A free DVD detailing how you can make thousands of dollars from marketing on the internet sounds like the deal of the century. There’s only 5,000 DVDs available, and they’ll send it to you for just the cost of shipping – less than $10 if you are in the USA, a couple of dollars more if you live outside the USA.

That’s the offer in an email that lobbed into my Gmail overnight. One of a bunch I get each day from internet marketers around the world.

The DVD is produced by two guys who have sold more than $15,000,000 worth of products online, and will let you in on the secret of how to use email lists to unlock the wealth you want and deserve. If you don’t already have a mailing list, then don’t worry, they’ll show you how to build your own email marketing list with thousands of hot prospects. List building 101 appears to be a key part of the program, along with implementing an email marketing campaign, either with your own product (a training program maybe!) or pushing affiliate products.

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This is a transcript of the video post ‘Lessons from the Coffeeshop‘.

Download the transcript as a PDF. Read More→

Our telephone bill arrived the other day, and seemed a little high – like $300 more than the previous month. A quick dig through the itemised section soon identified the discrepancy – $380 of calls from our eldest daughter’s mobile phone. Clea turned 12 in May, and her main present was a new HipTop mobile telephone, her old flip phone having finally died the death a little while ago. When I bought the HipTop I carefully ensured she was on a flat rate data plan, because the key attraction of the Hip Top is its ease of use for SMS and MS Messenger, Clea’s number one and two forms of communication. Problem is, the crafty folk at Vodafone won’t let you also bundle it with a phone plan, so you are stuck on their basic one cent a second call plan. Whilst I probably did hear the sales person state this in the shop, I clearly was distracted and didn’t explain the ramifications to Clea. Something I have now clearly done! Read More→

This is a guest post from our old friend Venessa Paech. Venessa worked with us at Arts Hub for a number of years, and has moved on to bigger and greater things as Community Manager with a major global internet content business.

Hi there,

I worked for Fiona and David at Arts Hub for several years, initially as an arts writer, then later as Editor and all round social media nerd.

These days I work as a Community Manager and I’ve been following Fiona and David’s niche content musings with interest. I thought it might be helpful to reflect on some community lessons I learned while at the Hub.

Endorphins and delight

Membership websites should stock up on Freddo Frogs

Fiona and David have already shared their chocolate frog tale. This small, delicious token of thanks for subscription was personal, fun, got people talking to each other (and us), and coming back for more. Who doesn’t want an endorphin rush associated with their business?

Community management professionals I’ve met are all over the power of the frog. Some local peers even cite Arts Hub as inspiration. This seemingly simple act generated oodles of good will and a critical forgiveness/trust buffer. Our members knew we cared and that we were trying. This way, when we screwed up (and we did), they gave us a chance to put it right and trusted that we weren’t in fact, trying to screw them.

Along with the endorphin rush is something marketers turn themselves inside out trying to bottle and peddle – delight. A mildly delirious mix of surprise, joy, playfulness and discovery, delight is community engagement 101 and Arts Hub nailed it with a milky amphibian.

Feedback – invite it, but only if you mean it (and buy a hazmat suit)

Fiona and David maintained a pro-active feedback loop with members and the market at large. They, we, were talking to members (lapsed, current and future) about what we were doing and why. We invited their opinions and ideas and explained how, why and when their feedback would play a part in shaping our services. It was hard work sustaining these conversations; giving them the time and care they needed; but we often reminded ourselves it was kind of the point (otherwise, who or what were we producing content for). It was also often painful. As Fiona and David have blogged here, people won’t always say what you want to hear and often they’ll make you the target of other issues in their lives. It’s annoying, and it’s worse now online than it was in 2000, but it’s unavoidable if you open the door and let the guests in.

The value of these conversations can soundly trump the standing on the edge of the cliff-ed-ness sensation they’ve been known to induce. Many businesses make overtures toward feedback but fail desperately with follow through (or in setting realistic expectations for follow through). It has to actually be a conversation, not feedback in a vacuum. And it has to be honest (certainly, not transparently duplicitous).

Brands and businesses are coming to comprehend the value opportunities embedded in social engagement and online community. But some still think they can have it both ways. They want to ‘add’ community and reap the benefits, without acknowledging that the hard bit is sticking your neck out and honouring community as constituency. In this time poor era, people don’t have time for your “community”. So unless you’re truly serving theirs as best you can, you’ll have a tough time of it.

A Hazmat suit can be useful!

