This series is intended to help you answer the burning question – “Is it time for a new web site?” If you haven’t read the earlier posts, I’ll include them here – but you can jump in right here.

Earlier posts: Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3

This week, I’m going to talk about how to identify your perfect market by blogging. How does one go about doing that? First, let me stipulate up front that this approach will take 6 months to a year. If you don’t have that kind of time, read the Week 2 post. You can accelerate the curve to 90 days if you can spend some money on advertising. If you can’t do either and need the money now, it’s time to get a job.

That out of the way, let me address a couple of basics about blogging.

1. If you don’t understand the point of a blog, start reading blogs. I refuse to explain the point of blogging to anyone who doesn’t read blogs. If you set aside 30 minutes per week to read blogs, you’ll either start to get the point or decide that blogging is clearly not for you. Get an RSS reader. If you run out of stuff to read before 30 minutes are up, go out and find some more blogs. There are plenty.
2. Blogs aren’t just for writers. You can create a video blog or a photo blog. Check out Max Chandler’s visual blog as a good example of original content. Whatever medium you choose, a blog must authentically express who you are.
3. Blogs aren’t for advertising. I can’t stress this enough – partly because you’re going to find a lot of blog posts with titles like “5 Reasons Why You Should Hire a [insert name of profession here].” Just because you see someone else doing it doesn’t make it a good idea. Blogs are terrible for advertising.

What exactly are we doing here, and how is this going to help you sell more plumbing supplies? For the next six months, it isn’t. In fact, it might never. What you’re looking to do is begin mastering the art of attracting like-minded individuals by expressing your passion. Create a blog filled with the ideas that inspire you the  most. Sooner or later, those ideas will inspire someone else. How will you know when this happens? The easier you make it for people to respond to you, the sooner you’ll get a response. One technique that I’ve tried before is something I call “the Easter Egg” technique. I wrote a newsletter for a client where we buried a line that quietly mentioned an opportunity for a free dessert for the first person who mentioned the newsletter in the store. There are plenty of other ways – the key is to be creative.

Sooner or later, someone will begin to respond. It might come in the form of an offline response – such as “I saw your blog post the other day…” Write down where the responses are coming from, and pay attention to what seems to be attracting a response.

This may seem to be straying a bit from our original topic 3 weeks ago, but I promise you that it’s not. This will help you to figure out who your market is – if in a slow and roundabout way. You might find yourself attracting the wrong kind of people for your business. If that happens, consider that you might be in the wrong business altogether.

Next week, I’ll be wrapping up the series with a discussion of information products. Hint: if you blog and stick with it, selling information products will be a natural fit.

Over the last two weeks, I talked about how to resolve a common dilemma – “Does my web site need an overhaul, or do I just need to advertise?”

Week 1

Week 2

I’m going to share a little bit about how to use advertising as a tool to determine who your target market really is. During week 1, I said that advertising could be used as a tool for resolving the question “Is my website good enough?” In week 2, I said that you can’t run this test until you know who the perfect people are, and how to find them at the perfect time.

To implement this approach, I recommend using either Pay-Per-Click (PPC) or Facebook advertising. Why? These methods can both be measured in real time. With a PPC ad, you can tell how many “impressions” your ad received (how many computer screens displayed it), how many people clicked on it, and which keywords they used. Don’t even think about doing this test without hiring a PPC management firm. Expect to spend about $5,000 – $7,000 to run this test over 90 days – $3,000 – $4,500 in advertising expense and $1,500 – $2,500 in PPC management fees. Don’t spend any more than this unless you know what you’re doing.

Surgeon General’s Warning: trying to do this yourself is bad for your health. Unless you have experience with PPC ads or plan to make PPC advertising your business, you’re wasting your time and money trying to do it yourself. If you can’t afford this approach, I’ll be talking about a much cheaper alternative next week.

You can run this test on your primary site or create a test site on a different domain. In any case, you’ll need at least one product that can be sold directly online. You will also need at least one conversion-optimized web page. I would highly recommend making it very easy for people to contact you during this stage, even if they don’t buy the item(s) that you list for sale on your site. Display your phone number in big bold letters at the top, and supply an e-mail address or contact form.

As for the product to sell, it’s  important that you choose something that represents you and your brand well, and I recommend going for a lower price point. If you have an information product to sell, such as a book or e-book, that’s perfect. If not, don’t worry – I’ll be talking about this type of product in Week 5. Finally, make sure that your price point is high enough to break even or profit on the campaign. You probably won’t, but you should shoot for it. Do the math. How many sales will you need to make to break even on your investment? Can you still survive if you don’t? (Don’t do this unless you can afford to lose all of your money – but don’t do it unless you’re confident that you won’t).

This may sound a bit scary. If so, you may not be ready for this approach yet. Read next week’s post for an approach that you can try out for almost no money: blogging.

In last week’s post, I talked about approaching advertising with the goal of testing and gathering data. If your web site isn’t making you enough money and you’re not sure if more exposure will lead to more sales, the number of options in front of you may look overwhelming. My goal, with this series, is to help you learn to reduce the number of choices in front of you until only one logical choice remains.

I promised you that I would help you learn to set up an ad campaign successfully. If you thought that I meant I was going to talk about methods of advertising, tricks, and demographics, I’m afraid I’ll be disappointing you. It’s going to be much simpler than that.

Let’s take a closer look at the goal of an advertising campaign. If you’re trying to figure out if your web site needs a redesign or not, there’s only one definitive test. Drive a handful of the perfect people to your web site at just the right time and see if they take action or not. Unfortunately, I’m sure that if you knew how to do that, you’d already be doing it. If you drive the wrong traffic to your site, they won’t buy – even if your site is just fine the way it is. The worst case scenario is spending a bunch of money on advertising and finding yourself no wiser than before.

How do you set up an ad campaign if you don’t know where and when to find the right people for your product?

If you can afford to run an ad campaign for 6-12 months without having to worry about making money, it’s easy – sooner or later, you’ll get it right. But I don’t think much of this approach. It’s sloppy, for one thing, and small business owners can’t afford it anyhow. There are better ways to find out who the right people are. There’s a fast (more expensive) way and a slow (cheap) way to do this. I’ll cover both approaches over the next 2 weeks. Right now, I’ll give you a basic overview of what to expect. But first, I’ll throw out a quick recommendation – read Timothy Ferriss’s blog post titled “The Margin Manifesto.” Reading this post will help you to better understand what I’m about to present here. One of the “tenets” in this post has become a quasi-mantra for me: “Good advertising works the first time.”

Next week, I’m going to talk about the faster and more expensive approach to finding out who your perfect market really is. This approach involves paying for advertising and should take about 90 days.

The following week, I’ll talk about a slower but less expensive approach. This involves creating niche content (such as a blog). This approach takes 6 months to a year. If the long timeline scares you and you can’t afford to spend money on advertising, accept the fact that it’s going to take you at least a year to make any serious money no matter what you do. If you can’t wait that long, now might be a good time to start updating your resume.

If you execute this test correctly, you’ll find surprise opportunities in the marketplace that you never would have guessed – or you’ll be clear that you’re headed in completely the wrong direction. Either way, you’ll feel a new sense of clarity and confidence. Sometimes, realizing that you’re doing the wrong thing can be great news. If you’ve been there before, you know exactly what I mean.

Stay tuned. It gets better.