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Do something different

Posted by

Ian Brodie on September 4th, 2011.

I did some training a while back for a really good client. And something we did had quite a surprising result that I think we all can learn from.

The area we were focusing on was tenders/RFPs and we used a live example of a proposal they were about to work on to bring the training course to life.

The team did a great job and came up with a theme and approach to the proposal that really hit their customer's hot buttons while highlighting their strengths.

At the end of the course, one of the participants made an excellent point…

“You know, we normally would have just ‘gone through the motions' with that proposal and not come up with half the ideas we ended up including”.

It wasn't that we did anything particularly unusual.

We just analysed their customer's request a bit more deeply and used a couple of frameworks I'd developed for them to draw out what was really driving their needs, and what fears they might have about switching suppliers.

What was important was that we tried something different.

We looked at something they'd essentially looked at a hundred times before – but just with a different lens.

And it made a big difference.

Try it the next time you're working on your marketing.

Look at what you're working on through your customer's eyes. Or your competitors'.

Instead of focusing on problems, focus on aspirations – or vice versa.

Instead of your normal benefit-filled headlines – write copy to invoke curiosity or surprise this time.

Do something different. It can work as well for you as it did for me.

Speak soon,

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How to market like a professional poker player

Posted by

Ian Brodie on August 28th, 2011.

About a decade or so ago I got a bit obsessed with poker.

For an ex-mathematician like me who then went on to study business and psychology, it's an alluring game. Full of analogies and parallels with business and marketing.

Although I haven't played for years, I still have a huge library of poker literature in storage. Brunson, Sklansky, Malmuth, Caro, Schoonmaker, dozens of them.

And I'm still sometimes reminded of the similarities between poker and business. Here's one that struck me recently.

Stacking the Odds in Your Favour

Perhaps the biggest difference between poker professionals and casual players – the thing that most results in one group winning money and the other losing it – is simply that the pros play less hands.

In the most popular form of poker, hold-em, there's a saying that “any two cards can win”. And while that may be true in exceptions, following that advice and regularly playing any two cards is a surefire route to the poor-house.

Instead, the pros stack the odds in their favour by only playing the best starting hands. They sit out round after round and only invest their precious chips in starting hands they know have a positive expected value (ie. if played often enough, they'll make money).

It's not a particularly clever strategy. It's not a particularly exciting one. But it works. It's the foundation they then build on.

Now, if you were to watch poker on TV it wouldn't seem that way. Every pro mixes up their game and plays cards you wouldn't expect so that they don't become predictable. And inevitably the TV shows focus on those unusual hands, or hands where a big bluff comes off or someone gets lucky on the river.

But underneath all the fireworks, and the table talk, the pros know the odds and they play them.

Similarly, in marketing, one thing that separates successful rainmakers from those who struggle is they stack the odds in their favour by focusing on prospects with a high chance of becoming clients.

It sounds obvious. But so few people do it.

They don't have a clear picture in their mind of exactly the sort of person likely to need their services.

They go to networking events filled with people unlikely to ever become a client or to refer one.

They advertise in general media or Yellow Pages.

Their website offers nothing of value or interest to the people who would make the best clients for them.

When they ask for referrals, they say they'd be happy to get a referral to “anyone” or “small businesses”. Such broad definitions that they don't get referred to anyone (or worse still they get referred to people never likely to buy from them and so waste their time).

If you want to be successful and productive with your marketing you must invest your time and effort like professional poker players invest their chips: only in the very highest potential areas.

For most of us, our time is a super-scarce resource. Yet so often we use marketing approaches that cause us to spend valuable face-to-face time with people who aren't perfect prospects for us.

The result is not only wasted time for us – it's also a painful experience for both sides.

Don't be like the poker amateurs who play any two cards and throw away their chips night after night.

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Selling

It Ain’t What You Do…It’s Who You Do It With

Posted by

Ian Brodie on August 25th, 2011.

