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Who are you writing for?

October 4, 2011 in Blogging, Questions with 4 Comments

I’m starting off this post by making two assumptions. First, you have an idea that you want to build your business around. Second, that your putting out some form of written content in support of the idea.

Now that you know those two assumptions, I ask you, who are you writing for? When you write, do you have a clearly defined person in your mind you’re writing to? Can you see him (I’m going to go with “him” vs “him / her” because that is going to get old rather quickly!)? Do you know his name? What’s he do for a living? Employed? Self employed? Manager, owner, disgruntled employee? Where does he live? How much money does he make? What type of people does he hang out with? Is he religious? Does he have kids? Is he married? On and on and on…

Who are you writing for?

I’ve heard it said that you should go so far as to get a picture of your ideal client and hang it by where you do most of your writing so you can always physically SEE this person.

Do you know who you’re writing for so well you can even pick out a picture of him?

What if you have multiple, distinct people you’re aiming for? Is it OK to have multiple targets? It depends on who you ask.

I’ve recently read that you should ONLY have one person you’re “targeting”, that your message is intended for. If you have more than one person then your message will be diluted, watered down because you’re trying to reach distinctly different and separate people / groups.

In the same week, I have also read that if you have your market narrowed down enough (topic of future blog) then you can dissect that market into smaller pieces and have multiple, distinct people you can target, but separately, not collectively.

Both authors contend that the more narrowly you define who you’re writing for the more powerful your message will be.

And I tend to agree. You need to know who you’re writing for. Do you?

~Ivan

Quantity vs Quality

September 8, 2011 in Blogging, Motivation, Priorities with 2 Comments

Quantity vs Quality

So I’m a numbers guy.

As a kid I grew to love baseball. And do you want to know what turned me on to baseball? It wasn’t the actual game. I had to FORCE myself to watch the game. It was long, and boring, and I only had about a five minute attention span (it’s up to 10 minutes now!).

It was the cards. Specifically the back of the cards, where several years worth of stats were kept. I LOVED looking at those stats. What was the batting average? How many doubles? Homers? RBI’s? Who had the highest average, per year, for the cards I had? Most homers? What about for 3 years? Add up the total number of hits for three years and divide by the total number of at bats. Who has the best average???

I loved it. I would make my own note books and hand write out all the stats from the back of the cards so I could then analyze the players easier (I wasn’t introduced to Excel until my college years). I would even go so far as to create my own stats and see what kind of numbers I’d get. Let’s give John Smith 605 at bats, with 203 hits, 47, doubles, 39 homers, and 146 RBI’s. Is that realistic?

Crunch the numbers!

It was great.

My love of stats transitioned into video games. Favorite sports game of all time? Tecmo Super Bowl. Why? It was the first game I came across that kept stats.

One of the reasons I love role playing games so much? You have to level up your characters, thereby changing and improving their stats.

To this day I’m still obsessed with numbers. Take this blog for instance. I found out I can monitor traffic at this site. I can see how many page views I get a day. I can see where the views are coming from. I can see so many numbers, and not all of them make sense to me yet.

I LOVE IT! Actually, I can see myself getting obsessed with it. Are my links from Facebook and Twitter working? How can I get them to funnel more readers over here? Do I get more views on Monday or Thursday? How can I tweak the titles of my posts to make them more attractive to drive more traffic? HOW CAN I GET MORE PEOPLE?! MORE TRAFFIC?!?! MORE MORE MORE!

You get the picture.

I actually had a bit of a melt down last Wednesday. I got to work and was pretty busy, so I didn’t check the blog until around lunch. That’s the day I wrote, “Can you accomplish everything that needs to done?” This was and is a topic that’s near and dear to my heart as I start A Better Way of Business. I was really excited about this post. So when I checked at lunch I was expecting this post to have a decent number of views, for me that would have been 20 by lunch. So I opened up the dashboard and what do I see???

To my GREAT surprise I see 1. One single, solitary, lonely page view. And that one view just so happened to be me because the way I get to my blog is by clicking on this link that I set up that takes me to the daily post (guess I need to change that so I don’t skew my stats) and then I click on the dashboard. So really, I had had ZERO page views by lunch.

I was crushed. I was defeated. I wanted to throw the whole site away as a failure.

I sent Skye a text asking her if I was making a mistake trying to get A Better Way of Business going.

About 30 minutes later it hit me. I was obsessing over the wrong thing (I do that too often). And I think I discovered what the right thing IS!

