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How to Find the Gold in Your Business

by Johnny B. Truant on December 13, 2010

image of gold coins

I was talking to a concerned client recently.

After taking my advice, his traffic and blog comments had started to decrease. We’d had three or four sessions, and he’d diligently done all I suggested, and he was implementing and enjoying himself and excited about his business.

But that graph kept trending downward. And it was starting to get to him.

Honestly, I could see where he was coming from. You hire a coach, and he tells you what to do, and your numbers go down?

Awesome.

But here’s the flip side:

During that same time that he was sweating readership and some zeros above his comments sections, he got his first big sale. Then his second big sale.

His number of customer inquiries went up, too — a growing pool of people who hadn’t hired him yet, but were on the right track to do so.

I told him to stop worrying about traffic. His goal wasn’t to attract as many eyeballs to his site as possible. What he really wanted was to find the action-takers and the customers — people who loved him and would prove it via their wallets.

No matter what your business, the goal isn’t to amass as much raw material as possible. (For a business centered around a blog, that “raw material” is typically traffic.)

The goal is to sift through that raw material, discard the junk, and find the small amount of true gold inside.

Small and engaged is better than big and vaguely interested

When the Third Tribe opened its doors earlier this year, Sonia and I talked in the very first seminar about the smallness of our lists. Sonia said that the big gurus would laugh at the size of her list, and I told Sonia that she’d laugh at mine.

Since that time, not much has changed. Relatively speaking, I still don’t have a large email list. I don’t have huge traffic to my blog.

But I don’t care in the least, because what I do have is a connection to a relatively small group of people who are pure gold.

They’re like me. They like me. I like them. I can talk to them like old friends. I can tell a borderline joke and nobody leaves, because we all have the same sense of humor.

I can make them an offer that I think is great and be pretty darn sure that they’ll think it’s great, too.

My people and I feel more like a club than a crowd. We’re not a huge group, but I’ll take close bonds with a few over a larger but more disconnected group of people who “read stuff from some guy online somewhere” any day. We’re small, but we’re a unit. Team Johnny, if you will.

That didn’t happen by accident. I had to sift and sort to find these people, and doing that is a lot harder than “increasing traffic.”

I don’t care about traffic if it’s unfiltered and nonspecific. Hell, I could increase traffic tomorrow if I wanted, but if it isn’t traffic that converts into sales, what’s the point?

Asking for more traffic is like asking for more vaguely interested people to shout at over a megaphone. I don’t care about that. I want new members to Team Johnny, so I only care about that big crowd for as long as it takes to sift through it to find the gold.

A simple, 2-step plan for finding for your own gold

Regardless of whether your traffic increases or decreases — or whether your number of comments goes up or goes down — the question you should always be asking is, “Am I getting more gold in my pan, or am I just collecting meaningless rocks and dirt?”

Commenters are more interesting to me than raw traffic, but even commenters are the wrong people if they’re just hanging out.

So if you’re out to find the gold in them thar hills, here’s how to go about it:

1. Get a guide

You don’t just need to know where to go to find gold. You also have to know what specifically you’re looking for (i.e. gold is usually in small flakes, not giant nuggets — and correspondingly, your ideal people may not be who you think they are) and how to tell the real stuff from fool’s gold.

Your guide in the quest to find more of those best people is intimate knowledge of your ideal reader.

Writing content is the blogger’s way of hiking through the trails and kneeling in the rivers to look for that glint of gold. That sketch of your perfect person is your map, so stick to it and don’t wander around trying to write for everyone. Think narrow and precise.

If a prospector’s map showed a hundred-mile circle bearing the legend, “Gold is in here somewhere,” it’d be pretty useless as a treasure map.

2. Sift and discard the junk

People look at traffic and blog comments because they’re incredibly easy stats to see and to measure. But people also forget that they’re largely irrelevant.

You don’t care how many people come to your site; you care how many people LOVE your site — and go on to take the action you want them to take.

You don’t care how many people comment; you care how many of them come back again and again, and use your comment section as a way to know, like, and trust you.

You don’t care how many people look at your products and services, or how many eyes see your offers.

Don’t turn down traffic that comes by chance, because more eyes means more potential customers. We all need traffic. But what you ultimately care about is how many people buy your stuff, not just the raw number of visitors.

Put all of that riverbed dirt through your sieve, and let go of everything that isn’t gold.

Don’t be afraid if people leave your site or unsubscribe from your email list, because those people aren’t the ones you’re looking for.

The question you want to ask is, is your connection to your ideal people increasing? Are you seeing more sales or more inquiries about possible sales? Those are the metrics that matter.

