Successful Blog

Your Blog Is Your Stage, But Who’s In The Audience?

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By Terez Howard

You’ve rehearsed your lines. You’ve completed the finishing touches on your costume. The curtain rises, and you see an audience anticipating a five-star performance. Do you recognize the faces looking back at you?

Bloggers have a reason for blogging. They blog to share what’s going on in their personal and professional lives. They blog to promote their products or a service. They blog to express their opinions. Most often, bloggers write in the hopes of creating a reaction.

Who has a ticket to your show?

Here are some general groups of people that take a ticket to blogs:

  • Relatives
  • Friends
  • Potential customers
  • Returning customers
  • Business associates
  • Yourself (You write for you)

Have you chosen a group to write for? I don’t care who holds the ticket, as long as someone is reading what I write. Getting readers to follow your blog can be challenging, and in a state of desperation, you might say that you’d be satisfied with any human being capable of discerning the English reading your blog. If you want a follower to stay for the duration of the show, then not any Tom, Dick or Harry will do.

Look at it this way. You blog for a reason. Let’s say that you blog in the hopes that visitors will click on a link to buy your book on potty training boys under 2. You might be happy to see a comment from your grandmother’s Bingo partner or your son’s 10-year-old buddy. Yes, they might spread the word, but these people are not going to buy your book.

You don’t hand out tax advice or Xbox cheat codes on your potty training blog, even though that Bingo player would love to know how she can get more money back and that pre-teen wants to defeat Tomb Raider. You must stick to topic.

Know your audience

You must establish who your audience is and what they want. Returning to the previous example, you are writing to parents, and not just any parents. You specifically write for parents who have boys under the age of 2 and want to start potty training them.

You blog potty training tips that may or may not be included in your book, how to handle temper tantrums, spirited toddler boys, how to raise a happy toddler boy and throw in your personal stories. These parents will be interested in what you have to say and possibly interested in purchasing your book.

Notice that not all the topics I listed are directly related to potty training. They would, however, be subjects of interests to your audience.

Hone in on a specific group. In my example, I used parents of boys under the age of 2. One blogging professional markets to females ages 21 to 45 looking to start a small business. Another blogger writes to relatives on her mother’s side to post updates on annual family reunions. The better you know exactly who you’re writing for, the better chance you will have at retaining readers.

Sit in the front row of your show

Take a moment to get off the stage and sit yourself in one of those cushy theater chairs. Think about what your audience wants to take away from your blog. What would you want to know if you were them?

You’re audience will applaud your blog if it fills a need, satisfies a want or just pleases curiosity. Who knows? Your words could merit a standing ovation.

Who sits in your blog’s audience?

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Terez Howard operates TheWriteBloggers, a professional blogging service which builds clients’ authority status and net visibility. She regularly blogs at Freelance Writing Mamas . You’ll find her on Twitter @thewriteblogger

Thanks, Terez!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Work Hard, Play Slow, Make Business

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A Guest Post by Erno Hannink

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What I admire in the American culture is the quest for success. Most Americans I meet want to be number one and have an entrepreneurial spirit. Everyone can make it and be a success is standard in the US culture. It already starts with the competitions at school.

Let me show you some differences with the European cultures and what an entrepreneur might learn from this difference.

In Europe becoming No 1 is not everyone’s agenda. It is nice to have financial success but not necessary. Our rating for tests in school in the Netherlands, where I live, is mostly from 1-10 and 10 is the best and 1 is really bad. Most of the Europeans feel that 6 is good enough, no need to go for that 10. It’s similar for most countries in Europe. You can see that same attitude in the workplace at organizations and companies. We try to satisfy the customer, there is not really a need to surpass their expectations on delivery.

Entrepreneurship is in American DNA and that grows the nation. Europeans work less and therefore we can spend more time with our families and friends, cook and have dinner at home. This is the basis for less stress and healthier lives.

Where there is great success there is also great failure. The difference in rich and poor is huge. In our culture, you can become rich but the poor have a safety net. The government plays a large role in this. If a company needs to fire employees, the fired employees get money — first from the company and later from the government. This all needs to be paid with taxes. This makes the gap between rich and poor somewhat smaller. The poor do not have it easy, but will survive, have a roof over their head and are able to eat food, and use the health system.

In most of the European schools, English is part of our education. More and more Europeans use American social networks like Facebook and YouTube. This means that more and more people read and speak English. However, language is in the detail. Detail is where we can make mistakes and have misunderstandings.

There is also a difference in the home base. In the US there are 50 states and many cultures, but mostly people speak the same language: English. In Europe there are 44 countries that all have their own culture but more importantly, most have their own language. This makes the home base for a companies service or product already a lot smaller. Selling your products in several European countries is easier said than done. It involves language, cultural and national regulations.