My love of numbers and stats had been telling me the IMPORTANT piece of data is page views. The more page views the more successful I am. The more people stopping by my blog, the more people who actually value what I’m saying. The higher the number of page views the more business I have…

Wait a minute…

THAT’S IT! That’s where I was wrong. I was equating page views to number of clients that actually want to work with me and have me help them and their businesses grow into their dreams.

And that’s not necessarily the case. I realized, that what if I had 1,000,000 page views in a day. I would be TOTALLY PUMPED ABOUT IT! But what if NOT A SINGLE ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE WANTED TO DO BUSINESS WITH ME? It would be POINTLESS to the extent that I want and need A Better Way of Business to provide income so I can support my family.

So it dawned on me. I shouldn’t be so concerned with simply having a large quantity of page views in a single day. What I NEED is a much smaller number of the RIGHT page views in a day, page views that will actually lead to clients working with me and me helping them and their business succeed better.

My thinking had changed.

It was: Quantity is all that matters.

It is now: Quality at the right quantity will lead to success.

What about you? Are you focused on numbers for numbers’ sake? Or are you focusing on the RIGHT numbers?

Do your online interactions bring out the best in you?

September 7, 2011 in Blogging, Commenting, website with 8 Comments

Do online interactions bring out the best in you?

I’m fairly new to the online world. Not in using the internet, I actually starting going “online” back in the days of BBS’s, thanks to my childhood friend and neighbor, Dan. But until around the turn of this year I had never actually viewed the internet as a way to make actual personal connections. Prior to this year, I viewed the net as mostly for games, throw in a lot of emailing and social networking sites for friends I made offline, and you have my limited use of it in a nut shell.

But at the beginning of February I joined Free Agent Academy, an online community / school designed to help you start your business. This was the first conscious time that I joined a community online primarily to interact with people I had not first met offline.

Since then I have come across numerous blogs and podcasts that are crammed full of USEFUL, INSPIRATIONAL, and / or ENTERTAINING material. I have also made numerous new contacts with people that I would have never interacted with if not for coming across these people online. Several of these new connections have blossomed into friendships that I am very grateful for.

Of all the interactions with other people, be it through forums, comments, emails, chats, etc I’d say 99.9% have stayed positive and been beneficial. It’s the 0.1% and I want to talk about today.

And not even the 0.1% that I’ve experienced. Because honestly, I REALLY haven’t had very negative experiences online. I think once or twice there was the potential to get into an argument through the net with someone, but I didn’t see the point. So regardless of what was said to me, I let a negative conversation die. If need be, I’ll go so far as to block someone, but that hasn’t had to happen yet.

However, last week I came across two instances of people being unnecessarily rude online at other people’s sites. These two instances are what spurred this post. Both instances revolved around a follower of a blog spewing acid at a blogger. In one case, the follower left a stinging comment condemning the writer, and then explaining how the writer doesn’t live up to another blogger. In the second instance I didn’t actually see the email, but a follower decided they would take the opportunity to verbally dissect and destroy the blogger’s life due to a perceived slight from the blogger (in actuality, the blogger never slighted the follower, the follower simply didn’t read what was actually written, got offended, and then went on the offensive).

To top it off, the follower that left the comment was so BOLD and BRAVE that the comment was left under an “Anonymous” name on the blog.

Now I understand that as a blogger I am putting myself out into the public domain. And in doing this I open myself up to both constructive and petty criticism. Ok, I get that.

But what I want you to think about today is do your online interactions bring out the best in you? When you’re interacting with the online communities you participate in the most, are you providing people with a courteous, respectful you? Or do you just say whatever you want, however you feel the urge, because it’s online. Who care?

Because of your interactions with others online, do people get excited when they find out they’re going to get to meet you personally at an upcoming event? Or are you considering hiring security for yourself because you’re likely to get punched in the face because of vicious comments you make daily?

Do you consciously realize that you are dealing with LIVE HUMAN BEINGS on the other side of your comments or emails, or do you put down the first acidic thoughts you have with the thought of, “Take that you ASS!” when you hit send or post comment?

Because if you are participating online in an attempt to build your community I REALLY hope you make sure that your online interactions ARE bringing out the BEST IN YOU. Not the worst.

So please, please, PLEASE, before you hit send, before you click post, read over what you’re saying and make sure that it’s bringing out the best in you!

~Ivan