This is the fourth (and final!) part of a series on rocking your audience at whatever stage you’re at. As we go through each stage, I’d love to discuss it like crazy and do some q&a before moving on to the next one. So got comments? Leave ‘em. I’ll be adding everyone who participates to the Twitter list so that we can keep up with each other.

Eventually, you’re going to get to the point where the demands on your time are extravagant. You will have to make decisions about how you can feasibly interact with the people who make up your audience. We’ve talked about this. You know it’s coming. (Hooray…happy dance!)

At this point, some of the people in your audience have a new need. The need to spend time with you. Wow. That sounds all self-important, doesn’t it? I’ll give you a chance to shake it off.

Paying for access: Why it’s not as snobbity as it sounds

We’ve talked about how you’ve got the corner on you. There is nothing like you available anywhere else. You are just as awesome as Oprah. Or Brad Pitt. Or anyone. You’ve got a unique rockstar-ness about you that has always been there…it’s just that other people are now discovering it. And I bet there are (or will be) people in your audience who would love the chance to hang out with you on a regular basis. And not just because you’re so awesome. But because you’ve got something going on, and you’ve got the ability to fuel their future growth.

Before I stomp on too many toes here (sorry toes!), I’m not suggesting that you stop talking to people who aren’t paying you. It’s just that you have the option of offering a clear way for people to get in your front row — by paying for it. It becomes a very effective red velvet rope.

So…what does that look like, exactly?

That is completely up to you. Everything’s so experimental online…we’re taking things that once were only available face-to-face and turning them into a plate of you-can-have-it-anywhere online delight. Everything old is new again! Seriously!

To get your idea fires stoked, here are some examples of how people have done this (and are doing this) successfully.

• Havi’s Kitchen Table: I’ve never been a part of Havi’s sandwich-eating bunch (there must be sandwiches, right?), but a few of my clients and friends have, and they tell me it is completely awesome. Apparently they all sit around eating sandwiches and work on their stucknesses. Delight!
• Naomi’s Speakeasy: I have been a card-carrying member of the Speakeasy, and I got so much out of it. It’s not so much about access to Naomi as it is about access to some of the best teleclasses I’ve ever been a part of. The Q&A alone is hot.
• Jen’s Comfort Cafe: I haven’t joined Jen’s cafe (yet), but doesn’t it feel like you’re settling into a hot bath just reading about it? Ahhh. Nice.

I’ve been personally tapping my toes waiting for people outside that sphere to start offering personal, get-on-my-front-row paid access options, but I haven’t seen a whole lot of it yet. Maybe because while it completely rocks, it can also scare the crap out you. (Oh my GOSH…these people are paying for awesome! Pressure!!!) What do you think?

P.S. This is the last of the peanut series. (Boo!) But I’ve been working up a new series that is getting me in-my-bones excited. Coming reeeeeal soon. Whee!

This is the third part of a series on rocking your audience at whatever stage you’re at. As we go through each stage, I’d love to discuss it like crazy and do some q&a before moving on to the next one. So got comments? Leave ‘em. I’ll be adding everyone who participates to the Twitter list so that we can keep up with each other.

I have never actually seen a peanut tree. [Update: This is probably because they do not exist! Google #fail.] But in my head, I imagine it growing, growing. And then the time for harvest comes, and the peanuts are falling all over the place. Actually, it’s raining peanuts. Your neighbor is screaming at you to get them off her lawn (or maybe it’s just my whacko neighbor, but that’s a story for another day).

Let’s imagine that those peanuts are your community. The ones who built your blog into a poppin’ place to be. The ones who bought your products when you thought no one would. The ones who said exactly the thing you needed to hear when you were convinced that you were the suckiest [whatever your job is] on the planet.

You literally prayed for peanuts for months, years even. And now you have them. (Some are even growing into little trees and are sharing their harvest with you…fun!) You have a couple of options.

Option 1: Walk the red carpet

Smile. Wave. Have red velvet ropes surrounding you so that people can’t get too close. Of course, the right people can get close. The ones with all of the fame and fortune. The ones who are useful to you in some way.