It’s a perceptive democracy, where the freedom to have your say and the right to expect it will be duly noted is implicit. Whether you like it or not, self-scribed ‘members’ have a relationship to you and your product/service/website/ideas. Generally speaking, the best thing to do is to own up to that and make it mutually beneficial.

Don’t say you want feedback, unless you honestly do. Don’t say you’ll take opinions under consideration if you’ve already made up your mind and it’s immutable. Keep it real with people about where they sit in your universe. Own up to your mistakes and your anxieties. If you don’t, they’ll call you on it, plus, you’ll ose points with the karma fairies. If you can wear all of this, do it – it’s worth it.

Community voice (help it happen, then get out of the way)

Compelling content was always at the heart of the Arts Hub universe and early on Fiona and David recognised the significance and staying power of community as engine for ideas, innovation and output.

Member passions and curiosities closely informed our programming and our independence as a small editorial entity offered agility and freedom to present alternative narratives and perspectives.

But our greatest strength and success, in my mind, was as disintermediators. Our creative community peers and members told us they were tired of wrestling with traditional media gatekeepers to get attention for their work, and frustrated that when they actually scored that interview or profile piece, their voice was distorted by journalists beholden to their own egos or agendas.

So we made sure that when we talked to them, we let them take the lead and got out of the way. We steered clear of over-written commentary that showed off our writing skill, but obscured the subject and the point. We did our homework – not just because it enriched the end result, but also as a mark of respect to the community we were covering. We earned a reputation as accessible, equitable media makers by focusing on our brand ‘voice’ and letting the voices of our members take pride of place.

Importantly, we got that it wasn’t about us. We invited our community to tell their own stories, in their own voices. They felt they had every right to author an op-ed rebutting the one in The Australian about arts funding, and we agreed. They – and we – were interested in shaking up the critical establishment of their world.

Our members would write their stories (how a project came to be, their take on the arts budget, an insight into their process), we’d mentor them editorially, publish and distribute. It might reach fewer eyes and ears than a national newspaper or television network (these days… perhaps not), but our eyes and ears were self-selecting affiliates far more likely to absorb the content and follow through on any calls to action.

It seems so obvious, but it’s a lesson media and advertisers are still learning; find an authentic, personal frame of reference, or your signal will drown in a world of noise. That’s how you create sustained, honest relationships with audiences and consumers – the glue of community as enterprise. It’s a considered pas de deux, not a gaudy star search.

These days, disintermediation is tilting at mainstream, with self-publishing to the social web all in a days work if you’re a creative, content producer type. But Arts Hub was an early adopter of the philosophy and the team, led by Fiona and David practicing what they were preaching, proved it could be profitable. By making it about members and their needs, it was all about Arts Hub and how it was different from the pack.

Arts Hub was by created for a community, by members of that community. We nurtured and facilitated conversation and exchange around shared interests. We believed enough to let our members shape our editorial. By trusting in paid content, Fiona and David forced accountability to members – if we didn’t deliver, subscriptions would implode. It’s worth thinking about this as businesses grapple with the shrewdest way to monetise their communities of affinity. Members handing over hard earned cash is a sign of some pretty strong commitment on their part – and a pretty serious call to action for you as host or service provider.

Tethering your future to your member base is a scary thing to do. It’s a marriage. But it’s also tremendously powerful and you’ll struggle to reap the rewards of digital community without taking a similar leap. Take the plunge. Stock up on frogs.

Venessa Paech
www.twitter.com/venessapaech

Images: Flickr The Shopping Sherpa and Max Knight

Chris Thomas, one of the regular bloggers on the excellent Australian business website Smart Company wrote a great post the other day on a real life example of black hat SEO – basically using naughty techniques to achieve better search result ranking.

One his clients’ web sites had fallen from number 1 to number 2 for a search term, Chris did some investigation and discovered it was because the competitor’s SEO firm had done some distinctly dodgy work, including creating spammy Bible entry web pages and other black hat techniques.

Good site optimization should be about creating a great site, not messing with mother nature.

I tend to lean towards the notion that paid SEO is the dark arts. I’ve worked with a bunch of clients who have paid companies for SEO work, and none of it has impressed me.

Chris’ story reminded me of a similar situation I encountered with one of my web development clients a while back. They were paying an SEO firm $400 a month for ‘optimization’. I was engaged to create an entire new web site and online management system for their business, and that meant I needed to take a look at their SEO as well.

The SEO firm had basically broken every rule in the Google book – hidden links on the home page (reams of them); white text links; using a flash page to hide SEO text – you name it. On my advice the client dropped the SEO firm, and we built a whole new site, using tried and true conventions, and hey presto, they now rank as well or better for their keywords. And save $400 a month.

