Lack of Engagement is like Giving a Customer the Cold Shoulder

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I feel that it is very important for businesses that market in the digital arena to be engaging with their audience.  If you use social media, respond and interact with your audience as opposed to just posting.  If you use your blog as a marketing vehicle, respond to comments and shares of your posts.  If you are listed on review sites like Angie’s List, Yelp or Kudzu and you receive a bad review, try to reach out to that consumer to see how you can make things better.

Sometimes people see digital marketing methods or business practices as a bit impersonal and cold, but it does not have to be.  I truly believe that it is possible to show a human side, engage, interact and really connect with people without physical contact.  Maybe I feel this way because I am an introvert and consider myself to be pretty good at forming strong bonds digitally.  Too me, the digital sphere is no different than the physical one.  If someone said “hi, I like your blouse” to me in real life, in the physical world; I would respond kindly with a “thank you” and probably a bunch of gibberish about how I found it at a thrift store, which one, on which sale day…I digress.  The point is that I would engage with them.  They took a moment of their time to reach out and pay me a compliment, to let me know that they noticed something about me and they liked it.  They did not have to do this.

If I had ignored them, I would have been giving them the cold shoulder and probably a negative impression as to who I am as a person.  This is the same for businesses and anyone that markets in the digital spectrum.  Respond, comment, connect and engage.  My (digital) friend Tracy over at Tracyville, wrote a post on responding to blog comments here that I thought was pretty good (check her out!).  She hit the nail on the head when she mentioned how it makes people feel to be responded to or not responded to.  We as marketers, have to be mindful to stay “human” and practice the same principles of physical interactions with our digital ones.

How to Make Your Head Explode

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If you are a small business owner, entrepreneur, solopreneur or a freelancer, you are constantly looking for ways to increase the profitability of your business.  This could be from a logistics standpoint or from a marketing standpoint, but no matter what, consuming information is the base to do so.  Why; because knowledge is power.  Knowledge can also make your head explode.  While it is a tool that can arm and guide you to make your business better, the wealth of information out there and available, can be overwhelming.

I have come close to the brink of a brain/head explosion plenty of times and I have also been the cause of an almost head explosion.  I read a lot and I have always been big into reading.  I was the kid that asked for books (and art supplies) for Christmas and I earned many free personal pan pizzas from Pizza Hut, through their Book-it program.  As an adult, in addition to reading books and works of fiction, I now also read a lot of blog sites related to my industry and for business.  I have to be careful of how much information I consume and how quickly I consume it.

I have come to realize that my brain can only hold and process so much new information at a time.  There is a limit for me.  I have to let everything new that I have learned settle in for a bit, before pouring more information in.  I would liken it to pouring soda into a cup.  Because of the carbonation, you cannot quickly pour the soda all in at one time without it fizzing up and out of the cup.  You have to pour a little in, wait for the fizz to die down and settle, and then continue to pour.  This is what I have to do with my brain.  If I don’t, I fall into a place of information overload and I feel like my head is about to explode.

It’s not very productive.  All of the information and knowledge I have taken in is all for naught, because I am too overwhelmed to apply it to my needs or implement anything.  Instead, I throw my hands up in the air and do nothing.  However, if I consume in small bites, I actually do something with that information.  So what is the lesson learned?  Consume information in smaller chunks to keep your head from exploding.  It will also lead to a more productive use of the information you have gained.

“I Want to Blog to Make Money.”

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The title of this post is a statement that I hear fairly often.  Very recently, I had a conversation with a childhood friend of my mother’s about blogging.  I have been giving advisement to my sister-in-law, whom I like to refer to as just my sister, about her blog.  It started as a hobby for her and with a little advice, she has been able to turn it into something far greater and is earning a small income from the site in a very short amount of time.  My mother’s friend was looking for a part-time way to earn some extra income and my mother thought she should talk to me about blogging.  She was not entirely sure what a blog was or how to make one, but she knew she wanted to do it to make money.  By the end of the conversation (don’t worry, I told her this would end up becoming a blog post), I had talked her out of doing so.

 

Here is why:

Saying “I want to blog to make money” without any other goals, purpose, etc behind it, is like saying “I want to randomly make a commercial to air on tv.”  To me, blogging for business or some monetary gain is part of a marketing plan.  It is a marketing practice that helps to reach a goal.  The goal could be revenue in terms of pay per click ads on your site.  Another goal could be customer acquisition by putting you and your brand in front of more people.  Being a helpful resource to people of a particular niche is also a goal.  A blog can help to generate revenue in the same way a print advertisement, podcast or tv commercial spot can help to generate revenue.

Things a blog can do for you:

  • Increase the visibility of an author/writer
  • Make you the go-to guru for a particular niche
  • Create brand awareness
  • Create a community of like-minded individuals
  • Create a space for you to engage with an audience
  • Build an audience
  • Showcase your work/portfolio
  • Give insight into your company’s culture
  • Give helpful information
  • A lot more…

A blog can help generate revenue, but a blog with no purpose other than to make money; will not make money.

