Ask Jonathan: Freelance Marketing Breakout

Want help solving your unique freelance marketing problems? Starting today, Along with my regular Thursday column, I will be rotating marketing case-studies and advice into the mix.

If you would like to be considered for a future marketing breakout column, please feel free to e-mail me at jonathan@jonathanfields.com and include a few paragraphs about who you are, what you want to do and what help you’d like. If it is a good fit, I will publish your request along with a detailed analysis and marketing advice in a future column.

Our first Ask Jonathan Marketing Breakout letter comes from blog-consultant, Michael Martine at Remarkablogger.com. He writes:

Dear Jonathan,

Thanks, Jonathan, for making the offer and for taking the time to read this. I look forward to hearing back from you.

Dear Michael,

Thanks for your e-mail. Sounds like you’re off to a good start, the blog looks nice and clean and is easy to navigate. And, I like that you added in a box on the front-page to promote your blog consulting services and articles for beginning bloggers. You’ve got some great content there.

So let’s figure out how to make some simple changes designed to kick-start your blog consulting business. Let’s start with your on-blog efforts.

On-blog marketing-driven changes:

• Add blog consulting and featured articles boxes into the right column above your free-theme box – From a marketing standpoint, I would want to keep these two items front and center on every page. The way it is set up now, these drop away once you leave the front page. So, even if you keep them at the top of the center column on the front page, I would add them on all other pages, above the fold on the right column. They are much more important than top commentators and trackbacks. Those don’t need priority screen real-estate.
• Credibility conflict – Great job putting up an about page with a video that helps show people who you are and blog-consulting page to introduce readers to your services. One of the things that jumps out at me, though, from a marketing standpoint, is a credibility issue that runs through the entire blog.

  In a number of places, the blog refers to your extensive experience in blog design and consulting and touts the fact that you’ve been online since 1997 and blogging since 2000. So, immediately you’re building credibility and that’s a great start. I am feeling like, being in the business for so long, you’ve got to be pretty established and in-demand. But, then a variety of other factors create a conflicting message.

  1. First, looking at the bottom of my browser, I see you have an Alexa rank of 90,817. That’s nothing to sneeze at, very nice for the average Joe…but for someone who has been online and blogging since the blog-pioneer days and whose business is helping build and make blogs popular, I would have expected it to be higher.
  2. Second, the posts are interesting and substantive, but the quantity and quality of comments do not match your stated expertise and time online.
  3. Third, there is a very noticeable lack of external validation/social-proof. Put another way, no testimonials, media reviews, expert appearances, yadda, yadda. This is a problem not only because it sets up an unspoken tension with your stated level of expertise, but, from a bigger picture marketing analysis, testimonials and media clippings are massively powerful proof of ability. We’ll talk about this more in a minute.

  So, how do you fix these?

  Let’s talk about the Alexa Rank and comments last, because that’s going to lead us off-blog pretty quickly. So, we’ll circle back to that when get to that in a minute.

  But, what about social proof?

  One of the critical elements of direct-response marketing is the ability to build credibility. You need to be able to prove that you can truly do what you say you can do. Preferably better than most others.

  Hands down, the best way to do this is with testimonials or media appearances. It’s why every infomercial is wall-to-wall testimonials. They build credibility and, in doing so, help cultivate a seemingly rational basis for the buy decision. And, here’s the interesting thing, people have come to expect to see social proof so often that lack of it can be seen as refuting any claims of expertise made by you.

  So, I would e-mail anyone you’ve ever helped and ask them for a few sentences about their experience working with you. Try to get them to throw in specific metrics,, if possible, people like to see how your services benefited your clients in a concrete, measurable way.

  Then, once you have five or 10, add a heading on your top-navigation bar called testimonials or press room and put them all up. Pull a single quote from the testimonial and use it as a heading for each one, placing it in quotes with bold italics.

  I noticed you already have some great feedback in the comments to your free blog review posts and you just added a category for client success stories, so you can start with those. But, rather than keeping them buried in the comments or in the middle of a big list of categories, feature them, front and center.

  People clearly like what you’re doing, but you need to get the social proof/credibility part of your message out bigger and brighter.

• Rewrite your blog consulting page: Glad to see you set up a separate page for blog consulting and put it right after the about page. This will help people naturally flow from learning about you to seeing what you can do for them. Once you’re on the page, though, things fall apart a bit, so let’s make some changes to draw your prospective clients in. Here is the page:


The single biggest purpose of this page is to get people to take a specific action. And, that action is to call or e-mail you and say, “I never knew how important blogging was for my business, how quickly can you get me online?”

The most powerful way to get people to take action is to:

• Get into their heads
• Understand the nature of their problem/challenge
• Understand what is motivating them to want a solution
• Speak to all of this in your early written content
• Show how you can ease their pain
• Show how you are different than everyone else who could help them
• Build credibility through social proof, media clippings, etc, and
• Create an irresistible offer that makes them feel like they’d be crazy not to call

If you want to see an example of this, check out my direct-response copywriting page. It’s always a delicate balance between being too slick but also including enough copywriting power to inspire people to call.

Is crafting copy that addresses all that an easy thing? No. It takes a lot of practice. And, I would definitely check out copywriting resources like Brian Clark’s fantastic Copyblogger for great persuasive writing tips.