Wrong People Quite a bit of the training and coaching work I do is to help professionals improve their selling skills to close more business.

It's an area where many people feel unfomfortable – they don't want to be too pushy or “salesy”.

And there are indeed techniques and approaches which can improve your conversion rate by improving the way you interact with potential clients in sales meetings.

But often there's something else you can do. Something that can have an even bigger impact than any sales technique.

Let's do a little exercise.

Think about the very best ever sales meeting you’ve had. A meeting with a potential client that was incredibly pleasant, where you felt really engaged, and where the client emerged enthusiastic and signed up to work with you right away.

Visualise it now.

Now rather than thinking about what you did in that meeting, I want you to think about the characteristics of the client you were meeting with. What was it about them that made the meeting go so well?

Chances are, they had most of the following factors:

They had a genuine problem or issue that you could help with
The issue was important to them – it had a big impact
You could add a tremendous amount of value to them
They were able to easily afford your services
They respected your expertise – they saw you as an authority in your field
They trusted you – they weren’t second guessing what you were saying and your motives
You got on well – your personalities and communication styles clicked

Let’s call these types of people your high potential prospects.

Here’s one of the big secrets to having more successful sales meetings.

Your success at winning clients is less to do with what you do in your sales meetings and much more to do with having the meeting with the right person.

If you can sit down with a high potential prospect: someone who has a genuine need for what it is you do, who feels the urgency of that need, who trusts in you and believes in your capabilities – then you are very likely to get a sale.

Conversely, if you meet with people who don’t have an urgent need, or who don’t perceive you to be an expert at what you do – then no matter what clever sales techniques you might use, you’re going to struggle to sell. It’s going to be painful.

Now, if you're a huge company – IBM, say – then you don't have much choice. You pretty much need to sell to everyone to keep up your market share and revenues.

But for most of us, that's not the case. Most of us only need a handful of good clients every year to do very well indeed.

We have a choice. We don't have to try to sell to everyone.

One of the characteristics of a consultant or coach with an inadequate marketing system in place is that they have very few high quality leads, and spend a lot of painful time trying to sell to the few they do have. Most of whom aren't anywhere near the high potential prospects we thought about earlier.

With a strong marketing system, the people you're meeting are a good fit to that high potential prospect profile. They're a pleasure to meet with and talk to, and they're much, much easier to sell to.

So next time you lose a sale, or are considering doing something to improve your selling skills, take a step back.

Is the issue really your selling skills?

Think about your most recent sales meetings. Have the people across the other side of the table looked like those high potential prospects you visualised earlier?

If they haven't, then chances are the issue is really your marketing system.

Chances are you're just not selling to the right people.

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Strategy

Why your competitors will fail (and you won't)

Posted by

Ian Brodie on August 19th, 2011.

This is a guest blog post by David Ackert of Ackert Advisory, founder of the Practice Boomers e-learning business development program for service professionals that helps them get more clients and grow their practice.

I've just joined the faculty over at Practice Boomers and will be contributing a number of articles and resources. Here's a short and sweet article and video from David on a (still) much underused marketing approach.

Whenever I speak to groups, I ask for a show of hands to this question: “How many of you regularly ask your clients or referral sources for business?”

Consistently, only 10-15% of the audience raises their hands.

The other 85% confess that they aren't very proactive when it comes to growing their practice. They wait for their clients to think of them, then they react and provide service, then they wait for the next email or telephone call.

When I ask them why, they ultimately give the same reason: They don't know exactly how to ask their clients and referral sources for business without offending them.

That’s understandable. No one wants to jeopardize their client relationships. If common sense keeps us among the ranks of the 85%, so be it. Better to play it safe until some better alternative presents itself; a simple, a clear technique that generates referrals without compromising our clients’ good will. Perhaps at some point in the future you’ll have such a technique.

Perhaps six minutes from now.