I have worked for and with companies from the US and all over Europe. It is great to learn and enjoy all these cultural differences. If you want to expand you business outside the US it relatively easy these days. You can get in contact with local people via the social networks and get to know potential partners.

Once you start working with people from outside your culture it is great to see what you can learn from them. Take care not to force your way of working on to the other culture.

Have you been to Europe? Next time you come to Europe look at the differences and see what you might take home to use in your way of working. I would love to connect with you, I want to learn from you and maybe you can learn from me.

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Erno Hannink is a Social Media Specialist for Independent Professionals and Social Media Business Coach. Through the use of social media and a focus on online publishing of valuable information, Erno helps independent professionals attract and retain more clients. He is the author of the book ‘Attracting Clients – How Independent Professionals and solopreneurs can get new clients using the internet” (free download) and also blogs on enthousiasmeren.nl (Dutch). You can find Erno on Twitter as @ErnoHannink

Thanks, Erno. I’ve enjoyed knowing and learning from and with you. 🙂

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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Cool Tool Review: Expensify

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Todd Hoskins Reviews Tools for Small Business

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Todd Hoskins chooses and uses tools and products that could belong in a small business toolkit. He’ll be checking out how useful they are to folks who would be their customers in a form that’s consistent and relevant.

Cool Tool Review: Expensify
A Review by Todd Hoskins

I have a shoebox of receipts, and a file folder for business expenses. How often do I spend time rummaging through the box for lost receipts? I’m embarrassed to admit.

Pain and expense reporting go hand in hand. The scanning, the spreadsheets, the documentation, the mileage log . . . you get the idea. Expensify completely changes this experience from painful to painless (and paperless to boot).

Imagine this . . . you get an email receipt from a hotel or airline and you forward it to an address that automatically uploads a copy awaiting your categorization (think TripIt). Or, you take a client to dinner and while emptying your pocket the next morning you simply take a photo with your phone and send it on its way (think NeatReceipts). You can also log a cash expense via SMS (think taxicabs). Finally, directly import your business credit card account and your reporting is being updated as you incur expenses (think Mint). These are just a few of the many features and services offered by Expensify. The days of the shoebox are numbered.

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They have done their research. As someone who has submitted, approved, and paid expenses in the past, I can’t find any holes. Better yet, it’s free if you are having expenses submitted by two or less people. More than two, it’s $5/month per person.

The beancounters and procedural police are taken care of as well. Expensify also provides additional support for the entire expense reporting workflow on their site – after submitting a report, the boss can approve the expenses online and the finance person can provide reimbursement electronically via direct deposit. Additionally, Expensify offers tight integrations with QuickBooks™, FreshBooks, Google Apps, and Salesforce.

Summing Up – Is it worth it?

Enterprise Value: 5/5 – currency conversion + customized policy mgmt

Entrepreneur Value: 5/5 – saves money and time

Personal Value: 0/5 – do your mileage log elsewhere, use Mint

Winning at Social Media in an International Market

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A Guest Post by Christian Arno

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Marketing, in one form or another, has been helping the cause since time immemorial and now it just got personal. Market savvy entrepreneurs are using social media websites like Facebook and Twitter and their online communities to target customers and listen to exactly what they say.

Social Media websites give both producer and consumer a voice and offer the transparency and sense of community that are now charming customers across the world into parting with large amounts of money. Here are some things to remember:

Marketing, the Differences

Traditional marketing, like press releases and advertising can be likened to throwing your advertising budget up in the air and saying ‘I hope these lands on someone interested.’ Tapping social media opens up a dialogue with your customers and usefully corrals all of your cash-cows in a few, easy to find, on-line fields. People can then say what they specifically like or loathe about your product and you, through careful monitoring, can act accordingly.

Marketing, the Similarities

You need not think that you can set up a group on Facebook and Lo! Your product has created an on-line community of well-wishers and unpaid market researchers. You still need to put the advertisements out there. Pay Per Click advertising campaigns (PPCs), for example, allow you to see which adverts the fish have been nibbling at and allow you to tailor your approach. Targeted audiences have always been at the heart of marketing, social media just takes it a step further.

Get Community Going

People will work for free. The happy sense of bonhomie and camaraderie that web groups and chat forums engender brings out the best in human nature and offers entrepreneurs a splendid opportunity to profit from this.

Translating is one way of doing this. Any international marketing scheme has to face the thorny question of translation. Keywords for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and subtle nuances must all be carefully interpreted and adapted to suit new target audiences, but a team of professional, native-speaker translators can be a serious drain on the purses.

Crowdsourcing is one way round this — when you invite the community of web-users out there to come and do the spadework for you. People always like showing off their bright ideas and this increasingly popular practice is the perfect forum for doing so. It also allows people to get directly involved in your brand. Wikipedia is one such example.

