Danger zone of competitor analysis

The danger of doing competitor analysis is that you could become complacent.

If your website ever becomes 'good' and 'better than' your competitors, you might stop improving.

If your social media strategy ever becomes 'better than' your competitors, then you might stop improving.

To avoid this, also add into your 'competitor' list some big hitters. Identify and add individuals who are so high profile you could never hope to compete. Add companies with an advertising budget that you could never hope to match.

Keep improving, so that you edge towards competing with them.

If you'll never reach their level that is fine, you'll keep improving.

Use Ongoing Competitor Analysis to improve your marketing

One way I improve my marketing and web sites is by analyzing what my competitors do.

And by competitor I mean:

• direct competitors who do exactly the same
• direct competitors who sell similar products as I do
• small consultancy companies who do a similar thing to me
• consultants, who look successful, even if they do different things to me
• small consultancies and agencies who look successful

I prioritize direct competitors and consultancies, but I will analyse the work that anyone does and see what strategies and approaches I see that I'm not using.

After all, we want to be seen as 'bigger than we are' and the easiest way of doing that is by looking to see what people 'bigger than you' actually do.

Lessons learned from marketing with a guest webinar

As part of marketing and self-promotion I took the opportunity to run a webinar. This was part of a series that a tools vendor runs (They hold one or two webinars a month, since they have a bigger mailing list than I do, it was a good opportunity to get my name/face/attitude/brand out there to more people).

I've presented webinars for other companies before, this was the first one that was paid for - the money doesn't cover the time to prep the webinar but it was better than nothing. I've been asked to present 'paid' webinars before but previously the recording has always been behind a pay wall. I figure if it is going behind a pay wall then its going to be my paywall. The recording for this webinar is behind free registration wall - which I'm comfortable with.

I'm becoming more sales and marketing savvy so I negotiated some additional marketing requirements. The contract had to be amended to include these so I assume they don't normally do this.

I made sure that we had in writing, an agreement that:

• I would receive a recording of the webinar and I could use it in my own marketing (they originally wanted sole copyright of the recording)
• I would receive a list of the emails for the people who registered for the webinar
• I was allowed to send an email to everyone who registered, after the webinar with a link to sign up for my own mailing list
• I was allowed to include upsell links to discounted products in the email and during the webinar

The webinar was run through on24, which is a good, but expensive webinar software. To present the webinar we had to use the phone line. I normally use a mic connected to my PC which has great sound quality. I was a little concerned about the audio quality over the phone, but it was their request so I went along with it.

As part of the webinar I made sure that I recorded it locally on my irig mic, and also recorded a webcam session from my laptop. So I could later splice these together and create a 'high quality' replay of the webinar live stream. I created this by editing in Camtasia Studio on Windows.

For my email marketing I use Mailchimp. But Mailchimp doesn't like sending bulk emails to people who haven't double opted in. Neither do I. So I needed to find a bulk mail tool.

I don't trust email applications that would sendout bulk emails with bcc, I've received too many emails from agencies where my email address has bled out to other particpants through the agencies inability to use the email software properly - I didnt' want to take the risk of doing that.

After looking at a whole bunch, I found that Mozilla Thunderbird has a MailMerge plugin. That would allow me to setup the email list as a csv, and iterate over each email address sending an email using the MailMerge.

After a few test runs to my gmail account using 'plus' addressing. I clicked 'send' onthe mail merge that would iterate out over 1000+ emails.

In the MailMerge (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/thunderbird/addon/mail-merge/) I used 'send later' so that I could review the emails before sending and could start and stop the email sending by using the "Send Unsent Messages" feature. 

After sending 600 or so emails, my web host blocked my IP address. I couldn't send emails, nor could I access my web site. I had to phone them to unblock my IP Address. But I still have 600 or so emails to send out.

I started up my trusty VPN and every 100 emails I stopped the mail client, changed VPN to a different IP address, and then re-started the email sending.

I suspect that if I do this again that I will investigate the Amazon bulk email service https://aws.amazon.com/ses

LinkedIn Tip: Images for company posts

In order to improve my marketing on LinkedIn, I conducted a bit of a 'competitor review'.

I looked at the company pages for other consultants and consultancies.

I learned more from the 'bigger' consultancies than the consultants - as you'd hope since they have marketing departments.

One observation I acted on immediately was based on one particular consultancy. For each of their posts they had an image - which is a normal social media strategy 'add an image to each post' (which I don't do here at the moment since this is a 'notes' blog rather than a traffic generation or marketing blog.

And all their images had a common theme: a photo of someone in the org, a logo, a title, etc.

And then I realised, or thought, that those images actually look like powerpoint slides.

So that's what I do now, for each company update. I have a LibreOffice presentation, and I add a new slide - because it is easy to collate multiple images, and add text etc. Plus when I export the slide it is at the correct proportions for LinkedIn thumbnails - perhaps due to their integration with slideshare?