Ugh. I know we would never ever do this intentionally. But ask the guy whose last 5 @ replies on twitter you haven’t responded to. Ask the girl who emailed you twice to tell you how much you rocked her world with that thing you did. Those people would probably put you in the category of “individuals who obviously don’t care that I exist”. You’re a rockstar, all right. And you’ve got the elusiveness to prove it.

Option 2: Shake hands with everyone if it kills you

You can choose to have a mission. You will answer every tweet. Every email. Every phone call and facebook tag. You can hire a VA (or two) to help you with the massive amount of communication that is happening. You can choose to be a paragon of inclusiveness…at a cost. Huzzah for inclusivity!

Huzzah for exhaustion and trying to do the impossible! Oh wait. That’s not a huzzah. That’s a big boo. So what’s a bonafide social web-lovin’ rockstar to do?

Option 3: Dive into the mosh pit

There’s a certain amount of trust involved when you jump into a mosh pit. A certain amount of putting yourself out there in full. You’re not engaging with everyone, but you’re engaging with the people who have taken the effort to put themselves on your front row. You take the effort with the people who are genuinely taking the effort with you.

You might not answer every form of communication known to man (hello…voicemail plain sucks), but you have your favorite ways of keeping in touch on an individual basis (DMs, anyone?). If you set those expectations up ahead of time, you’re much less likely to make people feel thisbig.

Gwen Bell is a perfect example of someone who nails the community thing. There’s a good reason I talk this woman up a storm. She’s smart. She’s insightful. And despite her celebrity status, she is one of the most grounded people I’ve ever met. You know those super-laser goggles everyone has that can tell how “important” a person is? I don’t think she has them. She makes up her own rules about who is worth listening to. She’s an empty cup. I asked her how she keeps up with the high demands on her time, and she said:

First: check in with yourself frequently. Ask: how is my energy? Choose to respond to inbox x y or z based on that.

If high energy. Spend it on creation, new endeavors & open loops. Action items. If low. Spend it approving comments, reading blogs, or go do something non-tech.

Also. As you “get embiggened” trust it doesn’t always have to be public. Know when to DM, shift to email, bring it closer to the heart.

(By the way, Gwen is involved in a new online project called The Mindfulist — daily prompts on mindfulness. I’m getting involved on my personal blog. I’m predicting a movement here, people.)

A couple more ideas to mull over: (and I’m certainly open to new ones in the comments…I’ve definitely got a lot to learn in this area)

• Twitter lists – I am a HUGE fan of Twitter lists. I have both public and private lists to keep track of more than people who tweet great stuff. I keep track of people who comment regularly on the blog. People who I want to get to know better. I make sure to take a special interest to the people who are interested in me. If I’ve got to choose who I’m going to spend my time with, I’ll choose people who are feelin’ the mutual love.
• Highrise (or another relationship management system) – “Relationship management” is the worst term I have ever heard. Can someone please change it? But they’re actually really cool. I can forward encouraging emails to Highrise, and it keeps track of it for me. It’ll show me people I haven’t talked to in a month. It helps me to remember details about people that I don’t want to forget. (It can also allow you to be extremely anal about information-collecting, but don’t give up on it for that reason alone.) Highrise is really useful for helping me to keep my relationships alive and well.
• Email policy – Email is incredibly invasive because it’s so easy to send. I can send it from anywhere. I can send it anonymously. If I’m feeling extra-spicy, I can send emails to thousands of people at once. You don’t have to answer all of your emails. Really, you don’t. But if you choose to go that route, let people know about it. And give them some other way to contact you that you’re more comfortable with. (“If you really want to get in touch with me, write a blog post about Alaskan elephants! Then DM me the link, along with your email address. I’ll be sure to respond right away!”) Just kidding…about the elephants.
• Office hours – Maybe you’re on Skype every other Wednesday from 1 to 3 for an open chat with anyone who wants to drop by. A no-holds-barred, “I’ll talk to anyone” session. I mean, wouldn’t it be cool if someone you adored did this? Like…Oprah. What if Oprah skyped on Wednesdays? Just sayin’. I would totally go.