This short video shows you exactly what to say, how to say it appropriately, and who to say it to.

Put it to work and you'll enter the 15% who ask for the business they want without risking the clients they have.

* As a faculty member, if one day you join the Practice Boomers community I'll get a referral fee.

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Marketing

Are You Building Your Tribe Yet

Posted by

Ian Brodie on August 18th, 2011.

I'm going to talk about a marketing strategy that's not for everyone.

It's hugely powerful, perhaps the most powerful strategy there is. But as I say, not for everyone.

The strategy is to build a tribe, a following, a “gang” – call it what you will.

Seth Godin wrote about it in his book Tribes (though to be honest, I think he overcomplicated it).

I touched on it when I wrote about Authority Marketing recently – establishing yourself as a leading expert in your field. Building a tribe goes one step further.

Building a tribe means creating a following of people who not only respect you, not only believe you know what you're talking about – but support you, want you to succeed.

Or more exactly, they want what you stand for to succeed.

You see, creating a tribe is about more than you. It's about a cause, a higher purpose.

To build a tribe you have to stand for something, champion something.

Back in the 80s my wife used to shop a lot at Body Shop. It wasn't just that they had great products. It was what they stood for.

Notwithstanding the later controversies about whether they were quite as green as they made out, at the time it felt good to support a company which stood for something we believed in.

Of course, the products had to be great too. But later, when the high street stores started bringing out comparable (and cheaper) “natural” brands we stayed loyal.

We felt we were part of a cause. And we were evangelists to those who hadn't “seen the light”. We identified with the people behind the business and what they were trying to do.

Can “normal” businesses like yours or mine inspire the same fierce loyalty and feelings of belonging?

Sure we can.

We all stand for something when you think about it. None of us is purely in it just for the money.

I interviewed consultant John Seddon recently for my Authority Marketing podcast series (you can listen here: John Seddon Interview). John's company is hugely successful and they win a lot of improvement projects with the public sector.

But they don't just win them because they're good at what they do. They win them because Seddon is an evangelist for systems thinking led improvement. He has a passion for improving the public sector ‘the right way” and is fiercly critical of the status quo. That's attracted a tribe of people who buy in to his philosophy.

My friend Charlie Green is the go-to guy for improving trust in business. But he hasn't just got there because he's an expert in trust. He's got there because he has a point of view on what businesses should be doing to build trust – on what's right and what's wrong.

Another friend, Tom Searcy, leads the field in advising companies on winning big sales through RFPs. But he's not a cold technician. He's a cheerleader and advocate for small businesses fighting against their bigger competitors to win those big sales.

Whose cause do you champion?

Perhaps you're a leadership trainer looking to unleash all the hidden talents in organisations. or a career coach who loves to help people find their calling. or a supply chain consultant on a mission to cut waste and bureacracy. Or a marketing consultant looking to generate growth in neglected inner cities.

For myself, over the years, I've seen myself becoming more and more an advocate of “pain free” ways of marketing and selling. Of approaches that allow professionals to win clients without being pushy or sleazy – and actually enjoying what they do. A champion of “pain free marketing” as it were.

What about you? Do you have such a passion?

Because if you actually stand for something, if you can build a tribe around that, then marketing becomes a whole lot easier and more pleasant.

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Marketing

Why Networking Doesn’t Work (for me)

Posted by

Ian Brodie on August 18th, 2011.

Are you a good networker?

I was pretty good. Invested in training. Read all I could. Went to some great events organised by some wonderful people.

I put the work into it. Practised and practised. Even got good enough to be asked to teach networking skills to others.

But it frustrated the hell out of me.

Perhaps you've experienced something similar? I used to go to events, meet people, ask them about their business, probe some of their challenges, tell them about what I did if asked.

All the stuff you're supposed to do.

I did OK. But nowhere near as well as I thought I should be doing.

After a few years it finally dawned on me what was going on.

