Back in Chapter 3, I told you about the day I was hanging out in the backyard pool, just watching the bees buzzing around in my I-need-a-good-mow lawn. You may remember I found the activity inspirational when I realized that although most folks saw “pollinating,” I saw “nectar gathering.” This was a good insight, and I’m happy to say that it wasn’t the only one I took from that pleasant afternoon. You see, when you let your lawn get overgrown, it can lead to more than one life lesson. This one came in the form of a patch of dandelions.

Every last one of those dandelion seeds comes complete with its own tiny parachute. Once the seeds have matured and are ready to spread, either the wind or a random child (or fun-loving adult!) will come along and scatter those parachutes on a breeze. Most of them won’t go too far. Unless it’s a pretty windy day or a pretty determined kid, those seeds will settle somewhere in the same neighborhood where the mama dandelion did. But a few of those parachutes will get caught on a gust. They’ll rise up and travel farther away from the parent plant than the other seeds will go, which will give them a whole different environment to populate and save them from having to compete with all the other dandelions for the limited resources of my now-dandelion-filled backyard. If you’re reading this and you’re a landscaper, hit me up. My yard sucks!

You’re going to use your blog as the dandelion at the center of your social commerce plan. It, and all the other content you create, will take your brand, your reputation, and your business into new and far-flung fields where there will be plenty of opportunity to spread out and tap new resources. Your blog is going to be the hub of the wheel that drives your social commerce efforts, just like the big head of white fuzz is the center that begins the lives of all those soon-to-be dandelions. A blog gives you freedom to create, explore, and bring your own business brand and personality to life as you engage your King Consumers. You don’t have to be a great writer. The only thing you have to be is knowledgeable about your business, your products, your customers, and their needs.

I won’t argue with you, blogging is old school. But even as one of the earliest social media tools we have, its power still can’t be denied. Yes, back in the dark days—before everything began floating around on the Cloud—people used online services, such as AOL, to gather digitally. The forums on those services were early social media platforms, and the communities were strong and robust, even if minuscule by today’s standards. But when it comes to controlling the content of your brand and business, and spreading that content according to your own plans and needs, nothing gives you more bang for the buck than a blog. You’re going to connect your blog and link it all over social media, with a strategic plan of course. You’ll find your blog will be great for helping you energize the Fifth Finger, Brand Awareness, and it will also broaden your sales funnel, the First Finger. But before you can put these fingers to work, you have to get your systems in place and create some content. Don’t panic, because I’m here to help.

First let’s do a little reality check. How many of you out there can swim? How many of you out there enjoy swimming as great exercise? How many of you once swam on a competitive team at school or in your community? Now, how many of you can compete with Michael Phelps, winner of twenty-two Olympic medals? Yeah, that’s what I thought. It’s easy to psych yourself out when it comes to starting a blog. It seems big. It seems you have to get it right. It seems like a lot of work when you’d rather be paying attention to other parts of your business. Trust me when I tell you that you can easily have a blog up and running in a single afternoon, and I’m not saying this just because I wrote this book. I’m saying it because it’s really not that hard, and I know how to help. Think about it. The last time you were hanging out on the beach watching your kids splash in the surf, it never occurred to you to wonder if the lifeguards could beat Michael Phelps in a race. But if you’ve ever seen those lifeguards jump into action to help someone in the water, then you know, with no second thoughts, they can swim just fine. You can showcase your business in a blog just fine, too.

OKAY, SO WHY WORDPRESS?

Wait a minute. I hear some protests in the back: “John, I already have a blog someplace else.” Good for you, and I mean that. And you, over there, shut your trap. I don’t own the stock, wise guy. You can have blogs all over the web, but that’s not going to get you out of having a WordPress one, too. WordPress is a blogging tool, sure, but it’s so much more than that. It’s a content management system (CMS), and that’s why you need to be using it.

The CMS functions that WordPress offers give you a single dashboard that allows you to create, organize, publish, distribute, and engage your Kings all from one single platform. Now some of you may be thinking, “So does YouTube or Facebook.” Yes, they do. However when you add WordPress to your plan, you get a system that will “talk” to and engage not only Facebook and You-Tube, but also Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, and dozens of other sites at the same time (see Figure 7-1). Now this is what WordPress can do as a content management system.

