Remarkablogger

WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org – The Definitive Overview for Business

Michael Martine — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 02:31:05 +0000

Do you feel as though blogging is more complex than it’s been made out to be? When you’re new to blogging, choosing a blogging service or software is overwhelming. Many people never even learn that there’s a version of WordPress you can put on your own domain. The dot com version of WordPress is the first thing they encounter and off they go. If you are aware there are two versions of the world’s most popular blogging software, you’re now faced with a decision–one you don’t feel qualified to make.

You feel there’s a lot riding on this decision, and you don’t want to screw it up. Let me put your mind at ease by telling you that you aredefinitely going to screw things up. There’s another word for this: learning. I’m only partly kidding. Seriously: doing things is better than not doing anything. Movement is progress. But we like to learn quickly, rather than slowly. We like to avoid mistakes made by others if we can. I hope this post helps you in that regard.

Be aware, however, that I focus on business owners, and I treat blogging as marketing for a business. I’m going to cover this from that angle. I’m not a “problogger,” and it’s likely you aren’t either. We’re marketing a business, and our long-term goal is sales.

Your One-Sentence Answer: For business marketing, you want to use WordPress on your own server, which means WordPress.org.

For the longer answer, I’m going to break it down for you by listing out the major differences along a few major broad categories.

Hosting: Self or Other

The biggest major difference between the two WordPresses is that the dot com version is hosted for you for free on Automattic’s servers, while the dot org version is software you install on your own web server. Automattic is the parent company of WordPress. Hosting with WordPress.com means you save a lot of money, because it’s free, and you never have to worry about your server crashing. You never have to worry about upgrades, because they’re automatic. Everything just works.

To receive those benefits requires you to give up something very important to a business: sovereignty. You don’t control the software or the server. There are incredible extras and freedoms unavailable to you if you go with the dot com version of WordPress. If you install WordPress on your own web server, we call that self-hosted WordPress to quickly tell which flavor of WordPress we’re talking about.

Self-hosted is a double-edged sword. With great freedom comes great responsibility. You have access to scads of themes and plugins that will let you do amazing things with WordPress that you can’t do on the dot com version—it’s like getting the keys to the kingdom. But you’re responsible for managing everything and keeping it updated. Plugins, themes, and WordPress itself require constant upgrading and backing up. Sometimes there are glitches that can only be solved by people who really know what they’re doing. If that’s not you, then you must have access to a qualified person.

Domains: My Place or Yours

One area beginners almost never know anything about is how search engines work and how to optimize site content to be easily found in search (which is called search engine optimization, or SEO). If you get a blog with WordPress.com, your domain name will be http://yourblogname.wordpress.com. This is because your site lives on WordPress’s servers, not yours. If your blog begins to rank highly in search results, and you later decide to move to your own server, it will be extremely difficult to keep your search rankings. You will have become dependent on search traffic because it brings you customers and sales.

You can have your own domain “mapped” to WordPress.com for a small fee, so that your domain will be http://yourblogname.com. This makes it much easier to migrate to your own server later. So, if you’re going to use WordPress.com for now, at least map your own domain name to it and choose standard date-based permalinks (the permanent addresses for each post on the blog, usually in a year/month/day format).

If you self-host WordPress on your own domain, you can do whatever you want with it. You can make the entire domain use WordPress like a content management system (CMS), or you can place the blog in a subfolder, so the address becomes http://yoursitename/blog. This is important if your site already has other components, such as ecommerce catalog, client login areas, training, employee admin areas, or forums.

Using your own domain and hosting WordPress on your own server means any search rank authority your content accrues belongs to you, not to WordPress. This is highly desirable, because blogs (especially when I’m helping you with them) can become crazy search magnets and attract a lot of highly-relevant traffic.

Plugins and Themes: Power to the People

A plugin is a little program you add on to a self-hosted WordPress blog that provide additional capabilities. With plugins, you can do cool and highly beneficial stuff like:

Incorporate contact and other kinds of forms into your site
Have related post links show up below a post
Use Google Analytics to measure your web traffic
Improve your SEO even more
Allow commenters to subscribe to future comments by email
Create an ecommerce catalog right in your blog
Turn your blog into a social network
And much, much more.

