Get Your Audience to Work for You… and Thank You for It!

Posted on February 12, 2013 Written by

This is a guest post by Danny Iny.

You spend a lot of time nurturing the relationship you have with your audience.

You give them amazing content, useful information and as much of your personal attention as you possibly can.

You listen to their concerns, accede to their requests and generally, make yourself a vital resource for them.

It’s a lot of work!

Isn’t it time they did a little of it for you?

Wait, you say, have my audience work for me? Isn’t that a little backwards? I mean, I work for them!

That may be true – but that’s not the only way things could be. Your audience might be dying for the chance to work for you – you just don’t know it – and maybe they don’t either.

You see, everyone wants to know that they matter – that they are needed and valuable, and while it’s nice to hear that a blogger appreciates your attention – it’s sometimes much nicer to know that they need you to do things for them too.

Yes, when properly motivated, and a little incentivized, you can have your audience doing a great deal of work for you, in terms of idea generation, promotion, engagement, recruitment and even content creation – and be thrilled to have the opportunity.

Read on to find out how…

 

Blogging Your Way to Traffic, Subscribers, and Sales with Danny Iny

Posted on March 28, 2012 Written by

This is an interview with Danny Iny from Firepole Marketing. He’s returned to Kikolani to talk to us about how he wrote 80+ guest posts on major blogs in less than a year, earned the nickname “The Freddy Krueger of Blogging”, and skyrocketed Firepole Marketing to success with his Write Like Freddy blog writing training program (aff link).

1. A lot of the readers here at Kikolani would love to get more traffic, subscribers, and sales (as you say), but don’t know where to start. What are they missing?

Well, in my experience, most people are missing one of two things.

The first thing is that Content is King. The truth is that a lot of people make things much more complicated than they have to be; “traffic” becomes this mysterious thing that you try to “drive” to your blog. Every day we stumble onto a new “strategy”, whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, SEO, Pinterest, or whatever. We never completely understand how this “strategy” is supposed to “drive” the “traffic”, other than having a vague sense that there’s a lot of traffic on this or that platform, and that somehow you might be able to siphon some of that traffic off to your site.

The truth is a lot simpler than that. Forget about “driving traffic”, and recognize that you’re dealing with people. Real live human beings, just like you. That’s where inbound and content marketing come into the picture. Human beings respond to content, because it’s a way for you to share a glimpse of who you are and what you’re about, while teaching something valuable. That’s how you build a real relationship, and that’s why content creation in general, and good writing in particular, are so critical to succeeding with a blog-based business.

Now, a lot of bloggers actually do get that, but they miss the second thing…

The second thing is that the King can get awfully lonely. See, we’ve all been fed this myth about how things go viral online. I tell three friends, they each tell three friends, and those friends each tell three friends, and pretty soon my server crashes from all the traffic, right? Except that in real life, that’s not how it happens; I tell three friends, and of those friends, one doesn’t listen, the second one isn’t all that impressed, and the third one mentions it to one friend who does nothing.

The network model for things to go viral can still work, but it’s a lot harder than people like to pretend, and it depends on a certain critical mass that most blogs just don’t have. Which means that if you want to build awareness and exposure, you can’t count on the traffic coming to you; you need to put your content where people are already going, and that usually means guest posting on other, bigger blogs.

So in a nutshell, that’s what people are missing: good content, and a guest posting strategy.

 

Traffic Spikes and Traffic Ramps – Measuring What Matters

Posted on August 24, 2011 Written by

This is a guest post by Danny Iny, an author, strategist, serial entrepreneur, and proud co-founder of Firepole Marketing, the definitive marketing training program for small businesses, entrepreneurs, and non-marketers.

Traffic spikes are awesome!

If you’re like most bloggers, you watch your stats daily, if not several times per day. And if you’re like most bloggers, you know how awesome it can feel to have a massive influx of traffic.

Sometimes that rush of traffic is created by your targeted efforts – maybe you published a guest post on an authority bog, or you’re running a pay-per-click campaign, or you produced a piece of exceptional content that went completely viral.

Other times, it seems to happen out of nowhere – maybe a big blogger randomly links to you, and suddenly the floodgates open.

Either way, when you see that traffic dot shoot up, and up, and up, it can be exhilarating – you might even be tempted to sit there and hit the refresh key over, and over, and over again, to watch it keep on rising.

Sometimes, that traffic sticks around; the initial spike lasts two or three days, and when it comes back down to earth, it doesn’t come as far down as it was before.

But other times, it comes all the way back down, and you’re back to square one, wondering “where did everybody go?”

 

When All You’ve Got Is a Hammer, You’ll Break Your Blog To Pieces

Posted on June 22, 2011 Written by

This is a guest post by Danny Iny, author, strategist, serial entrepreneur, and proud co-founder of Firepole Marketing

Are you everywhere, or are you nowhere?

Some bloggers seem to be everywhere – they have active profiles on Facebook and Twitter, they blog, they email, they comment, and they use every new technology and channel as it becomes available.

Other blogs seem to have a much narrower focus – they write their posts, allow you to subscribe via RSS and sometimes email, and stick to what they know.

There is an obvious issue with being everywhere: you get so distracted by one thing after another that you run the risk of never getting much traction with anything.

But there’s an issue with focusing too narrowly, too.

But isn’t focus a good thing?

Yes, focus is a good thing – but there are two different kinds of focus:

GOOD FOCUS: This is when you’ve identified your customer profiles and you’re diligently sticking to the strategy and tactics that are going to work best for them. Good focus is audience-centric; cutting out distractions to deliver value to your audience.

BAD FOCUS: Bad focus is when you know how to use Wordpress, aWeber and Facebook, so everything you do is a combination of Wordpress, aWeber and Facebook (these are three random examples – substitute your three favorite technologies instead). Bad focus is blogger-centric – avoiding new things and staying inside your comfort zone.

This post is about bad focus, and how to avoid it. But first, we’ve got to learn how to identify it. This is easier said than done, because we don’t have a conscious thought train going through our minds that says:

“I’m afraid to learn new things, so I’m going to stick with what I know instead.”

If only it were so easy! But it isn’t – our thought processes usually look more like this:

“Okay, so I want to accomplish X. How can I do that using the tools that I have at my disposal?”

That’s an innocent question, and a good one at that – it’s what you’d expect from a resourceful internet entrepreneur who is looking to make the most of his or her resources and abilities.

 

Kick Start Your Blog by Embracing the Nobodies

Posted on March 30, 2011 Written by

This is a guest post by Danny Iny, an author, strategist, serial entrepreneur, and proud co-founder of Firepole Marketing.

Your blog has been up for about six months, and your traffic is hovering around ten unique visitors per day… on a good day. And you know that at least one of them is your mom.

Does this sound familiar?

In searching for an effective blog promotion strategy, you eventually realize that commenting on other blogs can be a good way of getting some attention.

So you make your list of the hottest blogs to be on, and subscribe to them all. You check in every day, read the posts diligently, and dutifully leave solid, interesting, and value-adding comments. But by the time you’ve done it, there are already fifty other comments on the post, and you get a click or two through to your blog, if you’re lucky.

Don’t despair – there’s a better way: embracing the nobodies!