With WordPress, you’ll be able to host and launch not only your words but also your photos, videos, slide shows, audio files, and everything else you want to share. WordPress makes it very simple with an overwhelming number of plug-ins—more than 25,700 the last time I checked—created by other members of the WordPress community and available for everyone to share. Plug-ins are software adaptations that add functionality to your blog you’d otherwise need impressive software skills to do yourself.

That’s another great thing about WordPress. It’s an open source tool, which means two things. One is that software developers are free to make changes, which, of course, doesn’t have anything to do with us. More importantly, the open source nature of WordPress means you are free to use it without charge for whatever you want to accomplish with your blog. It’s pretty tough to beat free.

Figure 7-1

You Mean Free? As In, It Won’t Cost Me Anything?

Well, no, not exactly. Although you’ll be able to use WordPress for free, and that’s huge, you’ll still need to register with a host site to get a domain name and space on the host’s servers for your blog and other content. There are many such host sites, but I like these two: HostGator and Bluehost. You won’t need the most expensive option, but even those options are reasonable. You can expect to pay from about $5 to $15 per month. The difference in the prices reflect options, such as toll-free customer support. Once you sign up, the software for the host will simply download and install with a single click.

It Is Simple to Begin

You’ll be happy to know that getting your WordPress blog up and running is as simple as clicking your mouse and keyboarding. Plus, you’ll find that WordPress offers almost endless customization options. I’m not going to try to make you an expert in creating and maintaining an amazing WordPress blog. You do not need to be the Michael Phelps of the blog world. I’m not even going to walk you through the process. It’s so simple that you already have all the experience and technological savvy you’re going to need to do that. If you need more guidance, you can find it on the WordPress site, or you search on YouTube for some great tutorials that will actually walk you through the process. But, trust me, the best thing to do is just get on the site and start playing around with it. You’ll see how easy the whole thing is. Instead, I’m going to help you set up your blog with the most useful tools I know, and that means plug-ins.

OKAY, BUT WHAT SHOULD I WRITE?

When we decide to add social marketing to our businesses we need that to mean something. As you know, I am not really interested in making friends really, nor am I interested in having followers. No, I am most interested in making money. My goal with my blog—as yours should also be—is to get the King Consumer to buy. We want those who do already buy to buy more frequently, more consistently, and with bigger cart values on each shopping trip.

So others may talk to you about blogging and keywords and relevancy for SEO and blah, blah, blah … I want to talk about showing you the money! That is what we are here for and that is the difference between social marketing and social commerce, right? Cool, baby!

You should have an idea of what types of information your Kings are searching for, now that you’ve been busy listening to them and paying attention to what they’re saying all over the web. You probably also have a list of ideas you gathered from your Google Alerts that you set up from Chapter 4. You did set them up, right? Of course, I thought so. So now I’m going to make it easy by giving you some guidance about where you can begin. Then I’ll share a few examples of how I’ve used my blog with good results. Again, we’re not interested in winning any blogging awards, so don’t be intimidated by that blank page staring at you.

How Often Should I Write?

When people ask me how often they should write for their blog, I always say consistency and quality matter more than frequency. So, let’s look at this. If what you can produce is one blog posting a week, but it’s a good one and you can keep blogging every single week, then that’s what you should do. If you can and want to do more, that’s fine, as long as you can sustain it. You will ultimately “train” the people who follow your blog to expect a new posting as often as you provide one. Just be sure that what you write is very relevant to your audience. That is far more important that the frequency.

I usually sit down once a month and create all the content I plan to use in the month ahead. My thought is that I like to do fifteen to twenty-five postings a month. In between my written blog posts, I like to sprinkle in some other things I find and think I’d like to share, such as videos, photos, links, and other content. You can even let some of your staff write postings, if they are inclined and able. Just be sure to create a system you can sustain, and you’ll be fine.

If You Need Help, Admit It

I had hoped my first blog would generate more traffic for my website. This was my objective when I decided to start writing. I wrote a few dozen posts and sat back to wait and see what would happen. There was only so much I could think up that would be interesting to the King Consumers who came to look at my products, a mix of hip-hop jewelry, hats, shoelaces, and flags. Well, with a couple dozen posts under my belt, I noticed very little traffic coming from the blog and almost none coming from the blog to my web store. Clearly, something wasn’t working the way I’d expected it would.

But, like you, I had a clear idea of who my Kings were. They were young, ranging in age from fifteen to twenty-nine. They liked hip-hop music and were into basketball. They also loved everything to do with celebrities in the music world, sports, and Hollywood. Perez Hilton’s gossipy website was blowing up, and his celebrity gossip blog was getting lots of press. He was turning into a really big deal. That got me thinking about my own Kings. They love celebrity gossip! This revelation was frustrating, because now I wanted a celebrity gossip site geared toward an urban hip-hop crowd that was way outside my own demographic group. I was not up to speed on what or even who was trendy in that particular audience.

