If you are a entrepreneur or a blogger then there is a question you will need to ask yourself.
200 years ago when you built a business it was about starting local. Today with the world wide web and easy to use social networks that have global reach and real time communication, building a global audience from scratch is within your reach and budget that was not feasible even 5 years ago.
What tools are available that work?
These are some of the questions you will need to find the answers for to reach your goals.
In this two part series we will cover the six steps to building a global audience for your blog or business.
"I don't like writing but I love having written".
It's like the start of the new year where we clean the desk, set the goals and roll out the revised set of new year's resolutions. Some of us are excited by the year ahead but others are filled with dread and are even thinking whether going back to "that" job is an option.
That motivation for life and the dawn of a new year for some of us is burning and real and for others it is dormant or extinguished.
Motivation is a strange thing and for most of the industrial revolution and beyond we have used "external" motivations to drive ourselves and our employees to work and succeed such as monetary incentives and "stick and carrots". The reality is and supported by research is that there is a mismatch between "what science knows and what business does".
Because they are part of something important.
In another study by the London School of Economics (the training ground of George Soros and the Alma mater of 11 Nobel Laureates) they found that after looking at 51 companies pay for performance plans that "we find that most financial incentives can result in a negative impact on overall performance".
What science is telling us is that true powerful and long lasting motivation is built upon 3 elements.
Who would have thought 10 years ago that a professionally managed, paid and heavily sponsored project (Encarta by Microsoft) to create a new media encyclopedia would be comprehensively beaten to the canvas in a knockout by a free global social science experiment called "Wikipedia" involving thousands of unpaid volunteers working in their pajamas from home.
I came across a quote by the famous economist Dr. Paul Samuelson that encapsulates one of the secrets to success in life, business and blogging.
The secret is waiting for you and I am sure that some of you already know what that is. Remember, "it is never too late to have a happy childhood".
A plan will will keep you on track and ensure that you don't deviate down dead ends or get distracted. If you really want to get serious you could write a business plan and back that up with a marketing plan. To keep it simple we will combine this into one.
A strategy will ensure that you select the right tactics and tools to reach the right audience in the most efficient manner. In its simplest form it involves 5 stages.
This is important to make sure that when you build your social networks that you have an audience that wants to listen and engage. Just because there is 2 billion people on the web doesn't mean they all want to listen to your message and story. If you are seliing wine then you will need to target restaurants, food bloggers and any one who will help you reach an extended audience.
It is important to monitor your success and your failures to see if people are subscribing or unsubscribing. This allows you to change from tactis that aren't working and find ones that do. Keep experimenting!
I started the blog with my own domain name jeffbullas.com which was done partly for creating a personal brand online. I then used WordPress.com as my blogging platform using their free hosted WordPress template which ended up causing me more a lot more work later when I wanted to add extra features and functions (such as Retweet and Facebook share buttons) as well as use measurement tools such as Google Analytics that WordPress.com wouldn't allow. I would recommend that you avoid this and buy your own domain name and self host from day one. It will cost you a few pennies but it will save you a lot of time and grief later on.
So what are 12 blog building essentials?
This is important because if you do that you can always take it with you and host your blog wherever you like such as GoDaddy or HostMonster. If you use blogger.com, Typepad.com or even WordPress.com, sure they do it for free but it comes at the cost of your independence which removes your flexibility in the future to control your blogging destiny. They give you a domain name that is a subset of their domain and if you want to move your blog in the future you cannot do it without creating a new domain and you have to start all over again.
What this means is that your readers will have trouble finding you because you have moved. So if you serious about being a blogger buy a domain don't rent one! If you are intending to create a strong personal brand to provide a platform for you as an thought leader and expert, or author, musician, consultant a domain name that strongly reflects your personal name then that will help you get found online. If you are using the blog as marketing platform for a product then of course it should be named and branded consistently with the product.
For a corporate blog the blog should be consistent with the company brand look and feel and be part of the company website.
WordPress dominates the world of blogging and you can buy Templates ready to go for $40-$50. I use the Worpress template 'Frugal' (which has now been replaced by the upgraded version called Catalyst) which I have found easy to use especially being a non technical user. It requires no programming and makes it easy for you to do what you do best which is to blog.
In 1996 Steve Jobs was interviewed by "Wired Magazine" and he said this about design.
It means according to the Oxford English Dictionary "to understand intuitively or by empathy; to establish rapport with" and "to empathize or communicate sympathetically with).
The term "Grok" by the way is a real word and not a "Jobian" expression.
Wikipaedia says "To grok is to share the same reality or line of thinking with another physical or conceptual entity".
Author Robert A. Heinlein coined the term in his best-selling 1961 book Stranger in a Strange Land. In Heinlein's view, grokking is the intermingling of intelligence that necessarily affects both the observer and the observed.
So don't get lost in how it 'looks'. Make sure it works.
The thing to remember here is that a blog is about content so making it easy for people to view a video if it is a video blog or read the text if it is a text based blog is vital.
I have seen many blogs where the writing is so small that I can barely read the text or the background provides little or no contrast and you have to squint.
Don't give the reader an excuse to click away from your blog.
If you don't have the budget for a designer there are a vast range of Templates for WordPress with many inspiring designs that will suit the format and type of bog that you are wanting to publish. These can range from $40 – $200.
5. Provide Social Media Share Buttons.
I remember a comment on my blog where a LinkedIn user had suggested that I include a share button on LinkedIn as he wanted to share it with several hundred of his LinkedIn connections but had found it too hard. A share button provides a low friction ( 2 clicks and you are 'shared' to hundreds of people) means for people to share without cutting and pasting headlines, links and opening software.
Include retweet and Facebook share buttons as a minimum.
Allowing people to subscribe to your blog by email as well as RSS feeds is important so that they have new content pushed to their email inbox or Google Reader after you have published your latest post. This promotes loyal readership drives daily traffic and makes sure that you are not forgotten.
The minimum recommendation here is Facebook and Twitter buttons that allow people to connect to you on Facebook and follow yopu on Twitter.
This a chicken and egg scenario. How do you as a new blogger showcase your expertise when you have just started? This is where offline credibility needs to be displayed on an online medium. So if you have any awards that can be highlighted on the front page of your blog then get banners made. If you have written an article in a magazine, a book, been on a TV show, won awards then tell the web world so that they can see that when they visit. When your Twitter followers are above several hundred in number start displaying that.
Blogs still are personal unless you are Huffington Post or Mashable. Readers want to know who you are and what you have done.. they want to identify with you and start to connect. This will open to a page on your blog where you will provide your biography in summary.
So you have built the blog and you have some of the fundamentals of blogging under your belt. The next question to ask is how do I create content that people will read and keep them engaged and keep them coming back?