I don’t think this “figuring out how to stay in community with everyone” is purely relegated to the internet-famous, but the issue is certainly a bigger deal the more well-known you become. Do you have any systems in place for keeping connected to your community? Pigeons, maybe?

This is the first part of a series on rocking your audience at whatever stage you’re at. As we go through each stage, I’d love to discuss it like crazy and do some q&a before moving on to the next one. So got comments? Leave ‘em. I’ll be adding everyone who participates to the Twitter list so that we can keep up with each other.

Everyone wants a community to be built right into their website. Because what’s a stage without an audience? Community = more content and more usefulness to your users. It also means credibility, which leads to more sales and/or opportunities to work with really cool people. Community also makes your site stickier so that your audience will grow even faster. In a nutshell, yay community!

But building a community takes a lot of work. And t-i-m-e. It doesn’t hurt to have a good dose of luck thrown in either.

We all want this growth to happen super-fast. Some of us don’t have the time, money, or patience to burn while we wait for our audience to gather strength. But every healthy site goes through growth stages of community, so we might as well be prepared for them.

The Peanut Stage: My site looks more like a ghost town than a party

If your site is strategically well-developed, it will only be a matter of time before this stage is a thing of the past. But while you’re in it, it seems like forever. When will people start leaving comments? When will I get past 25 subscribers? Le sigh.

Stuff to do while you’re in this stage

• Make the most of the credibility that you do have. While you may not have a force of people proving to others that you are awesome, you ARE awesome. Let that awesomeness shine through your amazing content, packages, and samples of work that you’ve done in the past. (Haven’t done any work yet? Kelly Parkinson’s got some ideas for rocking out case studies when you don’t have results yet.)

  Show your work to its best advantage. Write stuff that doesn’t need others vouching for it for people to realize that it’s golden. Stick to your publishing schedule. In other words, do your thang as if 10,000 people were watching.

• Offer your services. Surely you can do something for people, even if your long-term goal is to sell products. You need lots of bodies in the door before your products start to sell enough to support you, your family, and your three dogs. You need a much smaller audience to successfully make a living selling your services.
• Tweet it up. Even if you’re a local business and people in your scene haven’t caught onto Twitter yet, start now. You’ve got the time after all. And when you’re way too busy to worry about things like getting followers, you’ll thank your savvy self.

  Even if you’re not set up to offer products or services to the people on Twitter, their comments and sharing of your amazing stuff will be invaluable for your credibility and future reach. I do not care what industry you are in. Social proof is a powerful thing. Much of the time, it is the thing that makes the difference.

• If you ever plan on writing a book or developing products, start now. Once you’ve amassed your audience, it will be harder and harder to find time to work on long-term, non-urgent goals. Not just setting them, but putting the practical legwork in to reach them. Work a little on these goals each day in your gallons of free time.

What NOT to do in this stage

• Don’t advertise yourself as part of the lonely hearts club. If no one comments, stop mentioning the fact. It’s quite likely that people won’t even be looking at your comment numbers if you aren’t constantly saying “Please, PLEASE comment so that I don’t look like such a loser!” Or “To all of my wonderful readers (who, at last count, totaled 3)”. Self-deprecatingly funny, sure. But not worth mentioning. (Don’t ask me how I know this.)
• Don’t build a forum or social-networking functionality. Forums and social networking features work best when they naturally extend from the desires and goals of a thriving community. If you build it when your community is small, it will earn the reputation of sucking before it even has a chance to thrive.
• Don’t do giveaways or contests. Yes, the point of a giveaway is to attract more readers. But you need at least an inkling of a community before a giveaway or contest will be successful. The last thing you want to do is offer up a fantastic prize and only receive 10 entries. Don’t do this to yourself unless some A-list blogger has written a pact in blood to promote your contest for you.
• Don’t despair. If your goal is to work for yourself full time, you probably need less of an audience than you think. As I mentioned before, service-based businesses do not need an audience of thousands to thrive. If you’re selling products, start brainstorming how you could supplement them with a service until you’ve got a large enough audience to support your e-commerce endeavors.

