How To Personally Chauffer Your Clients Out The Door
Let’s play pretend.
Let’s pretend that you are taking me out on a date. (For my lovely female readers, this can be a “friend” date or you can pretend we’re lesbians. Doesn’t affect the story at all.) Because you’re a cheap bastard, you’re taking me to McDonald’s.
We get to the counter and I’m trying to decide between the Quarter Pounder with Cheese and the Big Mac. They both look pretty good, but it’s taking me a while to decide. I step out of the line because I don’t want to piss off the people behind me and I see, to my left, another menu.
“What’s this?” I ask the nearest 15-year-old employee.
“Oh, that’s the menu for Burger King. They’re our competitor. You can go there if you want. In fact, we actually have a driver on call. He’ll take you there, if you like. You can go right now! You don’t even have to come back.”
Because you’re not insanely stupid, I won’t tell you how ridiculous this is. It does lead me to ask, though… why are you running other people’s ads on your home business blog?
At the moment, I’m feeling neither benevolent nor patient. I don’t really feel like holding anybody’s hand. I don’t care that you made $4.21 off Adsense in July and if you keep it up for a few more months, you might just make enough cash to cover your hosting.
If you run a blog that promotes your product or service, do not accept money to shill someone else’s product or service. To half of you, this is obvious. To the other half, this is not. To the half who find it obvious, I’m not talking to you. Read on if you feel like it. Go do some work if you don’t. To those of you who don’t find it obvious, just listen and don’t argue.
Let’s say you run a company that offers custom digital illustration. Let’s also say that you’re pretty good at what you do, and your blog doesn’t get a lot of traffic at the moment. You’re thinking, let’s make some money off this whole internet thing. So you pay attention to what the SEO gurus tell you and optimize your site with the appropriate keywords. Let’s say “custom illustration” is what you’re going for. You slam your site with “custom illustration” and wait for the Google traffic to come in. You also happen to be running Adsense.
What happens? Since Adsense picks up on your keywords, it sends ads your way that use those keywords. In our custom illustrator’s case, they send ads for other custom illustrators.
In Google’s mind, that’s relevancy. In your mind, that’s competition.
If you sell a freelance writing ebook, they will run ads for other freelance writing ebooks. If you sell gift baskets, they will send ads for other gift baskets. And so on. I won’t continue. Would you go to any offline business and find them advertising for their competitors? Or even businesses that aren’t their competitors, for that matter?
There should be only one person they can find to give their money to, and that person is you.
Homework
If you’re selling something of your own, whether it’s a product or a service, remove contextual advertising RIGHT NOW. Ugly blank space may send buyers away, but not as fast as other people’s ads will.
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Yes! This all comes down to people not even knowing why they’re doing something. The purpose of business blogging is to strengthen relationships with customers and get new business. Anything that isn’t bent towards that doesn’t belong on the blog. Most blogging advice is well-meaning but inappropriate for business blogs.
Hi Michael - You’re completely right. In most cases, it’s just a matter of not thinking. People put Adsense or its generic equivalent on their blogs because that’s what they think they’re supposed to do.
It’s late at night now, and I have nothing intelligent left to say. I’ll leave it with, “I agree.”
So, how do you feel about reviewing a “competetor’s” product? I ask because I will be reviewing another freelance company’s e-book on how to become a freelancer. It seems not to be a problem to me, because I don’t have a book of my own to sell; and they’re not selling it to my actual customers. I’ve been looking at is as more of a service to aspiring freelancers who visit our site, as well as a way to build a little goodwill between our company and theirs.
Thoughts?
Hi Naomi, another really interesting post here. I find myself disagreeing with this one a little, although I think the essence of it is right. I’m not a huge fan of Adsense generally because I think as you say, a lot of people use it without thinking about it. However, I do believe there’s some value in highlighting your competitors activities, as counter-intuitive as that sounds.
In this world of Google, UGC etc no matter what you do your potential customers (and current customers for that matter) are going to find your competitors; it’s just too easy for them to do it and too hard for you to hide them. Whilst therefore it seems logical not to promote them yourself (why spend your time and money working for your competitor??) I think that actually flagging them up develops a real trust with your customers and prospects. Essentially what you’re saying is “we are so god-damn kick ass at what we do, that we’re going to show you everyone else’s stuff freely and you’re still going to come back and buy from us”. They’re going to find them anyway, so link to them, send them there, provide the menu etc.
I do agree that there’s limits to this approach though, and I would say that having their ads on your site just seems daft (because you’re not actively highlighting them by choice, Google is, so you lose that trust connection). However, done right, I think there’s a lot to be said for being that (scarily) open with the people whose money you want.
Sorry for the long comment, I tend to go on a bit when a (seemingly) lucid thought pops into my booze addled brain (it’s my birthday, so I do have an excuse for the heavy drinking yesterday, even though it was a Sunday). I didn’t even touch on the obvious need to have the kick ass content, product etc that’ll make them come back after you’ve sent them away. That however is far more your turf, so I’ll leave it there.
Loving this blog having found it a couple of weeks back btw, you have me hooked like you’re peddling crack.
As John Chow clearly states, there is no money in blogging. Those who blog to make money directly through their blog should pack up and go home. Unless you are John Chow, because he makes an insane amount of money through his blog. That’s because he’s John Chow. You are not.