Last year I fell over a book by fellow Australian Glenn Murray called ‘SEO Secrets’. I liked his site, I liked he was Australian, I liked the fact that he really must be a copywriter because his sales pitch is the complete antithesis of the hyped up high pressure rubbish you so often see by the con merchants flogging their tired old paid information booklets.

So I did what I almost never do, and bought the book. And am glad I did. The majority of the content is not a major revelation to me, because I’ve been building sites for a long time, and generally feel I’m across the big issues with regard to coding and optimising content on a site. We kinda did this all before at our previous Arts Hub business – with literally hundreds of thousands of pieces of content on the site network it became second nature.

But Glenn’s book is a clear, well written, concise confirmation of my prior knowledge, plus throws in a few nuggets of ‘oh of course’ information that I know will prove useful in the future. And all nicely organised in a format I can easily dip into as required.

If unlike me you are not across the SEO issues, but you have a web site, and you want to know what all the SEO fuss is, then I reckon this is a good purchase. Glenn has done a thorough job of laying the known facts on the table, and offering a clear path through the maze. You can buy Glenn’s book from his web site by clicking this link.

Glenn concludes his book with:

“Search Engine Optimization is not a black art; it’s a science. There are defined rules and proven methodologies.”

OK, I’m going to hold to my assertion that it’s still the dark arts. There are so many variations, permutations and circumstances that, when teamed with the fact you are dealing with unknown Google algorithms, there is no guarantee.

Sites appear in Google in the order that Google’s algorithms has determined based on relevance and popularity. So if you have a good site, with great content, that people want to visit, you’ll deservedly rank well. SEO like those described by Chris Thomas and my client’s SEO firm rely on tricks and manipulations to circumvent the natural order.

Good site optimization should be about creating a great site, not messing with mother nature.

This is a transcript of the video post “Offline Marketing for your Online Business“.

You can download the transcript as a PDF.

Hi I’m David Eedle from nichecontentmillionaire.com on a pretty wild, wet, windy evening here in Melbourne. I don’t know if you can see the trees and the bushes behind me in our garden but it’s all a bit wild and woolly so I thought I’d take the time to put together my first video blog for nichecontentmillionaire.com and I was prompted because I wrote a blog post the other day talking about offline marketing for your online business. I think some days some people get a little bit caught up in all the fancy cool things that you can do online marketing and there’s no question there’s some great stuff, the rise of Twitter and Facebook and all of the social networks and so on give us a bunch of tools that we can use to spread the message about our product, our service, our website, whatever it is that we’re doing.

I actually come from a quite traditional marketing background, I spent 12 or 13 years working in the arts and theatre where marketing consisted mostly of putting posters up around the town and then sitting in a box office trying to sell some tickets and maybe occasionally getting the odd story on radio or in the newspaper so very much marketing 101 and a lot of foot slog involved, walking the streets putting up handbills and distributing flyers.

And that was one of the reasons why I wrote the post. I think I just wanted to highlight that there are all sorts of opportunities in your own town to promote your service, and whilst the internet is a global business and it’s fantastic to be able to deal with people all over the world, ignoring your own backyard is a missed opportunity.

We live here in Melbourne in Australia, it’s a city of 3 or 4 million people in a state of 4.5 or 5 million people. Now that’s obviously not a huge place, not as big as London or New York or somewhere like that, but the reality is a large number of people live in places this size or even a bit smaller. And Melbourne’s a fantastic town, it’s easy to get around, it has all sorts of media outlets, newspapers, radio, television. It has community television, so not for profit TV, and also community radio – not for profit radio – run a bit like public radio in the US, for example. And all of these offer really pretty good ways of reaching out to a pretty large group of people. My theory has always been that if, you know, you have a great product an easy test is to see whether you can sell it to your family first – or first and foremost. The next step is to see if you can sell it to your neighbours and if you can sell it to your family and your friends and your neighbours then maybe you have a chance of being able to sell it to somebody you’ve never met.

And at the end of the day that’s what marketing is, it’s about trying to communicate about your service or your product to somebody you’ve never met and quite likely never will, and to be able to reach out and put a proposition in front of them about the product, about the value of it to the person, and then obviously hopefully get them over the line to buy it. So I’ll just pick out a couple of the items in my post, and I’ll link to it from this post so that you’d go back and read the list but it was a top ten list of things that you can do to promote your online business offline and locally in your own town or your own city or your own neighbourhood.