You see networking, like any marketing, is a game.

And it's a game of skill. The people who do best at networking are the ones with the best networking skills.

Now that might sound like stating the bleeding obvious, but bear with me.

By networking skills I mean how well you interact with others, how good a listener you are, how well you can get across what you do in an interesting and memorable way.

Of course, there's more to it than that. But critically, success at networking is not particularly dependent on the depth of your expertise. On being the best in your field.

Don't get me wrong – you have to be good at what you do. Eventually your reputation will catch up with you if you're not.

But you don't have to be the best.

What happens is that when you enter that room, you're on a level playing field.You could be the world's leading expert in your field, it doesn't matter. No one knows you.

By the time they leave the room, the impression they have of you will be based on 5 minutes of interacting with you.

Even if they meet you multiple times over multiple events, their impression of you will be based on a very small amount of time.

Enough time for them to tell if you're a nice person. To tell if you listen to them and engage with them. Enough time for your networking skills to shine.

But nowhere near enough time for your depth of expertise and experience to show. For them to tell if you're really the world's leading expert or just a decent hardworking professional who does a good job.

And that's when I realised why networking wasn't working for me.

At the risk of sounding immodest – I really am an expert (in the rather limited field of marketing and business development for consultants and coaches – I'm pretty much a duffer at everything else).

My networking skills are good. But no better than dozens of others who've done the training and put in the work like I did.

Put me in a room alongside an averagely skilled marketing consultant who's a master networker, and he'll come out with the business, not me.

That's the nature of networking.

Nothing wrong with that. But it told me that I needed to find marketing methods that played on my unique skills.

For me, doing presentations at events rather than just attending them gave me a chance to showcase my expertise – and it worked far better for me at building relationships and winning clients.

As, of course, does my website, webinars, articles, etc.

Nowadays I only do marketing that showcases my expertise and builds my percieved authority.

What can you learn from this?

Whatever your personal edge – whether you're a technical expert, someone with decades of experience, you're a wonderful person to work with, you always get results, you're the cheapest there is.

Whatever it is – you need to use a marketing approach that showcases it.

Don't use approaches where you're just one of many like I did for so long with networking.

Focus on something that will let you shine.

So what approaches worked better for me (and will probably work better for you too)?

They're the strategies I outline in detail in Momentum Club. You can grab a $1 trial and start implementing those strategies right now by clicking here.

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Get Clients Online

How to Win Business with your Blog – Part 9: The Best Resources For Blogging

Posted by

Ian Brodie on August 17th, 2011.

Tools In my series of articles on How to Win Business with your Blog you'll have seen just how powerful a blog can be in winning you clients. And you've learned some of the key strategies to make blogging work for you.

But there's often a big gap between information, ideas, good intentions – and actual implementation.

Often it's tricky to know where to start, and you may be worried about running down a dead end or just wasting your time.

So here are my recommendations on key resources to help get you up and running quickly.

Getting Your Blog Up and Running

Firstly, I recommend that rather than hosting your blog on a free platform like blogger.com or wordpress.com, you host it on your own domain. It's not that tricky, and it means that the assets you build (for example, the links in to your site) are yours, rather than helping out the blogging platform. And you're not subject to the whims and policy changes of the platform providers.

To do this, you'll need to register a domain (or use one you already have – such as running it at www.mysite.com/blog) and then get hosting for the domain.

For domain registration I personally use godaddy.com as my primary registrar. They're easy to use with good customer support. And because they're big, no matter what you're trying to do (for example configure google apps) there'll be instructions on how to do it on godaddy.

My primary sites (including this one of course) are hosted on Lightningbase for high performance at great value. I can thoroughly recommend them. I also host other sites on Siteground which is a good, low cost alternative.

You can boost the performance of any site using a content delivery network. Cloudflare is a free one I use. It's a bit technical to set up but worth it.

Without question, the platform I'd recommend for your blog (and your website generally) is WordPress.