If you’re in the peanut stage (or have…ahem…a “friend” who is), what are you struggling with right now? If you’re past that stage, what helped you get where you are? Questions? Comments? Pie? (Mmm…pie.)

…as opposed to people who suck the living soul right out of your body. I spent about an hour yesterday thanking God that I don’t have to deal with bad clients like this anymore. It sparked a huge amount of gratitude that I work with such amazing people.

If you are still dealing with difficult clients, let me just take a minute to say that I am so sorry. Seriously. It’s easy for some people. They let it roll right off their back. My best friend’s from Jersey, and that kind of stuff doesn’t phase her. She just yells at them in Portugese and it’s all good.

But if you’re anything like me, you experience this awful, gut-wrenching feeling when someone is using you as their personal dart board. Whether they’re natural complainers, cynical know-it-alls, whiners, nit-pickers, or power-trippers, it all sucks. Bad customers eat away at the fabric of what you’re trying to build, and you do not have to work with them.

The makings of a bad client

Bad clients are usually just people who don’t know or trust you. They don’t trust your competence or they don’t trust your integrity. Maybe they don’t trust that you know their vision. Or they don’t trust you to care more about them than your own personal ego or agenda.

Building in the much-needed trust factor

To a great degree, establishing trust is on your shoulders…not theirs. You’ve got to earn it. Here are a few ways you can start:

• Price your services right. People believe that they get what they pay for. If you’re cheap, they’re going to think there’s a reason for it. And they’ll unwittingly work hard to justify that belief.
• Don’t be a robot. If you’re just a person behind a faceless corporation, you’re giving yourself permission to be treated like crap. Tell your story so that potential clients know there are real people behind your organization.
• Take a stance. Don’t be afraid to take sides on what’s happening in your field. What are you for and what are you against? When you take sides, you band yourself with like-minded people who will back you up in any situation.
• Share your knowledge. Find a way to share your stance in a way that directly benefits your clients or customers (as opposed to sharing it to benefit your colleagues — there’s a difference). You’ll attract people who appreciate your particular viewpoint and who are excited about the possibilities working with you will bring.
• Don’t be pitching yourself into a hole. Be honest about your strengths, but stop with the hard-sell stuff. Even if you’re “slipping it in” in a way that feels unnatural, don’t do it. The intelligent people that you want to work with spot that stuff a mile away.
• Uncover your successes. Make sure it’s abundantly clear that you are a regular winner at what you do. Don’t assume that people can tell. Spell it out. Show that you’re active and involved and solving problems.

When you’ve done your part

After you’ve done everything you can do, sometimes you’ll still get a gut-check about someone who wants to work with you. There are people who simply mistrust everyone around them. There’s not much you can do for this type of client except to repel them. Here are some things to try:

• Don’t twist their arm. If someone gives you a list of reasons why they don’t want to hire you, then just let them walk away. You don’t want their doubts to be the foundation for your work together.
• Use your writing as a point of entry. If someone clearly has not read anything you’ve written, have them start there first. Until they know your viewpoints and how you work, they are not in a position to trust you.
• Publish your prices. I’ll say it again. And again. And again. Even if your service is very customized, there are elements that you offer to everyone. Price them out so that people get an idea of the cost. It’ll weed out the people who don’t understand your value, and it will give people who can’t afford you (yet) something to shoot for.
• Don’t advertise on Craigslist. I love Craigslist. But that’s the place you go when you want a steal. You don’t want clients whose biggest criteria includes getting the cheapest thing whatsoever. Ironically, they’re usually the most demanding.
• Follow your gut. If something nags at you in your conversation with a potential client or customer, don’t assume it’s just you. Take a time-out and evaluate what is bugging you.

I promise, there is a greener pasture on the other side of your beady-eyed panicky client base. A little trust-building and a little weeding and you’re there.