I’ve already mentioned posters and flyers – I know it might seem old hat and a bit old fashioned and a bit traditional and so on but when we started ArtsHub, our online subscription content business in 2000, for a start we didn’t have Twitter, we didn’t have Facebook, we didn’t have MySpace. In fact we barely had email. So we were much more limited in avenues to promote the service. We couldn’t afford to buy advertising online, and we really couldn’t afford to buy advertising even in traditional media like the newspaper or on radio. And one of the first ways we promoted ourselves was to ask ourselves, well, OK, if we just put the rest of the world to one side and look at our own city here in Melbourne and we want to reach out to people – they’re the people who are going to join the service – where do they hang out? How can we reach them? And the obvious one was cafés, bars, restaurants, movie theatres, the university colleges. All the places where the sorts of people we were trying to attract might hang out.

We printed off a whole bunch of flyers, little handbills – so what we would call DL size – that’s about a third of an A4 page. It didn’t cost very much, we did the layout and everything and the design in Microsoft Publisher. We found the cheapest printer we could and printed thousands of handbills. We then paid a couple of university students we knew to foot slog around the streets and distribute bundles of the flyers to cafés and to bars, flyer racks in in local theatres. And then we did the same with posters as well – so we did a big version of the flyer and made sure that we had it stuck up on walls and so on. And we did pretty well out of that. The budget was just literally a couple of hundred dollars and yet it absolutely drove sales and drove memberships onto the website.

Another thing that we found that worked extremely well for us was community radio. I think community radio work operates roughly the same way around the world. Of course it’s the not for profit version of radio, run by volunteers – Australia has a pretty strong network of community radio stations and there’s a big one here in Melbourne and another big one up in Sydney as well. And they’re pretty networked together, so they do share some programming as well as creating their own. They don’t officially accept advertising because they’re not for profit but of course what they do is accept advertisements that are couched as sponsorship, so you’re able to buy 30 seconds, 45 seconds, 15 seconds, just like you would on commercial radio. You’re able to do it at a fraction of the price. Each ad – although they call them sponsorships – each ad has an announcement at the end, saying something like, such-and-such company is a proud sponsor of XYZ radio station, but at the end of the day, it’s an ad. We were able to buy packages of 30 or 40 30 second spots on the local community radio station for three or four hundred dollars, and that included production.

So we worked up a script in conjunction with them, they provided the voice-over artists, they cut the ad together, let us have approval and then once we signed it off they put it on air. And we ran community radio ads for several years. We knew that one of the ads had gone to air because we could see the spike in the sales. And because they were so cheap we were able to be in relatively high rotation. If you’re buying TV ads for the Super Bowl or something where it’s four or five million dollars or some ridiculous amount of money just for 30 seconds then high rotation ads become pretty expensive but on community radio, where you’re only spending 10, 15 or even 12 dollars for each 30 second spot you’re able to run a bunch of them and in a relatively short time span.

So we actually used to pick out programmes on the station that we liked or programmes that we believed our audience were listening to and then we’d make sure that we had two or three ad spots in each of those one hour programmes, and that repetition really helped, so we knew, as I say, we knew from our sales numbers that our radio ad had gone to air because we’d see the spike, the traffic into the site, and most especially a couple of sales going through. And on our sign-up page we always used to ask, where did you hear about us, and we gave people a choice, and so that also helped us with confirmation, so people would select the radio station as the place they’d heard our advertisement when they were joining up. So community radio, absolutely worth a look. They also run a whole host of different types of programmes, and that means you can get some editorial support as well. I used to go in and do some interviews from time to time about what we were up to. Again, they’re looking for content, they’re looking for things to talk about. It’s run by volunteers. They don’t have vast numbers of journalists and staff and producers and so on all sitting around able to create content, and so if you package some information together and you’re prepared to go and talk on air at a time that’s useful or convenient to them you can get some air time as well, and of course that’s free, you don’t even need to pay for it.