One quick warning

Do you know another reason for decreased traffic and decreased comments?

Those things also happen when your content sucks. So it doesn’t always mean you’re doing things right if your stats go down. Far from it, actually.

The lesson here isn’t to ignore or scorn traffic, but instead to pay more attention to the numbers that really matter.

  • Are you generating more true fans?
  • Do people buy your stuff, or buy on your recommendation?
  • Do they tell their friends about you?
  • Do they ask questions about your products and services?
  • Do they tell you that they really love your incredibly awesome free content?

If they’re doing more of that, you’re finding your gold, and traffic becomes a bonus.

Now get prospecting!

About the Author: Johnny B. Truant is setting up WordPress blogs for free this week. Get yours before time runs out!

P.S.

If you’re looking for a map to the gold in your online business, sign up for the free Copyblogger email newsletter, Internet Marketing for Smart People. It kicks off with a 20-part tutorial on how to boost the numbers that really matter in your business.

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Should Your Content Aim for Traffic or Conversion?

by Sean D'Souza on October 20, 2010

image of woman making a decision

Which articles attract reader attention, bringing you more traffic, more tweets and Stumbles, more eyeballs on the page?

Which articles convert, bringing you more subscribers and sales?

And how do you roll out a strategy that maximizes the twin impact of attraction and conversion?

Head to your local newsstand. The best attraction and conversion techniques are hidden between the pages of two very different magazines: Cosmopolitan and The New Yorker.

Cosmopolitan articles attract

Why does a Cosmo-type article attract more attention?

  • 77 Sex Positions in 77 Days
  • 75 Crazy-Hot Sex Moves
  • 10 Cheap Fun Date Ideas
  • 117 Style Ideas Already in Your Wardrobe

Seriously … 77 sex positions in 77 days?

That’s a lot of daily practice — but the sex isn’t what’s actually attracting readers.

We find it impossible to walk past anything that gives us seven, seventeen, or seven hundred ways to do or achieve something. We’re greedy, and we’re attracted to articles that feed our lust for excess — even excess information.

Most of us are suckers for list posts.

Mostly the articles are just bullet points stacked up against each other that go on forever. Sometimes there’s some meat to the bullet points, but often (especially in Cosmo) it’s just points.

This of course gives you the feeling that you’re learning something — and you are — but there’s no depth to the knowledge.

Cosmo-type articles are light reading. And we like light reading.

Gossip magazines sell like hotcakes for a reason. And just in case you’re thinking attraction is strictly a women’s-interest magazine strategy, you’ll find men’s magazines do it too.

Men’s Health and Money always includes light-reading articles on their covers like “How to Get Rock-Hard Abs” and “7 Secrets to a Richer Retirement.”

In fact, for years Men’s Health ran essentially the same four covers over and over again. They figured out the headlines and formats that were most effective and they just kept running the same ones.

Add light reading and a huge list together and what do you get? The promise of a lot of information without putting much work in to get it.

No wonder we find them so attractive.

Cosmo-style content gets retweeted, shared on Facebook, and sent around all the other social media channels more often, too — because everyone knows other people are attracted to this kind of format. And by sending it on, it makes the person who posted it seem more attractive by association.

If you create articles that offer Cosmopolitan-style headlines and light, easy-reading body copy, you will get the same results that Cosmo has gotten for decades on end. And those results are very good indeed. (That’s one reason Copyblogger has recommended Cosmo as a great resource for headline inspiration.)

New Yorker articles convert

The New Yorker produces in-depth, well-written articles that drive home a specific point.

When you write articles in that same style, you impress the heck out of your reader. They see you’re smart. They see you know what’s going on. And they see you can tell them something they don’t already know.

That impression is so powerful that the reader is compelled to investigate further to see what else you can tell them. The more in-depth articles they find, the more they think you’re a smart person to check in with often — and the harder it is for them to resist the Subscribe button.

This doesn’t just apply to text articles, but to video and audio as well. An in-depth piece in text, audio or video sucks you in. The more time you spend reading, listening or watching something, the more keen you are to follow up with the source.

Those of you who have read the back-of-magazine articles at The New Yorker might be worried this means you have to write incredibly long articles. You don’t.

Being interesting is far more important than going on and on about a topic, and even The New Yorker has plenty of short pieces that still offer great insight.

For a New Yorker-type article, you need depth, detail, and analysis. Those three things empower your reader a lot more than Cosmo-style fluff.

Put more in-depth detail and analysis in your writing, and you’ll see your conversion rates skyrocket.

