1) Learn From Your Own Blog
Do you check out your blog posts to see which posts are getting the most re-tweets or comments? You should. Every week, I go through my posts and take notes about what worked and what didn’t. If you don’t know what your audience liked in the past, you won’t be able to create something that they’re going to like in the future.
2) Teach What You Know
Are you very protective of your industry secrets? Try this instead: share everything you know!
Share your secrets on Facebook, Twitter, and forums. Post it on your blog and email it to your contacts, prospects, and clients. If you feel like you’re giving away too much, you’re on the right track.
Your fear: “if I give away all my secrets, then no one will want to hire me.”
The reality: people will see that you really know your stuff but won’t have the time or desire to do it themselves, so they’ll hire you to do it for them.
Let’s say that you prepare taxes for small business owners. I hate doing my taxes. So when I come across your post “10 Ways To Save Money on Your Taxes”, I’ll read it and then I’ll ask you to do my taxes because I don’t want to do them myself and I know you’ll save me money.
3) Think About Your Indirect Competition Too
Going back to the tax specialist example, on your website you’ll want to tell me why you’re better than other tax specialist, and that’s good. But you should also talk about all of your indirect competition, which are all of the ways I can solve the same problem using approaches that don’t involve your service. For example, you’ll also want to tell me:
- Why doing my taxes is better than not doing them (yes, for some people this is an option).
- Why working with you is better than doing it myself.
- Why working with you is better than having tax preparation software do the work for me.
Remember, your direct competitors are not the only ones you’re competing against.
4) Have a Facebook Page
I know, I know… you already have a Facebook profile. But, you should also have a Facebook page. Here’s why:
- Facebook pages get indexed by the search engines and you can even get a link back to your site.
- You can only have 5,000 friends under your profile; you can have unlimited fans for your page.
- On your page you can have an opt-in box so people can subscribe to your newsletter or get a free report.
- With a page, you can send an update to all your fans all at once.
5) Partner with Group Administrators
Let’s go back to the tax specialist example again. It’s April 1st and people know they need to do their taxes by the 15th. Take a look at this Facebook group:
Do you think that from these 13,407 entrepreneurs at least a few of them will need their taxes done? And, did you know that the administrator of this group can email all his members? What if you offered him a commission for every person that hired you plus a small fee for sending the email?
I hope all of Startup Nation’s readers and bloggers have a great New Year!
Zeke Camusio is a serial entrepreneur, online marketing expert, author of Google Rocketship and founder of an Internet Marketing Agency in Portland, OR.
