business marketing blog by the readers
of Marketing Sherpa for the third consecutive year. So it's
my pleasure to be able to bring you some of the valuable
points that were covered in this important interview with
John.

A Critical Marketing Mistake

Bob: What are some of the biggest mistakes that you
see small businesses and entrepreneurs making when it
comes to their marketing?

John: I would maybe categorize it into one big giant
mistake that I see, and that's not having, or thinking, or
taking any time to figure out a marketing strategy. In
other words, what do you want the market, over time,
to believe about your company? What do you want to
be best known for? What do you want your brand to
stand for?

There is no unique value that they're offering. It's just
this message, then that message, then this message, and
maybe they sell a little bit. In fact, that's probably the
danger, because they actually have a little bit of success
- but long term, marketing is boring. It takes consistency.
It doesn't have to be the flash of the week. Truly the
people that win, in a lot of cases, stick a flag in the sand
and say, "This is what we want to be known as", and
they say it until they're tired of it.

Effective Lead Generation

Bob: What do you find to be some of the more
ffective lead-generation methods for small businesses?

John: Well, I'm going to give you an answer that may
not satisfy some of the listeners, because again I will
go back and say that marketing is not hard, but it takes
work. To me, a couple things are critical - starting with
consistency. No matter what it is that you're doing,
commit to doing it over and over and over again, for
a year, minimum.

If you're going to do a direct-mail program, mail it out
monthly, assuming we've targeted an ideal client list or
prospect list. Don't just do it once and say, "Well, that
didn't work", or, "Well, that was okay, but what can
we do next month?" There is momentum in consistency.

The second thing I would say from a principle
standpoint is to think in terms of lead generation from
multiple approaches - multiple pillars, as if you were
thinking a foundation.

People learn in different ways. They need to be
exposed to your message multiple times, and so when
I talk to people about lead generation, I always say,
"We need to have an advertising strategy, a referral
strategy and a PR strategy. Time willing, we're going
to do all three of those as quickly as we can, at the
same time."

Marketing Effectively with Blogs

Bob: Now I want to move on to a topic that I know a
lot of people are going to want to hear from you about,
because you've won so much recognition for your own
blog and you are a recognized expert in blogging. What
advice do you have on successfully using blogs for
marketing either products or services?

John: The thing I would say is look at it as just another
marketing tool. I know that when blogs really got hot
for business, there was all this hype about how it's going
to change the way you do marketing, and there were even
people claiming you were instantly going to get rich if you
had a blog.

And I would say just look at it with a strategic approach
in mind. It is a great tool to facilitate content creation and
distribution. It's a great tool to help educate. It's actually
a great tool to help you in your search-engine optimization
efforts. It's all just inherent in the way the software works
and the way that the search engines view blogs.

But I would really tell people, don't look at it as being the
silver bullet that's going to instantly transform your business.
Look at it as a way to pretty easily get some of the results
or get some of the strategy of creating content and educating
done.

And having said that, I'm not trying to discourage anybody.
I would say you most definitely should have a blog, in my
opinion, but don't look at it as the magic bullet.

Bob: Let me dig a little deeper into this topic, because I
know it as a topic that I get a lot of questions on from my
clients, plus I have this opportunity to pick the brain of the
leading expert on this, so I want to dig even deeper.

One thing you mentioned is that a blog can help you get
better search engine placement. Obviously we could talk
about that for hours, but can you give a couple of critical
points about that?

John: It really is mostly inherent in the way the software is
designed. Very quickly, blogs are content management
systems that every entry creates a database entry, which
is then pulled into a web page. So when you go to
someone's blog, you see maybe eight or ten listings. Well,
those are all pulled from a database. Nobody needs to
know, really, how that works. I just had to set that up so
that you understand a little bit of the software.

But what happens is every time you post an entry, if it's
five words or its 500 words, a new web page is created,
and that web page is optimized for search engines. Again,
you can do this yourself, but the beauty is the software does
it. So all of a sudden you have the ability to create, over
time, a hundred, a hundred and fifty pages, all perfectly
optimized, generally with an educational content, because
people typically don't blog posts on "Buy our new product
today." They typically talk about some aspect of the
industry or some aspect of their product or service.

So all of those factors combine to make the search engines
say, "Hey, this is something that we ought to pay attention
to", and when a company has on their domain or on their
website a blog, then the whole website benefits from that
search engine paying attention to it.

Now, the other aspect that we could spend a lot of time on
is that inherent in most blog software is this idea of an RSS
feed, and all that really is a tool that lets the search engines
know automatically when new content is posted, and then
it distributes it automatically out to them, too.

So there are a lot of things in the software itself that just by
having a blog and posting about once a week, you would
actually be better off than most websites are today.

Now, there's a lot more you can get out of it and should get
out of it by maximizing it, but from the search-engine
standpoint, that's a real big piece of the value.

Bob: Right. And just a point I want to clarify, if I
understood what you said, you don't really need to
understand the technical intricacies of an RSS feed if you
use a blog, because it's built into the blog to automatically
notify the search engines for you? Is that correct?

John: Absolutely. There are hundreds of blog
softwares out there, but certainly in the leading ten, 20,
30 of them, it's automated. You really don't need to
know how it works or why it works. Just know that it
will work.

Bob: That actually leads to my next question. There's
kind of a raging debate going on in the marketing community,
at least I've heard a lot, that there are kind of two camps in
terms of blogging software. One prefers software called
"Movable Type". Another prefers "Word Press".

A lot of marketing experts are claiming that Word Press
works more effectively with the search engines than
Movable Type. Can you contribute your advice on that
particular issue?

John: I don't blog with either one of them, so take that
with a grain of salt. What I have heard as well is that
they're both capable of doing anything that you want them
to do, or need them to do, or can do. I have heard that
Word Press inherently, particularly for the person that
doesn't know necessarily how to amplify the RSS feed or
do some of the little under-the-hood tweaks, Word Press
is I think a little more user friendly in that regard.

I do think that actually Movable Type is more powerful in
some of the things it can do, but again, that's can do by
the hands of somebody who really understands the
programming aspect.

Bob: So is there a specific software that you
recommend?

John: Well, I think, as you mentioned, Word Press
that can be downloaded for free at wordpress.org
is a great option.

I personally like, and this is one of those things in
the great software debate - you typically like the one
you know how to use and you've gone through the
learning curve. I personally like Type Pad. And part of
my reason for that is it is very easy to use, so when I
have people that I'm trying to get started that I know
maybe aren't very technically savvy, I'll lead them to
Type Pad. That's actually a hosted service that without
downloading, customizing, doing anything, you can
actually have a blog in five minutes.

***************************************

That's great advice and insight from John Jantsch. I
hope you enjoyed and benefitted from this short
excerpt from my interview with John.

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This interview is not available anywhere else. To
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Posted by Bob Serling at August 29, 2006 10:28 PM

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Posted by: intiendes at August 30, 2006 01:38 AM

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