On WordPress.com, however, you have no choice but to use what’s made available to you through the service. Their functionality is good and they cover a wide range of needs, from related post links to video embedding. But the price you pay for free and easy is that you get what they give you and that’s that. If that’s acceptable to you, then the dot com version of WordPress might be what you need.

Themes are the how your blog looks: the design. With Wordpress.com, you can choose a theme from the list they give you. If you don’t like any of ‘em, you can pay a small fee for the ability to customize the CSS file for your blog. If you don’t know CSS, you have to hire that out. If you have to hire it out, you may as well go self-hosted and get absolutely everything about it just the way you want.

If your blog is self-hosted, you can add any theme you like, or commission your own from a professional WordPress theme designer. Your options are wide open.

Code and Customization: Yes and No

One of the most commonly used scripting languages on the web to make dynamic actions happen in websites is called JavaScript. Almost any kind of widget, stats tracker, buy button, or email sign up form is done via JavaScript. Well, guess what? You’re not allowed to use JavaScript in a WordPress.com site. They’re not doing this because they’re mean, but because there are many issues with having executable scripts running on a site. These issues mostly relate to security and keeping spammers away.

While that’s perfectly understandable and reasonable, it doesn’t help you do what you need to run your business. A lot of necessary business blog elements make liberal use of JavaScript, so for many that’s a deal-breaker when it comes to WordPress.com.

Migrating from Dot Com to Self-Hosted

If you’ve already got a WordPress.com blog and you want to migrate to a self-hosted WordPress blog, don’t worry: you can do that. You can export all your posts, pages, comments, and other content out of WordPress.com and then import that into a new blog you install on your own server. This post is not the place to go into details about it: you can Google it or talk to your (hopefully) blog-savvy webmaster.

A Final Word and Your Thoughts

Like I said at the beginning, I’m writing this for businesspeople. I’ve listed what I feel is important for that audience, based on my experience working with many blog consulting clients over the years. If you’ve got something to add I didn’t think of, please help make this post more useful to everyone by adding your comments below.

How to Bake a Blog

Michael Martine — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:40:30 +0000

I’m not exactly the Ace of Cakes. I’m a decent cook, but I’m no baker. Knowing this about myself, but wanting to bake a birthday cake for my step-daughter’s birthday, I did what any normal man would do: I bought a cake mix and a can of frosting.

You’d think it would be foolproof. All I had to do was follow the instructions on the box. Water, vegetable oil, three eggs, a bowl, a mixer, and a 9″ x 13″ cake pan. How hard could it be? I mixed it all up, poured the batter into my cake pan, and tossed it into the oven (which I had even remembered to preheat).

After about twenty minutes or so, I went to check on it. I couldn’t see in the oven through the glass too well because of the glare on the glass in the oven door window, so I had to open the door to take a look (the light in the oven has been out for years).

The cake was like a golden hill growing up in a bulge out of the cake pan.

I was pretty sure cakes aren’t supposed to do that.

Turns out I had used what I thought was the correctly sized cake pan, but it was in fact too small. The cake had nowhere to go but up. I didn’t measure the cake pan. I just picked something out of the cabinet that looked cake pan-ish. I mean, what could go wrong?

The lesson from this is that we are all completely stupid, sometimes. We suck at following directions. We don’t like to be told what to do. We think we’re smarter than we are, and that we’ll “figure it out.” Over 50% of the population consider themselves “above average,” right? Yeah…

