Remarkablogger

One Million Business Owners

One of my blog coaching clients is business coach Greg Balanko-Dickson. Greg’s the author of two books and has been involved in business and been a successful business coach for many years. In the interest of disclosure, Greg is also my business coach, and we are engaging in a joint venture for Gateway Blogging. Greg has set an amazing goal of impacting a million business owners through his work. I have no doubt he will accomplish this.

Conventional Blogging Not Good Enough

Greg’s been running several blogs and writing profusely for all of them. His writing and his thinking were scattered across too many subject areas, and he wasn’t using his blogs in a focused way to bring in business. He has been creating immensely valuable material, but felt that he was not realizing a return on time invested for his blogging efforts. Greg had been doing what any good blogger was supposed to be doing: writing about his areas of expertise on his blogs, posting frequently, and commenting on other blogs.

It wasn’t enough. Like any other blogger, Greg wanted his blogs to be successful. Conventional wisdom has it that a successful blog has loads of daily visitors, many comments on the posts, and a high RSS subscriber count. And while there is no doubt that all those metrics are indeed worthwhile, they miss an important point: what is the goal of the blog, and how does it support the goals of the business? After all, Greg is in business.

Although he was writing tons of incredibly intelligent, deep posts on running a business, Greg wasn’t blogging to get more business. He wasn’t focusing on a business owner’s pain points and offering a solution. He wasn’t sharing client success stories. He was giving away too much of the information he should have been paid for.

Return the Focus to the Business

In my discussions with Greg, he described how his focus had shifted from conducting live, in-person seminars to writing books to blogging. He wanted to get back to doing live seminars, because that was where he really had the most impact. I told him that repurposing that seminar content into other information products to sell online, with using the blogs to provide a glimpse into the paid content — Gateway Blogging — was a way to make money at all points along the value progression from paid content to live seminars to consulting.

Greg’s blog needed to act as a gateway to paid content, to information products for sale, to selling live seminars, and, at the top of the chain, selling his most precious assets of all: his time, expertise, and experience, via highly paid consulting.

From Visitor to Buyer

The steps from blog visitor to buyer would go like this: visitor arrives on blog, gets value immediately from the free content (blog posts, maybe an ebook or white paper). Visitor subscribes. Subscriber discovers there is more: an mp3 file to download that is a small part of a live seminar. The entire seminar is available for sale on CD or DVD or for paid download. You can see where this is going.

The next step in the sales funnel is to convert that reader into a customer. If a customer gets value from paid downloads, CDs, or DVDs, then it becomes a much easier decision to envision paying the price for a seat in a live seminar. It’s a gradual series of gateways, each gateway leading to the next tier of pricing. This makes it possible for Greg to impact more people than if he were blogging alone or conducting live seminars alone. Blogging is not a good format for much of the material, and live seminars can only reach so many people at one time.

One of Greg’s concerns with blogging was that he spending a lot of time creating in-depth content. He was getting coaching leads and clients as a result, however, when he looked at it from a return-on-investment (ROI) standpoint, he didn’t feel there was adequate return for the investment of his time. His goal is to shift and tighten his blogging focus via Gateway Blogging techniques. He stands a good chance of making blogging achieve a strong return on time invested. Being able to spend less time blogging while increasing the returns of blogging will help him move closer to impacting a million business owners.