Strange rumblings in the blogging world

There are some strange rumblings in the blogging world at the moment. There seems to be a group of relatively new bloggers who are on a mission to linkbait their way to traffic by very publicly calling out other, better known bloggers.

Don’t get me wrong here. I love it when people question the status quo, inject new ideas or a different approach into the stream. But I’m not seeing that here. I’m seeing negativity that simply seems to be stirring bad feeling.

And I have another concern, which is this: Each of these guys has a pretty small following – one has something like 154 readers via Feedburner, for example. But when you push that across four or five blogs, that’s several hundred people potentially being lead down blind alleys.

It’s not that I’m advocating following exactly what the established bloggers do. We all should seek to find new paths, and I hope we all do. But what’s changed recently is that instead of testing and checking their new and different ideas, then sharing them with their readers, these guys are simply trashing what people are advocating, with no basis in fact or experience.

This becomes a cautionary tale – based on my own bitter experience.

I came into blogging with a lot of general business and marketing experience. I didn’t like email marketing lists, I hated long form sales pages and I was determined to plough my own furrow, learning how to blog and create traffic from the excellent free content out there, but avoiding becoming an internet marketing “type” in the process.

My first product was The Beginner’s Guide to Twitter. I worked hard on that for a month, learning a lot of new skills, and I was proud of the finished product.

My view was that the book was good, the price was right and that I simply had to put it “on the shelves” and it would sell on merit.

I was right!

I sold four that first week.

Trust me when I tell you – that hurts. My return for a month’s work was $48. I can laugh about it now, but how naive was I? I had a blog that was getting around 100 visitors a day at the time. I really believed that a good proportion of those would buy the book. What I hadn’t factored into the equation was that my “shop” was actually only getting 2 of those visits a day!

I just needed some traffic!

So I set about driving traffic to the shop. And that worked too! In no time at all, the shop was getting 100 visits a week! But I was only selling one book every two weeks. My conversion rate was 0.5% I can be frugal, but I can’t live on $6 a week.

…..and to sell.

I realized that the new people I was driving to the shop didn’t know me, they didn’t trust me. How could they? What they needed was information about me, what other people thought of the book, and a gentle “push” to buy it. I tried three different configurations and settled on one which started converting at over 2%. But just to be clear, this wasn’t a “sales page” no, sir. This was a……a….erm this was an information page, designed to erm, sell.

In the meantime (this all took several months) I started building an email list. I didn’t try to sell them anything. I simply tried to add some value by emailing them personal stuff about me, giving them copies of interesting books I’d been able to get PLR rights to, and just hanging out with them generally. I only had a few in that list at the time, as I’d started late, but that didn’t stop me calling them the “Mike’s Life community.” I didn’t have an email list. I had a “community.”

I sent them a short email about the book. Guess what happened? 10% bought it! I’d found the secret to success! If only I’d started the email list earlier, I would have sold hundreds at that point, instead of ten. But ten was good. At last I had a three figure day.

Four months!

In four months I’d moved from not believing in online marketing, hating sales pages and thinking email lists were a waste of time to the place where I am now.

And where is that?

I know that if you want to sell enough of a product to make a reasonable profit, you have to market that product. Not in a sleazy way, but you have to find ways to drive significant traffic to the point of sale, then persuade them that they should buy.

I know that the point of sale (alright! let’s call it a damn sales page) has to take into account that most people coming there know nothing about you, and that they need to be given good reasons to buy from you.

I know that my email subscribers are my single most valuable asset. And I will love them and work with them, and nurture them as much as I can. And in return they will buy stuff when I (occasionally) recommend or ask them to do so. I’m fast approaching the point where I receive more income from that list, than I do from regular blog visitors.

The frustrating thing is that every single successful blogger I was reading was telling me all the above, from day one.

I’m just happy now I didn’t publicly call them out when I thought they were wrong. I just quietly went about trying to prove it.

It cost me four months to realize they were right and I was wrong.

How long will it take you?

Alan Weinkrantz said:

A great and modest investment. Like so many things in life, often times it’s the method and process that counts.

That’s my take-away with what Mike and Nathan have produced.

If you follow the method and discipline yourself to the process – and give the process time, it will really work.