From day one, we refused to put Adsense on our blog and refused to put paid ads on our blog. That is *not* what our blog is about. We’re running a resource for freelance writers, and we’re creating a very nice portfolio sample to show buyers. Our name is known, and we gain new clients - they can see what we do and are more tempted to work with us.
@ Lorna - Each time someone asks us to do something, each time I have the idea there is something I’d like to do, each time we see something we might like to get into, we ask ourselves, “What’s in it for me?” Whatever we do must benefit our blog or our business and be worth our investment of effort and time. When Harry and I aren’t sure, we list the pros - and then we list the cons. The longer list wins.
*happily clicks subscribe to comments…*
awesome.
When I worked in the Spa (hot tub) industry we would proudly display a list of our recommended competitors and tell our customers specifically which ones we thought they should go look at before buying ours. This would establish trust with them and show them that we knew they were going to come back. We would also tell them specific things to look for in those products, knowing that they did not have these features and ours did. We would also forget to tell them about our biggest competitor right down the street who had a better product than us hoping they wouldn’t waste their time looking at a product that we wouldn’t even recommend. This tactic was useful in a retail situation but I’m not sure how well it translates to a business website. You would have to have specific control over your adds to make sure they weren’t stearing your potential customers to a better service than yours.
@ Evan - Here’s what I learned: The greatest sign of confidence in business - service or retail - is that you specifically don’t bash the competition. In fact, you never mention them at all. They don’t exist. You are the be all and end all. Behind the scenes, you sure as hell know what your competition is doing and offering, but up front, you act as if you’re the only one. If clients ask questions about the competition, you bring focus back to your offerings. “Yes, the competition offers a Big Mac. (acknowledge them but never bash or point out their faults.) We have our own popular seller called the Big Joe. (bring it back to all about you) It has this, this and this, it does this… would you like to try? (make your sales pitch and encourage action.)”
There is a word that is about to appear in our dictionary that a competitor told me when we sat to have coffee two weeks ago : “Co-opetition”. The idea that competitors often work together and benefit each other. Heck - our blogs is a great example. We compete for a similar audience, but have found that pooling our energies helps everyone.
The question is whether or not your efforts are intentional.
Tongue twister. We call it networking :)
Hi everyone! Look! Comments! I don’t know why I don’t just set a timer to go in and check instead of waiting for WordPress to notify me. Poo-poo heads.
@ Lorna - Reviewing and physically sending people away are different. I think reviews are awesome!
@ James Parr - Absolutely! I talk about Mason from Small Fuel and Sonia from Remarkable Communications here all the time. I just don’t accept their money anonymously to let them put ugly ads on my blog.
@ James Chartrand - (Because James is Canadian, he’ll understand). It’s like we were talking about before - you don’t go to Sears and see them selling shirts that say The Bay on them, just because The Bay’s paying them some obtusely nominal fee for the privilege. It’s not only unprofessional, it’s unheard of in anything but online business. Maybe if your advertisers were paying you a small fortune, fine. But few of us will retire on Adsense revenue.
@ Evan - Exactly! If you have something intelligent to say about the competition, you’d be remiss if you didn’t. You don’t just put up a billboard and tell the competition to come and post whatever they want, as long as they pay you 83 cents a month.
@ Shane - Co-opetition. I like it. Kind of “the sum of the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”
@ Naomi - that’s what I said. The competition doesn’t exist. The Bay doesn’t exist for Sears. Sears doesn’t exist for the Bay. They are competition and don’t acknowledge each other’s existence. But I agree that if a Sears client asks about the Bay, the Sears salespeople better know everything down to what size booty the Bay salespeople have. And then redirect the client to how nice the booty at Sears is :)
–> is Canadian and can be bought for large sums of money to publicize other people’s business. Write me with an offer I can’t refuse.
@ James - Totally. I mean, let’s face it. We can all be bought. I just don’t want to go down in history having been bought for less than a buck. I mean, send me Durtbagz and we’re in business, but…
As usual, I’m late to the conversation. I agree that running AdSense on your blog makes no sense if you are selling your own wares due to what you already mentioned.
However, I do run BlogHer Ads. I have yet to see any of their ads compete with my product offerings and some of them are quite interesting & informative. I really admire what they are doing. In fact, I learned about the Quickbooks competition to win $50K from one of their ads. I hope I win but because I don’t have time to tell more than few dozen folks to visit and vote and I don’t have a video that features gourmet, oraganic, Thai dog food I’m not sure I will.
However, because I submitted their PR people discovered my entry and thought it was neat (i.e., Quicken for baby) and have started pitching my company as a small company using Quickbooks for press stories. My guess is that since I don’t have a PR dept that having them keep their eyes open and submit my company/me as someone to talk to will be more effective than me doing it.
@Naomi - you probably already saw this but Nataly did an awesome post on her blog where she mentioned us. Her post is now on the Huffington Post site. Cool beans!
@ Aruni - I’m not anti-ads. I’m anti-senseless-beyond-your-control- competitive-and-tacky ads that don’t make any money anyway. BlogHer totally doesn’t qualify as any of those. :)
Way to go on the PR thing. Rock on! And I saw that on Huffington. Way to go us!
What a fantastic article! Duh, don’t advertise for your competitors, unless you want to work for them instead of for yourself.
Great advice Naomi! First time reader, now a subscriber!
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