Succeeding with your blog marketing is like baking a cake. Recipes and instructions are everywhere, but people often miss something crucial, like making it obvious what your blog is about when a complete stranger lands on it.
Using a mix will certainly be cheap and save you time, but it won’t be as good as homemade. Your blog can be another “me too” blog and have cheap content, but it will be much more palatable to your hungry audience if it’s original and has a delicious but unique flavor. Maybe you want to do the blog equivalent of throwing in some rum or some chili powder into your chocolate cake. Spice things up.
People aren’t going to fall over themselves and shove each other out of the way to get at cake from a mix, but they will for awesome homemade cake. Great cake totally commands people, as if they had no will of their own. Wouldn’t you want your blog to be like that?
At least I made a damn cake. It still tasted good, even if it looked ugly. Cake, after all, is still cake. Too many people do the blog equivalent to thinking they have to become the “Cake Boss” before they can even start baking. How do you think he got to be the Cake Boss? By baking a zillion cakes, probably more of which were failures than he’d like to admit.
If you bake enough cakes, you really get an instinctual feel for how it’s all going to come together in the final product.
No matter how many cakes you bake, you still need to measure (and that goes for the length and width of cake pans, too).
Great frosting does not make up for a bad cake. Blog “frosting” is anything that sweetens the package, but which could easily become too much of a good thing. Do you really need five different social blogging widgets that show who’s visiting?
If you make a German chocolate cake before you discover that your dinner guests hate coconut, you will be eating that thing all by yourself for a few days. Write about topics that help your audience so much they can’t bear to live without your blog. I asked my step-daughter what kind of cake she wanted. I didn’t assume that I knew, or worse yet, made a cake that I would have liked, but which my family would have hated.
You don’t need the same kind of oven that Martha would use. Even if all you have is an EZ-Bake, you can still bake cakes—really small cakes, but hey. Point is, it’s not the tools as much as it’s the knowledge and drive.

You see? Anyone can bake up a great blog. Just make sure you follow your recipe correctly.

What’s your recipe for baking a great blog?

Killer Posts from My Clients’ Blogs

Headway 1.5 Now Available

Michael Martine — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 16:34:57 +0000

People have been asking us for weeks now when the new version of Headway is ready for download. I’m happy to announce that it’s ready, and you can now get it.

I’ve been showing you some of its capabilities over the past few weeks, and the comments and tweets have been really encouraging. Briefly, though, let me outline the main improvements from 1.0 to 1.5:

True WYSYWIG Layout in the Blog Theme: The Layout Editor is now the Visual Layout Editor, and it is truly visual: you work directly on the blog page as though you were viewing it on the web, and you can simply click on something and edit it in a floating properties dialog box.
Faster, Cleaner Code: The underlying code base has been rewritten to be even faster and more responsive.
More Header Tweaks: We’ve added new capabilities to make it even easier to get what you want in Headway without writing custom code. Now you can rearrange and realign your header navigation more easily.
Photo Gallery Leaf: We’ve added a leaf that lets you drop an image gallery for which you can command a host of settings. It does what you want it to do, without any custom HTML, CSS, or PHP.

To see a complete list of the changes, improvements, and bug fixes, check out the announcement on the Headway blog.

WordCamp NYC is the Place to be this Weekend

Michael Martine — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 22:30:42 +0000

Have you heard of WordCamp? Not word as in writing, but word as in WordPress. They happen all over the world, and they’re a great place to learn all things WordPress. The ones in the bigger cities are, well… bigger. WordCamp NYC looks like it’s gonna be a good one.

I’m going to be there, so if you’re around, be sure to say hello! You can still get registered to join and it’s NOT expensive.

There are educational tracks for beginning, intermediate, and advanced WordPress users, so there’s something for everyone.

This will be my first time in Manhattan, so I can’t wait to take tons of pictures and walk around like a touristy dork.

See you there!

How to Really Understand Marketing

Michael Martine — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:50:58 +0000

In spite of everything you read about marketing, do you feel as though you still don’t have a solid overall picture in your mind about it?

You’re not alone—far from it. The way we consume information and learn online is a fragmented experience: a blog post here, another one there, an ebook about a singular topic out of context… this is how most of us learn about marketing online. Does that sound like your experience?