And finally the last thing that I just wanted to highlight is, it can seem a bit daunting as a start-up business particularly or just as a really small little internet company to try and attract some media attention but there’s actually a couple of ways you can do that. And by media attention I mean the mainstream larger commercial media. A couple of those ways is local media – again, Melbourne’s very similar to cities all over the world, we have our big daily newspapers, we also have a whole host of smaller neighbourhood and community newspapers as well that cover various suburbs or groups of suburbs around town and again, whilst they’re commercial operations they tend to run pretty lean, they don’t have great big journalist staff, writing staff, editorial staff, and they love a local story, so we used to regularly make sure that we were in contact with our local neighbourhood and suburban newspapers, trying to pitch them stories about things that we were doing with our business. And very often they’d pick up on it, and we’d try to make sure that we essentially wrote the story for them, so we’d produce a media release that they could copy and paste – is the nicest way to put it – copy and paste and maybe top and tail with a bit of an introduction and so on and then try to set up a photo opportunity, which – I have to say – when you’re running an internet company photo opportunities can get a little bit dry and boring – there’s only so many ways that you can take a photograph of an internet entrepreneur sitting at his computer, although we did do a few of those. But we used to try and find interesting angles or at least interesting ways to pitch a photo opportunity to them. And again, because we did, or tried to do a lot of the groundwork, they were always pretty receptive to that.

The other part of the mainstream media was making sure we were getting coverage in some of the the big press. So for example the largest, the biggest financial newspaper here in Australia is the Australian Financial Review. It holds the dubious record of being one of the most expensive newspapers in world to subscribe to, apparently. And its readership is obviously relatively tight, people who are involved in finance and business in companies and corporate affairs and so on. Not dissimilar to the Financial Times in London and similar papers around the world. But once or twice we tried to pitch stories to their emerging companies or new companies section. So they had a couple of journalists who particularly focused on new companies and also on internet businesses as well so we tried to slide story ideas to them, for example if we were doing something particularly big, for example when we launched our new website in the United Kingdom, which was the second marketplace we went into, after Australia, that was a big story for us, a big investment, a big commitment, and we were rewarded with a couple of stories in the mainstream press about it.

I’ve mentioned this in the blog post the other day, there was actually an interesting little sidebar to all of that which was that at one stage I had to go and see our bank manager to talk about an extension on our overdraft. This was before we were making profits and doing quite so well as we did in the final stages of owning the business. So we did run an overdraft, having a line of credit that we used to use from time to time. And its renewal came up, it was an annual thing, and I had to go in and be interviewed to talk about the business and ask for the overdraft to be renewed. And I rolled into the bank manager’s office and she was sitting there with our file and all of our financial statements and all of those sorts of things and I was pretty nervous as you are with these sorts of things, I mean the line of credit was a pretty big thing for us, it made sure that we had the cash day to day to keep operating. But lo and behold, she opens up the file and sitting on top were a couple of press clippings, there were a couple of news stories about us, including one that had been in the Australian Financial Review. And she was really pretty impressed with this and she read the story and said, look I’ve read the story and this is great, sounds like you’re doing really well. What of course was interesting was that she saw our appearance in the newspaper, particularly in the Financial Review, because it’s the record for business and companies and so on and is seen as an authoritative voice, she saw that as a real confirmation that we were a real business, that we were selling real products, you know, something real online, even though we were an internet based business, and she renewed our overdraft on the spot, so that – a bit of work to get a story in a particularly important newspaper paid of for us, and was worth all of the effort.

So there’s a few things that you can be doing. I’ve put together a list of ten, you can read about it on nichecontentmillionaire.com and I’ll, as I say, I’ll pop a link off to that particular blog post from this one. But I guess the final thing to say is, just don’t get caught up in all the hype and the spin about the things that you can do online from a marketing point of view. There are some great things you can do, but don’t forget your own backyard, don’t forget there’s a whole host of opportunities to promote yourself and just remember that if you can’t sell it to the people in your neighbourhood, the people in your city, your friends, your family and your neighbours, then you could find it hard to sell your product to people you haven’t met, on the internet.

Anyway, thanks, and I hope you enjoy nichecontentmillionaire.com, and you can read more about the book that we wrote, Niche Content Millionaire, it’s available for sale from the website, and you can sign up for our free report about some of the internet scams and so on with Google Ads as well. Thanks.

Update: A transcript of the video is now available.

It’s a cold, wet windy day here in Melbourne, so I thought I’d turn on the video and record some musings about my post the other day 10 Ways to Promote Your Membership Website Locally. There was more I thought worth saying about a number of the items from that post, including how to use community radio and television advertisements, plus how newspaper stories can help your business in a number of ways, including with your bank manager when renewing your overdraft!

Watching back I realize I sound rather nasally and congested – please excuse, I’ve been suffering the after effects of a bad cold – nothing glamorous like swine flu I assure you, just a common-a-garden common cold.

The video is around 16 minutes long, feel free to let me know what you think about using offline marketing ideas for your online business!