So I put an ad on Craigslist for a blog writer. I said this person had to love urban hip-hop and know who was hot in music and sports. I ended up hiring a twenty-four-year-old who showed she could provide the skills we needed. I paid her $50 a week. Her job was simply to write celebrity gossip stories of about three- to five hundred words, five to seven times a week. I did not give a crap about keywords or putting my jewelry in the blog posts or anything like that. All I wanted was content that was relevant to my audience of possible King Consumers. This was the top of the sales funnel! She was great at it. In the second week, her stories were already generating ten times the traffic my dumb, boring posts were. I clearly was not the right man for this particular job.

“Sell” Yourself Some Ad Space!

Now, everyone who has a popular blog—celebrity gossip or not— makes money selling ad space on their sites. You know those ads are just all over the place, and no one who uses the Internet expects anything different. The space is valuable real estate. I had a dilemma when it came to online advertising for my business at the time. My product mix just could not support the cost of paid online ads. I sold items costing less than $10, and many cost less than $5. Even at $0.05 a click on Google AdWords, it was too expensive to get enough customers to justify spending the money. Of course, my blog was the answer.

Once my new celebrity blog began generating traffic, I simply put my own ads into those spaces on my blog where everyone expects to see ads. Yep, you get the picture? All the banner ads were ours. All the underlined links went to our company, and all the ads top and bottom on the blog posts were for us, too. So the blog was not at all about our business or products, but we created blog content to function as bait to get consumers in our target demographic to read it and see our ads. And by getting the relevant content to our chosen King Consumers we got lots and lots of traffic. This is content in context, and you already know that means money.

It was much cheaper to pay our freelance writer $250 a month to make content we could use to place our ads for lead generation than it would have been to buy ads on someone else’s site. This technique was freaking brilliant! I was floored with how well it worked. The conversion rate of this blog was higher than anything we ever got with paid ads. And it really cost us a fraction of a penny to get leads. In just six weeks, the blog was getting more than eleven thousand hits a month. Of that crowd, 9 percent were clicking on the ads, and of that group 11 to 12 percent became new buyers. That’s money!

So if you do that math—and trust me, I did—11,000 readers brought in 990 clicks and 109 of those people clicking made a purchase. Our average cart size was $14 at the time, so that was generating $1,526 from basically $250 worth of paid blog posts. The cool thing was that every week the traffic was getting better!

We moved along happy and healthy for about four months. That’s just about the time I learned the lesson I shared with you earlier about WordPress.org versus WordPress.com. Suddenly, I got a call from my blog writer that she couldn’t log into our blog. When I went to investigate, I learned all of our activity on our blog had actually violated the terms by which I could use WordPress.com. I tell you this, just so you know, so many of my lessons were learned this hard way, and not just by hanging out in the backyard pool!

Bet You Can’t Stop at Just One

Once you start to see the kind of results that are possible through your blog, I’m willing to bet you won’t be able to stop at just one. I know I couldn’t. Once I started selling black hair products, we created a blog about black hair and fashion. When I sold athletic gear, we started a sports fan blog. Blogs gave us a way to have multiple streams of traffic coming to us from content that was so simple to write, I could have hired a clever high school student to do it. Wait a minute … I did hire clever high school students for some of these projects. We’re only blogging for dollars, and the more relevant content I can scatter from my dandelion puff, the more seeds of commerce I can plant all over the world of social media. That’s what makes all this social commerce, baby! It’s all about the money.

SUMO LESSON

Because I had already discovered so much success from using my blog to generate traffic and sales, I was ready when a great opportunity came along during the Super Bowl of 2012. My mind is always thinking about finding the right context for the content my Kings will want. It’s habit now. When I saw Madonna fall during her performance at the half-time show that year, I knew I was golden. I was recording the Super Bowl, and so I captured that fall. I posted it on a blog, and it got over three thousand hits in just two hours! This little slip got me the best traffic I’ve ever had from any blog posting. The recording itself was not that important, but it generated a lot of traffic, and some of that traffic came to our website to shop. So, that is a simple and clear look at how you can snare your Kings by placing their high-interest content in the right context for them to enjoy so they will then take action by shopping with you.