Sure, there are other free platforms like Drupal and Joomla. And other proprietary systems to run your blog.

But WordPress works. It's got by far the most available themes (to make your site look good) and plugins (to give it functionality like doing backups, adding social media icons, optimising the site for search engines, etc.). And almost everything is free.

It's well supported by website hosting companies, so you can install it and have it running with one press of a button.

And there's no shortage of people who can help you – either with advice, or to do the whole thing for you.

So head over to www.wordpress.org to check it out.

Themes and Plugins for WordPress

Your site needs to look professional – and the best basis for that it to tweak a WordPress premium theme.

On ianbrodie.com I use the Expert Marketer theme from Themeforest.

Studiopress is the home of some very high quality WordPress premium themes – many designed specifically as showcase sites for consultants and freelancers. My other favorites are the Executive Theme, Enterprise Theme, Agency Theme and Freelance Theme.

Optimizepress is the theme I use to run my membership sites. It's specially pre-configured to handle sales pages, “squeeze pages”, product launches and membership sites. Thoroughly recommended – this theme has saved my literally days of configuration.

For high converting landing pages on my own site where I don't want to send people to a different site, I use LeadPages. It's such a huge timesaver – you just select the basic template for optin forms or webinar registrations or sales pages, make a few adjustments to text and images and you've got a high converting page up and running in less than 5-10 minutes.

For optin forms on your normal blog pages and posts, I recommend Thrive leads. It has a “what you see is what you get” editor and templates that lets you create great looking optin forms for your sidebar, after blog posts etc.

If you've got a premium theme it probably has built in search engine optimisation features. But if not, you'll need the All in One SEO Plugin or Yoast's SEO plugin. I also recommend W3 Total Cache to boost the performance of your site. For all my sites I use Contact Form 7 as a way of creating quick, easy contact forms for people to get in touch with me.

I also use Tweetily to randomly tweet out links to my old blog posts.

For my social sharing icons I use the Social Warfare plugin – it's one of the few that properly counts Tweets these days.

For my podcasts I use the Blubrry Powerpress plugin. And I use Akismet to trap spam comments.

Most important of all: you need to take regular backups of your site in case of problems. There's a free database backup plugin for wordpress. This backs up your blog posts and pages. Many web hosting companies – especially the premium ones like Siteground – have a backup solution included in the hosting.

Landing Pages

For Landing pages I use Thrive Architect. Thrive Architect is very marketing focused with lots of options for optin forms, testimonials, etc. And it has some great “out of the box” templates you can reuse.

Email Marketing

I highlighted the importance of Email Marketing for nurturing relationships with potential clients.

Personally, I use Active Campaign. It provides advanced email marketing with excellent integration with CRM systems, accounting systems and a whole host of others. And unlike Infusionsoft or Ontraport it starts off at the same pricing level as simple systems like Aweber or Mailchimp.

You can read my review of Active Campaign here.

For more basic options if you don't need the advanced automation, I recommend GetResponse.

That's it – these tools and services should be really helpfully to you. But most important of all – just get going. You'll learn as you go along.

Tom Peters recently said “No single thing in the last 15 years has been as important to my professional life as blogging…and it's the best damn marketing tool I've ever had by an order of magnitude”.

'nuff said.

* Some of these links are affiliate links. In other words, if you eventually sign up and buy these products via my link I'll get a commission. This has in no way influenced my recommendation. I use all these products myself as my primary tools (as you can see from the site and my emails).

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More Clients Memorandum

My moment of madness (and why it affects you)

Posted by

Ian Brodie on August 14th, 2011.

I had a weird experience a while back.

I was a bit dissatisfied with my business bank account. I'd been with the Co-operative bank for a while. They're the UKs “ethical bank” which I like – but unfortunately their online banking is just awful and I'd had about enough.

So I made up my mind to switch to a different bank. I planned to set aside an hour over the weekend to look up the different options and choose which one I was going to go with.