No matter how good the information, you’re only getting bits and pieces of the puzzle. It’s like trying to read The Lord of the Rings in fragments, and out of order. When it comes to marketing, you imagine the whole picture would probably take forever to “see.” You’re afraid it would probably be one of those crazy internet marketing courses that sucker people into paying thousands of dollars for a glimpse at the supposed marketing secrets of the universe.

Right.

Unless it’s Marketing School, by Naomi Dunford of IttyBiz.com. Naomi is your fairy godmother (if you can dig a fairy godmother with a buzz cut and a nose ring) who comes swooping in with her magic wand and gets all the little pieces of the puzzle to fly together and form that big picture you need.

You know what the real “magic” is she uses? It’s called: damn good writing. I paid for this thing with my own money and read it and loved it. As you may have found out, there’s a lot of decent ideas out on the web, but they’re trapped in a swamp of poor writing (why most blogs fail, by the way).

Naomi can write, and by that I mean when you read it, you actually understand everything she says. You will “get” marketing, and you’ll get it from the inside out.

And that means you’ll finally be able to make marketing work for you the way you want it to, without selling your soul or any dirty tricks.

Now, I don’t need this book at all, though I enjoyed it thoroughly. Why did I buy it? Because, even though I had a strong feeling it would help you, I wanted to check it out for myself so I would know for sure. Marketing School totally passes the test.

Is there anything bad about it? Well, if you don’t already read Naomi, then you should know she swears a lot (I’ve met her in real life and there is NO difference between how she acts and talks in real life and how she writes her blog or her books—100% Genuine Naomi). So the swearing might be objectionable to you. It’s not to me, so I guess that means I have no complaints. And I really tried to find to find something so that I could sound at least somewhat balanced.

I would be honored if you visited Naomi’s Marketing School page through my link. If you buy it, I get a commission (price would be the same for you either way). If you like what I do here, it’s one way you can support it while helping yourself in a big way. You have my thanks.

Have you used any of Naomi’s courses before? What did you think?

Seven Reasons Why Headway is the Best Theme for Blog SEO, Period

Michael Martine — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 22:38:59 +0000

If you can’t see the Headway SEO videos in your email or reader, visit Remarkablogger.

Headway has the most complete set of search engine optimization features compared to any other premium theme around, without any additional plugins needed.

In fact, even if you did nothing but switch to Headway, your search optimization would be improved from the default settings alone. I wouldn’t recommend you stop there, though. A little knowledge goes a long way. Having the best tools for improved WordPress SEO baked right into your theme is great, but it’s even better if you know what to do with them to really maximize your optimization so you rank higher.

Watch the video above for a run-down of the main SEO configuration page in Headway, in which you set your blog’s home page and global SEO options. But here’s a point-by-point list of Headway’s formidable SEO features and why they matter:

Automatic URL Canonicalization – This eliminates the problem that Google sees http://www.domain.com and http://domain.com as two different web pages with the same exact content. Combined with the other SEO features of Headway, you can ensure Google and Bing know which URL really “belongs” to a page in your blog. That way, you concentrate your search strength to the right pages, instead of diluting it across multiple duplicate content pages.
Separate Titles from Blog Post/Page Headlines – There’s an HTML tag in every web page called title, and what’s in it carries a lot of importance in search—it’s used as the big headline text you click on in search results. Google and Bing look at the words in the title to help decide how to rank a page. Normally in WordPress, the title is automatically generated from your blog post headline, but sometimes we want it to be a little different. WordPress alone won’t let you change that, but Headway does.
Meta descriptions – The meta description tag is another HTML tag that search engines use to judge a page. It’s also used in search results as the description (go figure) below the title link of each search result (Note: not always, but often). This makes it kind of a big deal for SEO, but guess what? WordPress does not even have this built in!

Unless you use a plugin or a theme like Headway, no descriptions for you. Previously, you had to hack your WordPress theme code. Headway makes this painless, you just write your description in a box. Often the description is what really convinces people they should click on your link in the search results, instead of some other guy’s.
Total Nofollow Control – Adding “nofollow” to a link in HTML tells search engines to ignore the link and act like it doesn’t exist. This causes search engines to “see” a different picture of a web page than if all the links were “visible” to it.