But this makes it easy to create an image for the post, and starts to add a 'corporate' feel to my 'non-corporate' and slightly adhoc approach to marketing.

LinkedIn Tip: How to share updates from your company page and product pages

I've been trying to use my Company Page more on linked in.

I've created the main company page and pages for some of my products.

But I couldn't figure out how to share those updates through my profile.

And the answer is:

• Follow your own company
• Follow your product pages
• Use the "Interests" menu on linkedin
• Look at "Companies"
• then you can 'like' or even better 'share' the posts on your personal feed - after all 'you' probably have more followers than your company, but you do want to have people follow your company as well since that is your business.

Marketing via content and getting it in front of people

One hard part of being a consultant is that 'you are the business' therefore you are your own marketing department.

Given this, I want to get my content in front of as many people as possible.

I could pay for this via advertising, but much of my content is 'value add' i.e. it doesn't sell me, it builds up authority through the authority of the content.

I would rather see it spread 'socially', i.e. people like the content and retweet it or mention it online via social media etc. But that requires that they see the content in the first place.

Therefore I have started looking for aggregation sites to feed my blog content through.

There seem to be two types of aggregation:

- we share anything in the rss feed
- curated where the moderator chooses what to show

I subscribe to many of the 'we share anything' feeds and I do put my content through those. As a reader I occasionally find it useful because I stumble across a blog I haven't read before, but there is usually a lot of low quality noise as well.

I value more the moderated feeds. And I have just submitted my blogs to a moderated feed. With the first of my posts being 'accepted' into their feed.

The statistics for that were surprising. There is a page count on most aggregated feeds. And page counts or view counts are not all created equal, so they can't be trusted, but... the page count difference between the aggregated version any my blog version were large.

At the time of writing:

- post on my site 114 views after 6 days
- aggregated version 1135 views after 2 days

It is too early to know if people are reading the article fully, or if it actually drives more traffic to my other sites, or if it will lead to increased product sales. But, it is early enough for me to look for more moderated syndication sites to feed into.

I'm doing this first before 'guest posts' or 'articles' on other sites simply because this allows me to build on work I'm already doing. I haven't considered 'guest posts' or articles on other sites yet. But clearly that is a future option for me to explore and when I do, I can compare the impact.

Take Action Now:

- Identify blog aggregation sites for your specialism and add your blog feeds to them
- Identify moderated blog aggregation sites for your specialism and if you like the moderated content that they show, then submit your site
- Look at the 'successful' posts on the moderated aggregation sites and analyse why you think they succeeded and 'spice' up your posts with those ingredients.

On hiring people to build your website, or just start with a blog

I attended a training course a couple of days ago. While I took a lot of value from it, I will not recommend it to others.

We received a lot of 'advice' on the course that did not gel with my experience.

One piece of advice was to hire someone to build your website.

While that advice will prove useful long term. It does not help you get started.

When you are starting and building your profile you should try and build content rather than gloss.

And to get started with content you can:

1. buy a domain name
2. sign up to a blogging tool
3. associated the blogging tool with your domain
4. create content

This way you build up your intellectual capital, and your profile, instantly.

You can 'gloss' it up later, if you need/want to.

On this particular course we were introduced to a web company that designs websites for small buisness to help them improve their profile. I had a look through their portfolio and lo and behold, many of the sites were simply Wordpress sites that had a custom theme and design.

Had those businesses been given the above advice, with point two replaced with 'sign up to Wordpress.com' then they could have started building their profile on a default theme. And later, hired a design team to 'skin' the website on a custom host and migrate the content.

I have one site that is entirely custom built, because I can program, and I started that site prior to the existence of blogging tools.

I also have:

1. one site on a custom hosted Wordpress instance, where I have extra 'functionality' on the server in folders under the top level domain. But I could have hosted my main site on Wordpress.com and used subdomains to point to 'other' functionality hosted on other sites
2. two sites with a front page hosted on a custom host, and the main content in blogger under a subdomain. This gives me flexibility to change the front page to whatever I want, but is a tad more hassle than it needs to be.
3. several sites as 'anonymous' blogger sites, without a custom domain, just for building content.

I've seen businesses build their brand, and indeed host their entire websites on blogger.com, and on wordpress.com.

Essentially hosted blogging platforms that allow posts, and pages.

Use these tools to:

• build content
• refine your message
• create your products and packages

Add gloss later. 

Do not start by paying people for gloss, when you have no content to glossify.


Bonus

I had a quick look online for 'how to make a professional site/blog on blogger', and found a bunch of links for templates and information:

• http://designscrazed.org/category/website-templates/blogger/
• http://www.cssauthor.com/blogger/
• http://www.templateism.com/
• http://www.blogcrowds.com/resources/blogger-templates/
• http://www.oddthemes.com/