Then completely by coincidence, I got a call from Barclays asking if I'd be interested in briefly talking about their business account and the benefits of switching.

It was like they were psychic. Absolutely perfect timing. Just as I was considering a switch.

Now you're probably expecting me to go on and talk about the value of timing. Knowing how to identify when your clients get urgent needs. And how Barclays walked away with my business as a result.

But it didn't work out like that.

When the nice lady on the phone asked if I'd be interested in discussing their business account, I immediately said “no thanks, I'll call you if I need something”.

I couldn't help it, it was a knee-jerk reaction. Pure emotion speaking.

Afterwards I realised just what a strange thing I'd done. I needed a new bank account, someone offered to give me detailed information about it, and I turned down the chance.

Madness really.

Here's what I think was going on inside my head.

The minute someone called me offering to talk to me about something, my defenses went up.

It wasn't her fault. She wasn't pushy. Wasn't salesy. It's a conditioned response these days.

If you call me wanting to discuss one of your products or even how you can “help me” I assume you're trying to sell me something. I assume you're biased. I assume you'll give me a picture that favours your products.

And I know I can find out all the information I need from the web anyway.

You see, the importance of the web isn't just that it allows me to search and find what I want. It's changed my mindset.

Searching myself. Finding information myself.

Where in the old days I used to rely on others to provide me with information on things I might want to buy, now I don't want to hear from them.

I want to be self sufficient. I want to control the process.

There's an old saying in sales: you have to control the process. Control the sales meeting. Control the agenda.

But try that on me these days and you'll be out of the door.

I, the buyer, want to be in control. If you want to sell me anything you're going to have to live with that.

And I'm not the only one.

We're all shifting. We're all growing increasingly suspicious of information we haven't sourced ourselves.

We're all used to being in control and that's how we want our buying experience to be.

You know this. This is nothing new.

But have you adjusted your marketing to respond?

Are you focused on becoming one of the trusted sources of information your clients use?

Or are you still pushing your message at them?

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More Clients Memorandum

The best way to get the attention of prospects

Posted by

Ian Brodie on August 7th, 2011.

Getting the attention of your prospects and clients – and more importantly keeping it – is so tricky.

Not only are attention spans shrinking, but we all have so much on our minds and we're so busy multi-tasking we find it difficult to give our full attention to anything.

Yet if we want prospects to hire us and clients to continue to engage us, then we need their full, undivided attention.

Recently I was reminded of the power of an approach that most of us don't use anywhere near enough: storytelling.

When I was on holiday one of the books I read was Stephen King's “On Writing”. It's partly an autobiography, and partly his guide to how he writes.

Now I can't claim to be a big Stephen King fan – in fact I've not read any of his books. But he's very prolific and commercially successful – so worth paying attention to.

In the part of the book where he talks about good writing: vocabulary, grammar, style, etc. he introduces it by telling the story of his Uncle Oren's toolbox.

It takes him 3 and a half pages and just shy of 1,000 words to essentially make the point that it's useful to have a big “toolbox” to hand so that you always have the right tool for the job, no matter how hard your writing task gets.

Now I've got an embarrasingly short attention span these days, but his story of going out with his Uncle Oren and his giant toolbox to fix a broken screen had me hanging on every word.

I even found the diversions – the descriptions of the box itself, the cigarettes Uncle Oren smoked and his attitude to King's brand choices – quite fascinating.

King could have made his point in a few short sentences. But if he had, I'd have forgotten it hours later. Thanks to him bringing the message to life through storytelling, the point is still clear in my mind a couple of weeks later – and no doubt will be in months or even years to come.

Master salesmen are usually master storytellers too. They hold attention and get their points across much more powerfully through the use of stories and examples than by just stating the plain old facts. And even the most no-nonsense, “tell me like it is” executives listen intently. We're all programmed from birth to listen to and remember stories.