The other reason why I discouraged her from creating a blog was the time commitment.  The reason why she was looking for something part-time to do was because she had gone back to school and needed time to devote to her studies.  In order for any blog to be successful and especially for her purpose of making money, a lot of time has to be invested into it.  She would not only need to write daily or almost daily, but she would need to promote it, and also respond and engage with those that engaged with her.  My sister did not achieve success by blogging part-time.  She treats her blog as a full-time job.  Her dedication and time commitment to her blog has helped to make it as successful as it has been.  She also had a purpose that was not monetary.

She started blogging as an online journal where she shared stories of relationships with significant other’s, co-workers, family and friends.  I saw the beginnings of a creative writer and she took the concept and ran with it.  She also loves what she is doing which takes some of the edge off of the time commitment, while trying to run a household with young children at the same time.

I explained the amount of time and effort that was needed to my mother’s friend.  I also explained that she might come to resent the blog if her heart was not in it and the sole purpose was to try to make some money.  After explaining everything to her, she agreed that she did not have the time to commit to doing something so tedious.  We discussed some of her future plans upon graduation and I told her how a blog could complement those future endeavors…if the current tech/marketing landscape remained the same.

Although the outcome to the conversation did not help her to start a blog, it did help her get some insight into the “blogosphere” and different ways blogs were used for both business and for pleasure.  Having more insight, I think is what ultimately helped her to make her decision and I thought writing about the conversation, might help someone else that wants to “start a blog to make money.”

Creating A Custom Short Link

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Over the Thanksgiving holiday break when I was supposed to be “not working,” I worked. I did not do anything stressful or work for clients, but I did do some “internal,” as I call it, work. For a while, I have been wanting to create a custom short link. I share a lot of content on social media networks and here on my blog. I primarily use goo.gl (Google Link Shortener) and bit.ly (bitly.com), but I had noticed a couple years ago that other businesses were using custom links. Yes, it took me almost two years to finally do this and I can see you shaking your heads. Please stop. Because HostGator was running Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals that included domain name purchases/registration, I decided to go ahead and get this done. Finally.

If you have wondered how to create a custom short link to share content with, here is what I did to do so:

Bitly offers the capability to use a custom domain name to create short links. Instead of the standard bit.ly/xx12345, you can use cust.om/xx12345. To do this, you must first have a domain name that is not being used for anything else (can be a sub domain). It can also only be 15 characters long, to include the “.” I used Domai.nr, to get suggestions and search for a short domain name to use. Most of the variations of “Colleen Eakins Design” that I was interested in, were already taken, so I decided to just go with my name. In the end, I chose “colleeneakns.me”

The next step, was to go to Bitly and enter the new domain name in as a custom link. You can find this by logging into your Bitly account, clicking on “settings” and then clicking on the “advanced” tab. Once I had it entered, I needed to change my A record for the new domain name to point to Bitly. I can admit that this was a little tricky with HostGator. I must say, that it was easier to make these types of changes with my domain names that I still have under GoDaddy. Minus two points for HostGator. Once that was done and verified with Bitly, I was good to go and geeked to have my “vanity” custom short link. I probably frivolously shared content that day, just so that I could ogle my own link.

Here are a couple [frivolous] links that I found helpful and one irrelevant one:

Bitly Support Page – http://colleeneakns.me/1eJyiOF
Mashable Article – http://colleeneakns.me/1cSxG7i
CED on Facebook – http://colleeneakns.me/1cdQ3W2

Finding Your Blogging Voice

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My first foray into blogging was not on this site here, for business, but on my hobby site for fun in my spare time.  I am very competitive and I turn everything into a challenge that I must conquer.  I find it helps to motivate me to accomplish things and move forward in life.  My hobby blog was no different.  I challenged myself to become a blog superstar.  To become the blog everyone wanted to read and subscribe to and in case you are wondering; no that did not happen, and no it is not the “it” blog.

I bring up that blog because that is where I found my blogging voice.  I’ve written previously about why every business should have a blog and it is something that I advise my client’s to do.  One of the objections that I hear is:  “I’m not witty/funny or know how to write eloquently/formally.”  Basically, they do not know how to find their blogging voice.  I do not think that you have to be intentionally witty or funny to blog or write in a formal style, not if that is not true to who you are and how you speak.

When I first started writing on my hobby blog site, I first tried a more formal approach.  My thought process was that I always made good grades on term papers in school and graduate school is almost entirely writing and reading.  I figured if I could make it through grad school and did well writing in school, surely I could write a few articles/posts for a website blog.  I kept it formal and I did not see much traction or success.  I do not believe that the formal writing style was the problem, but that it was not my genuine speaking voice.

With time, I became a bit lazy and the formal style dropped.  Instead, I began to write more like I talk/speak.  I started speaking to my readers instead of treating them like professors requesting my paper for a grade.  When I started doing this, I saw more traction with my blog in the form of engagement from my audience.  They answered my calls for guest post submissions, commented on posts and my traffic and subscription numbers increased.  I no longer have the time that I used to, to devote to that site (the woes of entrepreneurship), but the site continues mainly through guest blog post submissions.

I believe to find your blogging voice, you must find your actual real life voice.  How do you speak when you talk about something you are passionate about to someone in real life?  How do you explain it?  How do you give out advice and tips?  That is the same voice that should be used on your blog.  Speak to your readers and not at them.  Unless your topic is of a scientific/technical nature AND the audience that will be reading the information needs to consume the information in a formal way, use your natural voice.