You’re looking at Google Analytics and checking the stats for your website and your blog. The numbers are small. You start to worry. You know that some blogs have hundreds of thousands of visitors and subscribers. Some websites get millions of visitors. Your numbers feel pretty small by comparison.
Here’s the thing – you’re not ever going to get huge numbers coming to a website or blog about divorce. It’s not interesting to most people and when it is interesting it’s only interesting for a short time. Getting big numbers isn’t important.
Big traffic just doesn’t matter. What is, however, important is reaching the people who need your services. Reaching 100 people who need your services is far more valuable to you than reaching 10,000 people who don’t need your services. Those 100 people will get to know you through your site. They’ll start to like you and trust you. Soon they’ll come in and meet with you and get started on their divorce.
As you write copy for your site, as you create audio and video, think about your relationship with those 100 people. Think about the impression you make with your words. Think about them as human beings that are experiencing and crisis and tell them the things they want and need to hear. Don’t create content for everybody. Create it for that one person you need to touch. That small audience will make you successful.
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We’re always looking for the magic bullet. We want some new marketing technique that will solve all our problems. We’d love something that brings new business every day without any input or effort on our part.
We love the idea of something like Google AdWords. Something that we can set and forget. We’d like a well-oiled marketing machine that spews out cash.
I’m constantly being asked about the next big thing. The questions cover everything from Twitter to podcasting to blogging to media relations. I wish I could say that one of these tactics would be the solution to all of our marketing problems. Unfortunately, there is no magic bullet.
The solution to our marketing problem is to accept that we can never stop marketing. We’ve got to keep going and going like the Energizer bunny. We’ve got to keep doing the old stuff while adding new approaches to the mix. Occasionally, we can remove something from the program and replace it with something better but, we can never stop.
I know the idea of marketing forever is distasteful for some. But, reality and the sooner you accept it the better. You’ve got to keep plugging away or you’re going to be economically vulnerable. You can’t rely on others, you can’t focus on other business, you’ve simply got to keep marketing every single day.
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Should you publish articles on the web? Should you have a blog? Does it make sense to invest the time it takes to crank out new content on a daily or weekly basis?
There are lots of opinions about the value of blogging and different “experts” come down on different sides of the issue.
Here’s one way to put a value on blogging. Calculate the number of visitors you’ll generate each month and determine what it would have cost to generate that traffic via a pay-per-click campaign on Google.
If you generate 1,000 visitors to your blog and the cost of generating traffic in your market is $6.00 per click (which it is in my market), the blogging is worth $6,000 per month. Of course, it’s up to you to take that traffic and convert those visitors in to clients.
Google provides a tool that will help you estimate the volume of traffic on each search term and the cost to have your ad on the first page of the search results returned for those terms. You can get some solid numbers to determine the monthly value of your blogging time.
The reality is that traffic coming to your blog is worth far more than PPC traffic. These visitors are more connected to you and impressed by you than visitors coming from advertising. They’ll know you’re an expert and that you’re experienced and credible because you’ve become their teacher. Blog traffic has a higher conversion rate than PPC traffic.
These numbers might not add up in every market and there are lots of other ways to measure the return on investment for blogging. The value of traffic varies widely and there’s more than one way to put a value on it. Try my approach, do the math and then decide if blogging makes sense for your practice.
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Excellent marketing requires excellent metrics. That’s why it’s important to identify the source of every initial consultation. You’ve got to ask them how they found you. You can track everything if you try hard enough.
There are some great tools for measuring your marketing. Google Analytics, for example, is a great tool for measuring the effectiveness of your website.
But what about lunch? How do you measure the effectiveness of your referral source meetings? How do you know if you’re doing a good job helping other professionals make referrals to you?
You’ve got to carefully track your relationships with your referral sources. You need a record of every relationship and you need to track the clients generated by that relationship. You can do it with a simple spreadsheet or you can implement a relationship management system like Highrise or BatchBook.
Dig in to the stats as you gain data. Figure out where you’re winning and losing. Are you great at getting the referral source to send you business and weak at converting consults to clients? Are you wonderful at getting the referral sources to introduce you to other referral sources and poor at getting the referral sources to actually refer? You’ve got to dig in to find out where you’re succeeding and failing.
You can’t win the game if you don’t know the score. You need information in order to modify your strategy and tactics. Lunch, just like most other marketing activities, is measurable.
Take the data and use it to improve your weaknesses and capitalize on your strengths. Think of lunch as a game and keep improving. Set goals and work to meet them. The greater your understanding of the metrics the faster you’ll see improvement in your performance.
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