Veteran marketer Dan Kennedy is another master storyteller. His carefully crafted stories of “Al the Plumber” and the “Carpet Cleaning Guy” give perfect illustrations of how his magnetic marketing approach works in a way that's both memorable and intriguing.

You listen to the stories and they give Kennedy credibility without him having to boast or make bold claims. And they segue perfectly into his offer to provide the tools and templates to help you achieve the same great results.

You can use stories in many different situations. On my blog I've writen about how to use stories to explain what you do, or to answer tough questions from clients.

They work brilliantly in pitches and presentations, or in more informal discussions.

And the lovely thing is that you don't have to be a famous novellist to use them. You just need to put some thought in advance into preparing a set of relevant stories you can use to illustrate key points you often cover in your presentations.

Of course, most people don't put in the effort to do the preparation. So if you're one of the few that does, you're going to really stand out.

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Get Clients Online

How To Win Business With Your Blog – Part 8: Where I Get My Traffic From

Posted by

Ian Brodie on July 30th, 2011.

(Please note this article was written in 2011 – my traffic sources change and right now the #1 source of traffic for me is from my regular emails. At other times it has been from paid advertising).

Most articles about winning business online start with how to get traffic – but I've left it until last.

And the reason is that so should you.

There's no point in getting a ton of traffic to your site if none of it turns into subscribers or clients. You first need to get your content right to get visitors engaged and your conversion right to get clients.

Once you're confident that the traffic you get will turn into something useful, then you can start ramping it up.

Sources of Traffic

There are a zillion sources of traffic for your blog. I can't hope to possibly do justice to all of them. So instead, I'm going to tell you where I get my traffic from (with a few additional recommendations).

Overall, I get roughly 10,000 unique visitors per month.

My #1 Traffic Source: Google

I get 52% of my traffic from search engines – 48% of it from google.

For me, search engine traffic is critical. Not just because there's so much of it – but because the traffic is from people searching for something. And if they find my site, it means that most of the time, they're searching for something I can help with.

There are really two main sorts of searches I get. There are what I call “problem” searches. This is where visitors (hopefully potential clients) are in the early stages of trying to address an issue and have come searching about the issue itself.

So the search could be something like “how to get more clients”, or “how to become a trusted advisor”.

The second type are “solution searches”. Where the visitor already has an idea of what they need – so they're searching for that. Things like “sales training” or “marketing consultant”.

Solution searches are from people who are closer to buying – so theoretically they're the best. The trouble is, they haven't built a relationship with me yet and I've got a short space of time to build up the trust and credibility needed for them to feel confident hiring me.

Problem searches are a longer sales cycle. But the advantage is that if they keep coming back to my site, or subscribe to my newsletter, then by the time they've figured out what they need, they'll already know and trust me (and my blog may have influenced what they decide they need).

Early on, I figured out what the important problem and solution searches would be for my services and I invested heavily in my own education on search engine optimisation (SEO) to make sure I knew how to make sure I ranked at the top of google for those phrases.

A few years later and it's paid off.

I thoroughly recommend you make a similar investment. Not in the technical details (unless you really want to). But in learning the key principles so you can make sure anyone who does SEO work for you is doing it right.

I'll be writing more on this topic soon.

My #2 Traffic Source: Direct visits

25% of my traffic is direct. These are visitors who've come to my site directly without clicking on a link on an earlier website or a search engine.

So they've either bookmarked my site and are coming back, or they're on my email newsletter list and are clicking on a link in their email program.

These are crucial visitors for me. They're my regular subscribers and repeat visitors. The people most likely to become clients.

But I can't directly control how much of this traffic I get. It's a function of how many people come from other sources and how well I do in converting them into subscribers/repeat visitors.

My #3 Traffic Source: Social media

11% of my traffic comes from social media: 6% from Twitter, 3% from Facebook, 2% from Linkedin.