But, some critical changes you can make immediately include:

• Create a more-compelling headline or hook that touches on a strong need/concern/emotion and make it all about them, not you. Maybe something like, “If you’re not blogging, you’re losing customers by the minute” or “Become the authority in your niche and explode business growth through blogging” or “X million businesses are blogging for customers, what do they know that you don’t?”
• Tap the motivation that drives someone to want your help – What is it that leads someone to want help from someone like you? Frustration, lack of knowledge, failure after trying on their own? Figure it out and then lead with a paragraph that paces the struggle that would lead a prospective client to want help, then you are ready to move into leading them to a better, easier reality…of course, with your help.
• Make it more about benefits, not features – the current page is simply list of services that “you” provide. Change the perspective here and, rather than simply listing features, once you’ve laid out the challenges of most new or soon-to-be bloggers, makde you bullet list about the benefits that your prospective clients will experience, rather than pure features and services. For example, change “Blog coaching/mentoring” into something like, “Dramatically accelerate the launch and growth of your blog.” Make it about what blog consulting will do for your client.
• Differentiate yourself – I want to know why I should choose you over everyone else who comes up when I google blog consultants. What makes you different? Is it your approach? Your unique niche knowledge? Your experience with a specific type of client? Your rugged good looks and downright yummy brownies that come with every new blog? Thing is, you’ve got to answer the giant question, “why you?” If you are having trouble coming up with an answer, that speaks volumes about where a major gap in your marketing efforts lies.
• Make a stronger call to action – Rather than saying “Feel free to get in touch with me,” change it to something more commanding like, “call or e-mail today and be blogging in days.”

Okay, so there’s still a bunch more, but this is starting to get a bit long, so let’s jump over to a few things to do off-blog to help get people to your blog and using your services.

Off blog marketing:

Now it’s time to circle back to your Alexa ranking and comment volume/quality. In addition to weighing on the credibility of your claims of expertise, these are just a few the elements that speak to how much other people want to hear what you have to say,

Bumping your ranking and the number and quality of comments will come with increased traffic. There is a vast universe of ways to do this. And, there are far more knowledgeable people than I to speak on traffic building tactics for blogs, both paid and free. These resources should get you going:

• Online-Off-blog efforts: Two blogs I would spend a lot of time on are Darren Rowse’s Problogger.net and Maki’s DoshDosh.com. These two blogs will give you a giant head start.

  For some great recommendations on how to build traffic without spending any money, check out my recent roundtable article (which Cyan contributed some awesome ideas to).

  Chances are you know most of these techniques already, it’s more a matter of putting them into action. To answer your specific question about PPC advertising, though, before I went that route, I might try something like StumbleUpon Ads. StumbleUpon.com actually has a service that lets you have your webpage inserted as people stumble for 5 cents a page.

  The big difference between this and something like Google Adwords is that it not only exposes people directly to the desired page on your blog, but, if you get enough thumbs ups, it has the ability to continue to send referral traffic to that page for some time to come.

  I used this a number of times to launch my blog and, in addition to getting a ton of traffic, it also led to increased commenting, which gave a brand new blog a much more vibrant feel from the get-go.

  The challenge with all of your online marketing efforts is going to be that those who need your services most will likely spend a lot more time offline on their businesses than online on their messages. So, to really reach them, you should seriously consider taking a chunk of your efforts offline.

• Off-line/off-blog marketing: Okay, so here is where I think you can actually make the greatest impact and spend almost nothing, if you’re willing to spend a lot of time in the process.

  One of the things you didn’t mention in your e-mail was “who” your target market is. Now, the easy answer is anyone who wants to launch or grow a blog. Problem is, that audience is way to massive. You want to build a reputation, establish yourself as an expert and doing that is eminently easier when you focus your efforts in a finely tuned market. So, rather than looking for anyone who wants to blog, think about who you’d really like to work with and narrow that description as much as possible.

  For example, let’s say you like working with small businesses. So, you decide to focus on teaching small businesses the value of conversation marketing through blogging and helping get them online. Now we have a much more discrete market that is easier to target.

So, what next? Here are a few ideas:

• Create a free 1-hour seminar on the economic impact of business blogging. Use the info from your featured article section to create a presentation and, if you like, turn it into a booklet or ebook. Then, go to the local chambers of commerce within a 50-mile radius to get lists of small business members. Call every business and offer to share your presentation during a company lunch meeting. Or mail or e-mail the communications/marketing person with a similar offer.
• Expand your presentation or include organizations – then contact any organizations within a comfortable travel range and offer to share your presentation at their next scheduled meeting.
• Attend small business conferences and events – these are great opportunities to network, pass out your cards and, more importantly, get cards.
• Speak at local and regional small business events – begin to build your authority by becoming a speaker at any local small business events.
• Join small biz networking groups – these are local organizations where business people meet once a week for the purpose of exchanging business leads. It’s still very early in the blog consulting curve, so, chances are you’ll be the only consultant anyone in the group knows.
• Publicity – This is a big topic, so I’ll save it for a future article, but, simple fact is, if you can build your profile in small-business media by either getting quoted as an expert, featured or profiled, in either on or offline small-business media, this goes a long way toward building credibility, increasing your profile and attracting clients.

There are so many potential strategies, the list is really endless. But, in the end it’s all about (1) getting creative, (2) using your time instead of your cash or using your cash as wisely as possible, and (3) finding the places, online and offline, where your target market goes and taking your message and services to them.

This last point is especially important when promoting a service like blog consulting that could benefit many, but is also a bit of voodoo for a good number of small businesses. Reality is, part of your marketing and selling is going to educating people and simply letting them what a blog is, before you even get to why they need it. Because of this, you may want to view yourself as a teacher first and a blog consultant second.

Okay, gang, so that wraps up this week’s Ask Jonathan Freelance Marketing Breakout. I hope you enjoyed it. Now, it’s your turn to add your voice. What else would you suggest to help Michael grow his business? Feel free to add any other ideas, questions or thoughts in the comments below.

And, if you’d like to be considered for a future marketing breakout, please e-mail me at jonathan@jonathanfields.com