So which is the best strategy?

It depends on you, of course. Some blogs — just like some print publications — are driven almost entirely by Cosmopolitan-style headlines and copy. Others are driven by the New Yorker style.

But you don’t actually have to choose.

You’ll notice that even Cosmo includes at least one in-depth article per issue. And The New Yorker always has a couple short, lighter items up front. Heck, even Playboy made a name for in-depth articles and attention-getting pin-ups.

You can use both of these strategies at the same time. And you should.

A strategic mixture of both types of articles will not only attract a larger number of clients, but also get you greater conversion.

You can also interlink articles, so that a Cosmo-style short article leads to a more in-depth New Yorker-type article. Or a Cosmo-influenced headline can pull the reader into a piece with more depth than Cosmopolitan ever dreamed of.

In print, magazines normally separate the two styles. The front of the magazine has mostly short, light pieces; the back has longer, more in-depth pieces.

Online, you get to be more flexible. You can drive them from light material to deeper, more detailed content so they get a brilliant mix of both kinds of pieces (you’ll get great SEO benefits, too). They’ll be more attracted to you at the same time they’re inclined to convert and check in with you daily.

If you want to attract attention (that means more traffic, more readers, and more social media sharing), go with Cosmo-style articles. At a minimum, make sure you’ve crafted a drop-dead attention-grabbing headline.

If you want conversion (that means subscribers and paying customers), lean toward New Yorker-influenced articles, with plenty of depth, detail, and thoughtful analysis.

And if you want both, give your readers both. Copyblogger doesn’t settle for just one approach, so why should you?

About the Author: Sean D’Souza offers a great free report on ‘Why Headlines Fail’ when you subscribe to his Psychotactics Newsletter. Be sure to check out his blog, too.

P.S.

If you’d like to get more traffic and more conversion for your site, be sure to pick up Copyblogger’s free email newsletter, Internet Marketing for Smart People. It kicks off with a 20-part series featuring our very best advice on how to grow your online business.

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Should We Be Worried About Fast Food Content?

by Sonia Simone on December 18, 2009

image of guy looking at a hamburger

Earlier this week on TechCrunch, Michael Arrington wrote an alarmed post about “fast food content that will surely, over time, destroy the mom and pop operations that hand craft their content today.”

Mom and pop operations and hand-crafted content sounds an awful lot like you and me, doesn’t it?

So is this actually something we need to worry about? Is what Arrington calls “the rise of cheap, disposable content on a mass scale, force fed to us by the portals and search engines” going to destroy the businesses we’re building on a foundation of high-quality content?

Arrington is deeply concerned about sites like AOL and Demand Media, which scrape and mash real content into something that’s theoretically legitimate (since it was compiled by a human being rather than a piece of software), but in practice gives no value to the reader.

This “mainstream spam” can be efficiently optimized for search, or thrust onto the unsuspecting eyeballs of AOL users. (Haven’t the poor things suffered enough already?)

Arrington believes there’s no hope against this onslaught of junk content, which is going to overwhelm all of the good stuff.

Clearly, we’re all doomed

Arrington advises content creators (that’s you and me) to:

Figure out an even more disruptive way to win, or die. Or just give up on making money doing what you do. If you write for passion, not dollars, you’ll still have fun. Even if everything you write is immediately ripped off without attribution, and the search engines don’t give you the attention they used to. You may have to continue your hobby in the evening and get a real job, of course. But everyone has to face reality sometimes.

Apart from the whining, the exaggeration, and the hysteria, the problem with Arrington’s argument is it’s based on a number of bad assumptions.

Specifically:

Bad assumption #1: Search engines and mega portals are the only way to get traffic

AOL is feeding their content slop to their “massive” audience (which, in fact, is shrinking at rates that would make Biggest Loser proud). Arrington makes the assumption that those AOL customers won’t come find your non-crap content, because the fast food stuff is the only thing on their radar.

This then leapfrogs to another bad assumption, that the only way anyone sees content is to find it on a mega site like AOL, or via a search engine like Google.

Links from your favorite bloggers count for nothing. Tweets from a friend count for nothing. Facebook pointers count for nothing. Email from your mom counts for nothing. No one ever points a friend to genuinely valuable content and says, “Hey, you should check this out, you would like it.”

The entire direction of social media and content sharing indicates otherwise.

Bad assumption #2: Readers will keep reading crappy content

AOL’s user base is still big enough that I’m sure they’ll get some readers at least skimming their stuff.