It's not a ton of traffic – but it's over 1,000 unique visitors so it's worth having.

I don't do a lot on social media. A few minutes every day on each of the big sites.

But I have a big Twitter following and I've implemented quite a bit of automation to make me more productive. I tweet each of my new blog posts a couple of times. I also have a plugin installed called “Tweet Old Posts” which randomly tweets one of my old blog posts every few hours – that doubled my twitter traffic when I installed it.

Most of my Facebook and Linked traffic comes from the “like buttons” I've got on the blog (via a plugin called Digg Digg). Readers click the like button for their preferred network and their followers, contacts and fans see a link to my blog posts.

Linkedin is particularly interesting. Despite getting less traffic than the other social media sites, I get over 5 times the sign-up rate from Linkedin traffic as from Facebook or Twitter. I assume because there's just a greater number of relevant people connected to me and my contacts on Linkedin.

Although none of the social media sites were so big when I started blogging nearly 4 years ago, I would definitely recommend it for people starting out.

I've helped a few people get their blogs up and running recently, and social media has been a big help.

It can take a long time to get a decent ranking in google for your key search terms – but with social media you can be up and running much quicker and generating relevant traffic. Especially if you have a pre-established network.

The downside is that you have to keep working at it.

With SEO, one you've worked to get a good ranking you have to put in much less effort to maintain it. With social media, you have to keep working just as hard forever.

The remainder: Other referring websites

The remaining 12% of traffic comes from people clicking links from other people's websites. This may be links from an article directory, a blogroll on another blog, or a specific blog post or article which mentions my site.

Exactly which sites I get this remaining traffic from changes each month – as does the “quality” of the click.

I get particularly high newsletter signup rates if I write a guest article for someone else's site or blog, or I'm interviewed by them or otherwise mentioned favourably. This is obviously particularly true if the other site is closely related to mine.

For example, a year or so ago, one of my articles on referrals was reprinted on the site of veteran sales trainer and motivational speaker Zig Ziglar.

I got a flood of traffic, and over 30% of the visitors subscribed to my newsletter.

I get subscription rates of 10%+ for other articles I've written. Whereas with less directly related links, there are often no subscribers or a very low percentage.

Joint Venture Traffic

I ought to say a few words about what's called Joint Venture Traffic.

A few blogs have managed to get huge amounts of traffic by being recommended in the email newsletters of other highly successful bloggers or internet marketers.

This is very similar to the quality of traffic you can get from links from your own articles or strong recommendations on other sites. But if the other blogger/marketer has a big following, the traffic and the quality can be even higher.

However, there's almost always a commercial relationship in this case. The new blogger may be a client or mentee of the other marketer. Or they may be sending traffic for a cut (usually at least 50%) of the revenues from a product the blogger is trying to sell.

For that reason, unless you're already well connected or have a proven product to sell, you're unlikely to get much joint venture traffic.

In fact it's worth being a little wary of so-called experts who talk about the rapid results they've got – when in fact they're really due to someone else sending them a ton of traffic. A strategy that you're unlikely to be able to reproduce yourself.

Good stuff if you can though.

Recommendations

So, based on my experiences, what do I recommend you do to get traffic?

As soon as you can, identify your problem and solution keywords and invest in search engine optimisation to drive traffic from google. It'll take a while to pay off though.
In the short term, use social media to get relevant visitors to your site. Tweet your new blog posts and share them on Linkedin and Facebook. Make sure you have prominent social sharing buttons on your site. If you're in the professions – pay particular attention to Linkedin. Build up your presence and contribution to relevant groups and occasionally link to some of your articles.
Get traffic (and help your SEO) by offering guest articles (sometimes even a minor rewrite of an existing article will do) to other sites in similar fields to yours.

Above all, keep putting out quality content. Eventually your initial small following will share your quality material with others and it will grow.

In the final article in this series I share some of the best resources to get you started blogging.

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