This matters for two reasons: One, because the words and destinations of links affect search rankings. And, two, because if you have any sort of paid or compensated links in your post, and they are not “nofollowed,” you are violating Google’s terms of service. Headway gives you complete control over nofollow in your blog. From links in a post to comment author links, to links to entire pages, Headway lets you decide what to let search engines see.
Not Just Nofollow, but Noindex, Too – In addition to affecting the way search engines see and don’t see links, you can tell them to ignore entire pages. When you search the web, you’re not searching the actual web, you’re searching the search engines’ indexes of the web. Noindex tells them to not add a page to their index.

There may be pages that are necessary to have on your site, but which don’t contain content that benefits your search rankings. For example, you may be writing a whole big new section of your site, and you don’t want search engines to find it, yet.

Not only can you noindex individual pages on the fly, you can noindex entire classes of pages in order to avoid having five different URLs for a blog post as far as search engines see things. You can noindex all tag, category, and other archives, for example. The idea is that only URL search engines have for your post is the permalink one.
Seamless Integration with All-In-One SEO Pack – Many bloggers concerned with SEO are already using a popular plugin called the All-In-One SEO Pack (AIOSEO for short). If you switch to Headway, all of your AISEO data is used by Headway, which means you don’t have to go back and redo the SEO on your previous posts.

In fact, you can happily deactivate AIOSEO and have one less plugin to slow your blog down. Other blog themes with their own built-in SEO features allow AISEO to override their own features, but you have to keep the plugin and keep it updated. With Headway, you can throw it overboard and have one less thing to worry about.
Breadcrumbs – Headway creates breadcrumb links at the top of the page that show a visitor’s location in the blog. Headway breadcrumbs use your blog’s categories, turning your categories into keyword link powerhouses on every single page of your blog. This works especially well if you’ve set your permalinks to being category-based, but more keyword-rich link text always helps, even if you’re using the normal date-based permalinks.

What about code frameworks and all that? To my thinking, any premium theme from now on is going to be built on a code framework that is better than your average theme’s code, or people aren’t even going to buy it. In other words, code frameworks are no longer a point of difference. Code frameworks are just par for the course, anymore. And without the features I’ve listed in this post, code frameworks really aren’t any help with SEO. Beyond valid XHTML/CSS and well-written PHP and JavaScript for speed and accurate parsing/rendering, code frameworks by themselves do nothing for SEO.

Note that none of these features will improve your writing, but they will help good writing be found more easily. You don’t want your good writing to be hampered by a bad WordPress theme, do you? That’s like putting a fifty pound weight in a backpack and then trying to run a marathon. Your theme should help you, not hinder you. Take the weight off. Make headway.

What you see in the video above is actually Headway 1.5 which will be released in a matter of weeks. Most of these features exist in the current version of Headway, and upgrades are free for life for all current Headway owners. The sooner you switch, the sooner you can start improving your blog’s search optimization.

Check out Headway and learn more.

Headway 1.5 Changes the Game… Again – Meet Your New Visual WordPress Theme Editor

Michael Martine — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:58:53 +0000

If you can’t see the Headway Sneak Peek video below, please visit the Remarkablogger blog to watch it.

When Headway 1.0 was released, it shook up the WordPress premium theme market. Why? Because we gave bloggers what they really wanted: visual control over their blog designs with little-to-no complex coding.

Well, now we can add the word total to that description. You now have total visual control in Headway 1.5, which you can now get as a developer preview (which means you have to have the developer’s license).

For all you non-developers, though, Headway 1.5 is going to be your home for do-it-yourself design. The Layout editor in Headway 1.0 was great, but it was just the start. We know that what bloggers wanted — and what they thought they were getting with other themes, but didn’t — are easy drag & drop and control panel-driven design tools. In other words, bloggers want an easy design environment that’s more like a program than a web page.

