WiseBlogging.com

The company that I’m working for often sends its employees to training programs, both internally and externally. I personally think that it’s a good long-term investment in the employees as well-trained employees are able to improve or at least maintain the company’s readiness to respond to the market. I was recently asked to attend a 2-day external training on “Handling Customer Complaints”. The trainer, Dr Allen, was indeed an experienced speaker and the content was very informative. I learned something new and during the whole course I was trying to relate it to blogging, hoping that it could add value to what I’m currently doing. To my surprise, the findings were of satisfactory and here are some points that I think you can apply to your blogging model.

1. Do what people don’t do
You probably remember Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart which generated $245 billion in sales last year. He was once asked what his secrets to building the multi-billion retail empire were, and one of the rule of thumbs that he shared was “What people do, you don’t do; What people don’t do, you do“. In today’s blogging world, it’s getting difficult to make money from it as it has become more competitive. What other bloggers are already doing is no longer as worthy because it doesn’t deliver the uniqueness of your blog. Therefore, if you wanna stand out of the crowd, then do something that other bloggers don’t do, this way you will most probably be the first to capture the major market stake. A very good example would be John Chow, he was the first blogger who gave away prizes while converting visitors into RSS feed subscribers, and it created amazing results in his feed count leading to an increasing income. So, start thinking something that the rest are not doing and be the first to do it. I’m yet to experiment this golden secret, let’s try it and let me know if it creates opportunities and increases your online income by any chance.

2. Help others help yourself
“When you help others achieve what they want, they will help you achieve what you want“. This is yet another important factor that should be added to your blogging model. It is extremely true that when you help others solve their problems by providing tips, how-to’s in your blog, they are inclined to like your blog, they bookmark your blog and they begin to visit your blog more regularly, thus, you gain the readership and automatically the money rolls in. Maki from DoshDosh is the best example in this aspect, it is not difficult to notice that most of his making-money-online blog posts are always full of unique information, tips, how-to’s that you hardly see elsewhere. Maki constantly does a thorough research on the topic that he’s writing about, and that’s why he gains the reliability, popularity and readability from his audience. In simpler words, do not hide what you know or are capable of, help yourself by helping the rest SINCERELY.

3. Be relational
Dr Allen also raised an essential point that we should really take note of. He thinks that today’s business models are moving towards a transactional mode. Take fast food outlets for an example, you go to the counter, the girl at the counter takes your order, you pay the ticket, leave with your food and the relationship ends right there while the girl at the counter yells “NEXT”. They are no longer serving customers, in fact they are “processing” customers, and they forget that a good service delivery is what keeps customers coming back. How does it relate to your blogging model? Don’t just write, post and hope to earn a fortune from your blog. You might get a few dimes from some random clicks, but your audience is not going to return for more. In fact, you should personalise your blog, your blog is not a robot. Care about your readers, reply their comments, ask what they want, appreciate their visit, they are your friends, they aren’t your competitors. According to a statistics done by Dr Allen, only 5% of the people who purchase your product or service would give you feedbacks, compliments and complaints, while the remaining 95% would be indifferent. Therefore, if you want to find out what you have done right or wrong, what you need for improvement, what you can do to gain more readers, how you can add value to your blog etc, you should also conduct surveys on a regular basis, ask your readers and get more feedbacks out of the remaining 95%. Be relational, not transactional.

These 3 tips may not earn you your first million, but they are of essential importance to building a different and popular blog. Tell me what you think and do let me know what you’ve achieved after applying these strategies to your blogging model.

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You have probably already heard of ShoeMoney.com and JohnChow.com, or you may not have heard of them, but they are undeniably one of the most influential money bloggers that give valuable tips and complete guides to making money online. “ShoeMoney vs JohnChow” has become the hottest topic in the blogging world. They were having a breathtaking RSS feed competition recently to see who recruited the most new RSS feed subscribers in the month of October 2007. Winner would then be granted bragging rights and a link on the other person’s blog.

In order to win the once-in-a-life-time competition, both of them came up with a win-win marketing scheme. They gave away a ton of prizes, including cash prizes, to new feed subscribers. Who doesn’t like free stuff? Who doesn’t like prizes? Therefore, I entered the competition too, and of course I subscribed to both of them, meaning I had greater chances of winning those crazy prizes, even a small prize as a consolation would surely mean a lot to me (I hardly win something). To my surprise, on only the second day of entering JohnChow’s RSS feed, I won a prize! LOL I won a free wiki page worth $100 on Million Euro Wiki. Check out my name in the winner list here, look for “admin-reviewcolumn”, that’s me. Glamour! I’m currently still in the midst of updating the wiki page that I won, you can check it out here.

And it seems like my luck didn’t just stop there, it came and stayed. I later won a prize from ShoeMoney’s too. Now you can call it SPLENDID! ShoeMoney gave me a $650 worth of full SEO analysis from Seonext.com, check out my big name in the winner list here.

The competition ended at the end of October 31, 2007 (US or Canada time). Who was the winner? Both of them were the winners, as they claimed. In fact, ShoeMoney’s RSS feed count was 18,003 with 7,170 recruited during the competition, while JohnChow managed to pull in 4,691 new readers giving him 13,276 in total subscribers. During the competition of the century, JohnChow was once in the lead and ShoeMoney almost gave in, but ShoeMoney managed to gain 4,403 readers on the last day making him the winner. However, both ShoeMoney and JohnChow agreed that both of them were the big winners as the whole point of the competition was to gain their RSS feed readership, and now that their purpose have been fulfilled, no one really lost in the match.

I personally think that it is a good marketing strategy to gain more readership by giving away prizes, I might consider this in the near future. Meanwhile, ShoeMoney and JohnChow haven’t announced the winners of their grand prizes. I’m just hoping that I will win the grand prize from either one of them. Please give me one of those, finger crossed.

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