A-List Blog Marketing

By Stephanie Wetzel

I read a lot of blogs. Probably far more than the average person. But it is simply because I am fascinated whenever I learn something new, especially when that something helps me grow my business.

So as you can imagine—I read many blogs on the subject of online marketing. After all, that’s why you’re here today. Well I hope you are sitting down because the information and idea I am about to share with you blew my mind wide open . . . and it’s about to do the same for my business (I think!).

Tara Sophia Mohr of Wise Living is one of my favorite bloggers, and she happens to also be a Stanford-educated MBA Life Coach. The first time I heard this women talk about struggling with the “missing piece” of growing a business, I knew I would follow her forever more.

That’s exactly what it feels like to me too. If this highly-educated, professional businesswoman feels it, then it’s not just something wrong with me. For all the great business and marketing advice in the world, there is indeed a “missing piece” to this puzzle.

Do you feel it to?

Following Conventional Wisdom

There is so much great advice and technique out there for anyone looking to start a business. And as more and more of us independent entrepreneurs take to the net, the pool of strategy only grows. In launching my site, Trading Pounds, I spent about three full years reading and digesting information like a big sponge.

When I finally took the plunge to launch, I did it the “right” way—

• Identified my niche
• Got really clear about my target audience
• Worked hard to create great content
• Stuck to a consistent publishing schedule
• Emailed my tiny list consistently
• Created a free product
• And regularly submitted guest posts

I worked hard for 10 straight months to build an audience and then my moment came . . . I was launching my first product.

Once again, I followed the advice out there and although I was happy with the income this launch generated for my growing business, I was emotionally distraught over the process as a whole.

I had conversions, I made sales, but I didn’t generate the large revenues it appeared all my colleagues were generating. What was I missing? What was I doing oh so wrong, that they were doing oh so right?

At the end of the day, the reality is that my first launch would be defined by me as successful. What made this acceptance of success difficult is that over the course of 3 months building, refining and promoting this program, I had become completely and emotionally invested in it.

To not have the allotted 12 participants I had planned for in the program made me feel as if I had failed.

Fighting the Resistance

During the 3 months I was planning, developing and marketing my product, I realized there was a growing resistance within me. Not just the “I don’t want to be a sleazy marketer” mentality, but something much deeper.

It was a fear that began to manifest itself in different ways. At first, I found myself shying away from talking about the program. I didn’t want to “force” it on my readers.

Then I started resisting email sends because people were unsubscribing from my list. Plus, I was kind of doing them on the fly. I hadn’t really created a communication plan for this process. The other challenge was that I didn’t know what to communicate, so I just kept talking about the program.

The resistance finally became the boulder in my path as the days of marketing came to a close. The last week of registration, I sent one email blast. The deadline came and went without a single additional sale.

I was defeated. And I’ve spent the last few months educating myself more about what to do, as well as analyzing what went wrong.

But in all this time I couldn’t find the answers because according to conventional wisdom, I was doing everything by the book. So why did I feel so bad if everything looked so right?

What was the missing piece?

Removing the Emotions

Last month, I signed up for a short course with Tara Mohr called The Abundant Launch. I went into this course hoping to find the missing piece before embarking on my next course launch at Trading Pounds.

The course started simply enough with a recap of all the stuff I knew about online marketing. But then, Tara shared her experiences of all this wisdom coming together and NOT working. She even went so far as to share how it never really worked in the offline business world either.

She said there’s something missing out there in all that advice and learned wisdom. Her solution and the one that is working for her growing business—everything must be an experiment.

Emotion is the boulder that’s blocking your progress forward. I was so emotionally invested in reaching 12 participants, that I wasn’t able to take a critical look back at the hard data of my launch.

Treating each stage of a launch as if it were an experiment—assigning hypothesis based in factual data—gives you a foundation upon which to build your projections. It breaks apart each layer and allows you to study it more critically than before.

Instead of feeling defeated when the results aren’t what you want, you break apart the data to see what worked and what didn’t. You go back to your focus group (your readers) and gather more data. You put all of this together and you form a new hypothesis.

This vision of launching a product was mind-blowing to me. Being that I am already such an emotionally-driven person, and the fact that I run a coaching business based around the hardest journey of change in my life, it was as if Tara had given me an escape clause from feelings.

One that I have gladly utilized as I plan my next course launch in May!

What Comes Next

With this idea of experimentation firmly in hand, I have taken the first steps towards gathering hard data by which to plan my next course launch. I’ll be sharing progress and thoughts with you in the coming months, but for now, here’s where we are ::

Research.

I’ve talked with my readers about their pains and struggles. Where do they find the most difficulty when it comes to losing weight. I’ve used this information to select a very narrowly focused topic for the course—food.

Using their responses, I’ve identified about six specific challenges that they face within their daily lives. Currently, I am designing a second survey based on these results to help determine the final modules that will be included in the course.

Lastly, I am also reaching out to some of my survey respondents individually to talk with them directly on the subject and gather even more research. This personal contact also allows me the opportunity to ask more in-depth questions.

Planning.

Based on my research, I’ve roughly outlined the four modules that will be included in the course, as well as the topics they’ll cover.

I’ve created an editorial calendar for the coming weeks at Trading Pounds. This is an important step because it also outlines how I will be communicating with my readers via email. At first, I am simply shifting the focus of my posts to the topic of food and exploring how gaining understanding in this area changed my life.

The next phase of this will be to announce the course and a special list where people can register to learn more about the course contents. I created a second communication plan for this list, including a discounted registration exclusively for them. Only after this early registration period expires will I announce the course to my full list.

The Benefits So Far

Right now, I can already tell you that there are significant benefits to this experimentation approach. Instead of pulling ideas for my course from thin air, I have hard data and a pool of my market willing to communicate with me directly. (Only about 2% of my survey respondents declined my request to contact them.)

The other advantage I have found to this method is that my expectations are far more reasonable. Instead of just randomly crunching numbers, forming a hypothesis about each stage of the launch has required me to stop and think about the process as a whole.

And with my emotions removed from the situation, I’ve found that my decisions about when, what, and how to share information are coming more easily. It’s like I can see this entire process from a different perspective.

So there you have it, an interesting look back over what I believe to be one of the most eye-opening approaches to business planning that I’ve heard in years. Hopefully, by sharing my own launch progress, you’ll be able to gain some valuable ideas and processes for yours!

I’d love to know some of the techniques and ideas you’ve found valuable in your own past launches. Please share them in the comments below!

{ 13 comments }