Interestingly enough, those same features also make Headway 1.5 the best friend of every advanced WordPress designer on the planet, because the sheer speed with which you can work will plaster a grin on your face. Hardcore coding applications are great (I used Notepad++ myself), but Headway is the Dreamweaver of theme design.

Headway 1.5 is not available just yet, but it will be soon. I’ll be making more videos to show you the cool stuff it does and explain how you will benefit from these features. If you want to try your hand at a developer license now, head over to the Headway Themes site and get yours.

I’m not an affiliate for Headway because I’m a partner. But if you want to earn money as a Headway affiliate, sign up here so that you’re ready to promote 1.5 when it officially releases.

The Tao of Blog Conferences

Michael Martine — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:31:26 +0000

Watch the blog conference survival video on the blog if you don’t see it below.

My advice for surviving big blog conferences? Flow like water. Here’s some of the story of what happened at BlogWorld Expo ‘09 and how I managed it. People mentioned: Grant Griffiths, Naomi Dunford, Christine O’Kelly, and Joel Williams.

How to Use the Secret Desires of Your Customers

Michael Martine — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 10:06:01 +0000

What are Your Secret Desires?

No, no, not those kind of secret desires. As a business owner, you have daydreams of what success looks like to you. You probably don’t go around talking about these publicly, because they feel private and personal to you. You’d likely be a little embarrassed to lay them bare before others.

Right now, I want you to take a moment to catalog your business success daydreams. I want you to write them down. Seriously, write them down, because there’s an important point to this. I’ll wait while you do.

All done? Okay. Here are some of the ones that were on my list (yes, they’re real, and no, they’re not outrageous):

$10k a month income
10k subscriber and follower counts
More time to spend with my family
Never doing work below my pay level
More time to write fiction and work on other creative projects
Some kind of workflow and client management system I would actually like that works

Headline Magic

I hope you’re seeing the seeds of great headlines in those. If you were selling something that would help me achieve any or all of the above, would I be interested? Hell, yes, I’d be interested.

The reason why you had to write down your list of “secret desires” is because I wanted you to make them concrete in the form of exact words. Once you have that, it’s easy to start constructing headlines out of them:

What I Did to Reach $10,000 a Month in Income–Ethically
How to Grow Your Twitter Followers to Over 10,000 (Without Being a Spammypants)
The Super Duper Hoo Ha Project System: A Review

Try It and See for Yourself

Try it with your own daydream list. Turn them into exactly the kind of headline that YOU would stop everything for and click on. Take a few minutes to do this. I’ll still be here on your screen until you’re done.

No, really, DO IT.

All done? How was it? Eye-opening? Maybe a little frustrating?

Get Inside Your Clients’ Heads

Now, this next part is going to be really fun: do the same thing, but I want you to envision your clients’ secret desires. Write them down, put them into concrete words. Create at least twenty of them. I’m serious: twenty. Why so many? Because if you go past the point where you normally would have quit, you will surprise yourself and start creating gold (big life lesson, right there, my friends). You have more insights into your clients than you think.

Here’s where the folks who think “everyone” is their customer falter and fail. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: everyone is not your customer. You can’t be all things to all people, you’ll end up being nothing to nobody. Figure out exactly who your customer is, down to the tiniest demographic detail. You only want to appeal to that person. Always write as if you’re writing to only one person. That person. Your perfect customer. Like you’re in a bar with her, having a drink and an important conversation (like how I’m “talking” to you, right now… do you feel it?).

Spinning Dreams Into Gold

I bet you know what comes next: take those secret desires and turn them into headlines. The words for these headlines are already there in your clients’ daydream statements you wrote. You can see from the examples it’s easy to turn them into headlines. Remember that headlines make promises to the reader, and the article text has to deliver on that promise.

If you do this, it’s like taking your customers’ dreams and spinning them into gold for you. What you write will resonate, and you’ll connect with potential clients like never before.

Why You Are Not A Service Provider

Michael Martine — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:46:55 +0000

This post was inspired from a conversation I had with Chris Brogan at BlogWorld Expo 2009. Chris is so damn productive, I have given him a nickname. Henceforth, he is “The Broganator,” but that is beside the point.