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival ran an extremely successful crowdsourcing project on Twitter for their 2010 program cover. Festival lovers were encouraged to tweet their ideas for illustrations, which were then heaped with praise and/or criticism by everyone else before the successful ones were drawn by a professional illustrator, whose work was streamlined live online. The festival hype this built up created a strong sense of community and beat all but the most ambitious advertising campaigns.

The Misguided Public

The problem with People Power is that people can get it wrong and this is particularly true of translation and technical material. Take, for example the case of Chicken entrepreneur Frank Purdue. His slogan was ‘It Takes a Tough Man to Make a Tender Chicken!’ Taking his campaign into Spanish this became, ‘It Takes a Tough Man to Make a Chicken Aroused!’

If you do not invite a professional to translate your material from the start then you should strongly consider getting one to check what the well-meaning public have submitted.

Wit Goes a Long Way

Burger King put Facebook to good use with its whoppervirgins.com campaign. It offered the ‘sacrifice ten friends’ application which caught people’s imaginations to the tune of over 20 000 users, who ‘sacrificed’ 200 000 friends for free whoppers. The campaign was memorable, unusual and had just enough humour to make it a real hit.

An Honest Embrace

Social media encourages a culture of transparency and honesty that can create great interest in your company. Sun Microsystems’s CEO, Jonathan Schwartz set up a blog that received about 400 000 hits a month and attracted positive, negative and downright insane comments. This kind of transparency, at the highest level, increased trust among consumers and therefore interest in the product.

Likewise, Graco have managed to hugely personalise their brand by building a community on Flickr. They promote it heavily on the Graco blog and in doing so encourage people to submit pictures. The pictures highlight the people behind Graco and the people who use their products. They have introduced offline community gatherings and the pictures from these are also posted on the Flickr page. This takes the concept of social media beyond the blogosphere and combines it with offline marketing, humanising the community around the product. Something that TV advertising campaigns struggle to do at a much higher cost.

Who Does All This Reach?

Lots of people. Young, geeky men are not the only people who use the simple to use and highly gregarious social media sites. You have only to take a look at Facebook to see the number of middle aged users has risen dramatically in recent years. A survey by Insidefacebook.com reports that 22 percent of registered users are between 35 and 65, and that the fastest growing group is women over the age of 55.

But this is just one site. The international marketer must look beyond Twitter and Facebook et al, to capitalize on the opportunities social media offer. In Japan, for example, 80% of social media users are signed onto Mixi.jp, while Orkut predominates in Brazil, Xanga in Hong Kong.

Wherever you launch, social media marketing is a source to be reckoned with.

What do you think it takes to win in social media?

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About the author: Christian Arno is the founder and managing director of Lingo24, an international translation company which provides language translation services to and from all the major languages in the world. Follow him as @lingo24chr on Twitter.

Thanks, Christian! The whole thing changes when we realize the world is our community!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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Hate PowerPoint? Try Prezi!

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Todd Hoskins Reviews Tools for Small Business

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Todd Hoskins chooses and uses tools and products that could belong in a small business toolkit. He’ll be checking out how useful they are to folks who would be their customers in a form that’s consistent and relevant.

Refresh Your Presentation Skills (and Tool)
A Review by Todd Hoskins

I hate PowerPoint.

The tool itself is not the primary problem – it’s all the bad habits that have proliferated in business including too much text, too many slides, and the worst of all, reading a deck verbatim to an audience.

But, sometimes PowerPoint is necessary. If you must use it, I recommend absorbing Garr Reynolds‘ work at Presentation Zen.

For the rest of us who are free to be creative and experiment with new tools, I enthusiastically encourage you to check out Prezi. It’s well designed, simple, and will make any presentation not only more tolerable, but more memorable and enjoyable.

With PowerPoint, you use a template and create slides. Then you proceed through the slides (often with snazzy or annoying effects) in a linear fashion. With Prezi, you create a map populated with words, images, charts, video, etc. Don’t let that intimidate you. Really, you take all the stuff that you may want to use, get it out there, and then create groupings and a path.

Once you figure out the “zebra” navigation, it’s very easy. The flash technology animates the path you create within the map. Here’s an example:

About perspective… on Prezi

Prezi highlights its “zoom” for good reason. The spatial relationships and animation allow the presenter to capture the big picture, drill into details, and show the connections between concepts. It’s not just theater, it’s effective.

It’s free, as long as you don’t mind the Prezi watermark and keeping your presentations public. Premium subscriptions start at $59/year and allow you to work offline and have increased storage capacity.

Summing Up – Is it worth it?

Enterprise Value: 5/5 – worth the 15 minute investment to learn

Entrepreneur Value: 5/5 – look sharper, break the bad habits

Personal Value: 1/5 – make a movie, not a presentation