But when it comes to content, Darwin rules. If content doesn’t meet the needs of users, it dies. We can’t even force grade-school kids to read what doesn’t engage them. What makes us think that AOL can “force feed” their users anything?

And what makes us believe that even if those users do skim AOL’s lame content, that they’ll never read anything else, or that, when they have a particular need or concern, they won’t go actively looking for something more useful?

Business tip for TechCrunch: when you find yourself afraid of a stumbling dinosaur like AOL, there’s something gravely wrong with your thinking, your business model, or both.

Bad assumption #3: Google would rather serve fast food content than your content

Now I hold no illusions that Google is a benevolent, all-knowing deity that rewards the just and punishes the wicked. But based on observation, it’s pretty clear that Google would rather serve good content than scraped and mashed junk content.

Google wants their searchers to find a good experience on the other side of their search result. If sites like Demand Media, a video producer that slaps together 4,000 videos a day in what amounts to content sweat shops, can deliver content worth watching, they’ll do well.

If they don’t deliver something worth watching, they don’t give Google’s searchers the experience Google wants to deliver. Which means Google becomes less valuable.

Google can’t be “force-fed” any more than readers can. There’s no reason to believe they’ll treat this “hand assembled” spam more kindly than the bot-created kind.

Bad assumption #4: Content means news

Arrington also says that sites like the New York Times are “outright stealing” his content and passing it off as their own. (And he warns you, little mom and pop, that your content’s going to be stolen without attribution as well.)

By “stealing,” Arrington apparently means that when TechCrunch publishes a breaking story, the New York Times often writes a story on the same topic, using their own reporters and neglecting to thank him for his tireless journalistic efforts.

If you’re not TechCrunch, this is not a problem that you need to spend even four seconds thinking about. You already know from hanging out on Twitter and reading blogs that news spreads more quickly than anyone’s ability to control it, and that nobody “owns” a breaking story.

For those of us who create “hand-crafted” content, what we say isn’t nearly as important as how we say it. We rarely break news (although occasionally we become the news.)

If readers want the latest news, they rightly go to a site like TechCrunch, the Times, or, increasingly often, Twitter.

It’s when they want useful knowledge, insight, or analysis that they come back to us. Plus, there’s a reason we get you to focus on delivering educational content versus commodity news, right?

We’re valuable precisely because we can cut through the noise and give them only what’s useful and relevant to them.

I’m sure it’s irritating to Arrington not to get a linkback from the Times, but that’s his headache, not ours. He seems to be doing ok without it.

Bad assumption #5: You need millions of eyeballs to make a living

There’s an implicit bad assumption behind all of the explicit bad assumptions in Arrington’s post, which is that the only way you’ll be able to make a living with content is to attract huge amounts of traffic.

In other words, the only possible model is to attract enough attention (via search engines, for your breaking news) to monetize your site with advertising.

But you already know that’s not a business model for the real world.

Let’s say you have a blog that gives business advice to yoga teachers. You’ve paired that with a simple but effective marketing system to sell group coaching, individual consulting, and information products to readers who want to go further with what you’re teaching. You only need to find a few hundred customers a year to make a very nice living.

  • No fast food content generator on earth is going to outrank you for “how to run a yoga studio.”
  • If a cheap, scratch-the-surface video or post does outrank you for that #1 spot, the reader quickly finds out that the fast food content doesn’t meet her needs at all. Click goes the back button, and she’s looking for you again.
  • Your content collects links from like-minded people, because it’s cool and valuable.
  • Other yoga teachers (and herbalists and organic co-ops and past-life regression therapists) will spread the word about you faster than Google ever could.
  • You have no reason to run advertising for anything other than your own products. So you don’t need to pull hundreds of thousands of “eyeballs” to make a decent living. You just need to make a great connection with the right 300 people.

So what should a “whole food” content producer do?

Exactly what you were doing yesterday.

Keep your eyes on your audience, not Chicken Little pundits telling you (again) that you can’t make a living.

Keep following the First Rule of Copyblogger. Keep creating content that rewards the reader for consuming it. Keep cutting through the clutter and noise by being smarter, more relevant, and more interesting.

Fast food content is just the latest incarnation of an old affliction — spam. If it hasn’t killed us yet, this new version isn’t likely to make much of a dent.

For content-based marketing strategies that work in the real world, sign up for the free Copyblogger email newsletter, Internet Marketing for Smart People. It’s packed with the information and advice you need to create real business success, and it’s 100% hysteria-free.

About the Author: Sonia Simone is Senior Editor of Copyblogger and the founder of Remarkable Communication.

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