We were standing around in a little circle with a couple other people after a session Chris had paneled, talking about business. Any time we dig a little deeper into our blogs to make them more successful, we’re reminded they have a business end. We’re reminded which end is dog, which end is tail, and which end is supposed to be wagging the other (most people have it exactly backwards in practice).

One Very Important Thing

In order to be successful in business, and market that business successfully via blogging, you have to know one Very Important Thing. You have to know what problem you’re solving. There’s more to it than just that, but let’s leave it at that for now, as an introductory idea.

Most businesses don’t take a problem-solving approach. They take a service-provider approach. How many people you ask say, “I provide design services,” or “I provide consulting services?” Even if the word services doesn’t make an appearance, it’s often assumed.

But when our prospective clients reach a point where they need our services, what has happened in their lives? Often, they’ve suffered a problem that needs fixing. They may not even know what service to search for. All they know is they have a problem. If my stomach hurts, and I want to search online for relief, I’m not going to type “irritable bowel syndrome” into the Google search box, because I don’t know that’s what I have. What do you think I’m going to type in?

Framing the Problem

If you guessed, “stomach pain” or similar, high five yourself (or on second thought, don’t, because to other people that just looks like a weird clap and you’ll get funny looks). Now, if we’re selling a product that relieved stomach pain, our marketing objectives for blog content are clear.

But what if we sell services? Our potential clients still suffer from pain, but it’s more of a situational, logistical, or anxiety-based kind of pain. Our clients don’t necessarily want services. They didn’t wake up today wondering, “Gee, where I can I get me some good career coaching services?” They woke up saying, “Damn, not another Monday! I hate this job! How can I get out of this without putting my family’s well-being in danger?”

They want their problem to go away—preferably with as little involvement as possible on their part.

Google’s Big Mistake

Let me pick on a giant company as an illustration: Google. Google has created several services which are languishing or riddled with problems based around large-scale user annotation of the web. Google SearchWiki is not even used by people. Google Knol is a ghost town. And Google SideWiki is turning into a huge, sad joke. Why does Google fail so badly with these services?

Because they’re trying to solve a problem nobody has.

When I said that in our after-session conversation at BlogWorld, Brogan immediately lit up and he said he really liked that phrase (Chris: steal it, use it). That’s the connection between BlogWorld and this post.

Think about your own business, your own blog. Are you having difficulty attracting qualified traffic that converts? Could be you’re not solving anyone’s problem.

“But wait a minute,” I hear you say (yes, I really heard that), “I do solve a particular problem! I solve ___________.” That’s good if you know that. But if your business blog marketing still isn’t pulling like you want, there’s a likely reason for that. It’s because even though you know what problem you’re solving for your clients, your blog isn’t doing a good job of communicating that. Go back and look at your posts from the fresh perspective of a complete stranger: do you see more than one post where the problem you solve is clearly stated in headlines and post content? Yes, you have to be that blatant, that direct about it.

Your First Step

Your first step in the right direction is to forget about labeling yourself as a service provider, and begin calling yourself a problem solver. And yeah, the observant among you will notice I’m not doing that here on my own blog. I’m sharing this with you before I implement it myself (because it’s that important). I’ve been telling this to my blog consulting clients and blog coaching groupsas well, for months (they have a head start on you, and they also have my specific guidance for their individual businesses and blogs).

We’re not service-providers. We’re problem-solvers. But, more than that, we want to be sure we’re solving the problem our clients believe they have. Let’s make sure we’re not making the same mistake as Google. Don’t try to solve a problem no one has. You and I don’t have Google’s vast resources to create and then discard such costly projects.

By the way, as I hinted at above, there is something beyond problem solving. That’ll be the next post. Stay tuned.

Your Thoughts

Have you been thinking of yourself as a service provider? If you had to write down what problem you solve, what would that look like? Leave a comment below and let me know. Help each other refine your “problem statements.”