I got kind of antsy today and made a quick (sort of) video for you guys. (Yay! Another person with a webcam!)

Also. I blame Pam Slim for the “I’m sitting in my room right now” brand of quality. She’s lowered the bar a couple of notches (and I love her for it).

One more note: for every time I say “face of the company”, mentally replace it with “face of the RELATIONSHIP side of the company”. Because that’s what I meant in my head. Quality, folks!

Man, I’d love to have six billion readers. That would be awesome. I could wake up in the morning, crank out awesomeness, and even if only one hundredth of the people saw it, I’d make millions of dollars while simultaneously inhaling my morning bagel.

I don’t have six billion readers. I don’t have the time to invest in getting six billion readers for one thing. And my business isn’t set up to handle six billion people walking in the door. And I just bet…neither is yours.

Scattering bagels in the wind

When you have a huge readership, all you do is scatter your bagels in the wind. People catch them, they eat them. Maybe you get to crowd-surf for a while (as long as you keep tossing out your free bagels). People tell their friends, they buy stuff, everybody’s happy.

Most of us do the same thing with a small audience. We throw our bagels into the wind and half of them get eaten by squirrels. We jump into the crowd for some crowd-surfing action and land with a thud. No fun. Then we cry and bemoan the world for not liking us even though we’re just as cool as that Seth Godin guy. Our pride is shaken, and we wonder if we’re ever going to win at this.

Putting those bagels to better use

A large audience requires a wide and shallow approach. You’re banking on numbers and percentages to make your sales. Everyone tells you that this is the best way to be wildly successful. And it definitely is a good way.

But it’s not the only way.

The way to go with a small audience is not wide and shallow; it’s narrow and deep. Narrow and deep means personally delivering your bagels instead of throwing handfuls of them out the window. It means keeping track of the people who are in your audience. Knowing their names, their phone numbers, what they take in their coffee. Don’t just half-recognize the people in your audience, and don’t be the one that they half-recognize.

Narrow and deep doesn’t work unless it’s deep

A lot of people theoretically do this. They say “Don’t worry about your numbers. The quality of your relationships is what’s important.” But what does that mean? Are your relationships quality, or do you merely have a small number of them?

As a service provider, I keep fun facts about my clients in a little spreadsheet. When I met them, how I met them, what they like to do in their spare time, when I talked to them last. It helps me make sure I keep in touch with the people who I know I like and trust.

After a while, I started doing this on a larger scale. People that leave comments on my blog, people who I’m in cahoots with on various projects, people who I talk to on Twitter…I just filed them away along with info to help me remember how I know them. It eventually got out of control, so I recently moved to a fancy-schmancy system to help me to do it better. It’s got some limitations in that I actually have to think about using it (the best solutions integrate seamlessly with your current workflow, I’ve found), but it’s 10,000 miles ahead of my old spreadsheet method.

Systems help when your brain is tied in knots

Maybe you’ve got one of those magic brains that remember people’s birthdays and stuff. I DEFINITELY do not. If you don’t either, a spreadsheet or some kind of information-tracker will help. Things that are especially important to keep up with: the date that you last contacted the person (so you don’t let your relationship starve), and details about what that person is doing in their personal life and in business (so that you can help them out when the opportunity arises).

Strategic? Yeah, sure. My brain cannot hold all of that information, and I like to be able to pull up a list of people I like who I haven’t talked to in a month. When I can’t take on a job, I can quickly pull up a list of people who might be perfect for it. If I need to recommend an illustrator or a photographer or some other incredibly skilled person, I can find them immediately.

At that point, it’s FINALLY not about me. When I know your favorite color and you know mine (it’s green), we’re on our way to having real community. When I know not just that you’re a marketing professional, but that you do origami in your spare time, then we’re onto something.

Sidenote: Yummies!

You might notice my subscribe options have changed. To thank the people who subscribe by email, I’m sending out yummies once or twice a month. I won’t spoil the surprise but trust me…they’re delicious. If you subscribe by feed reader, you can sign up to get the yummies without the site updates. Hurrah!

A couple of weeks ago, I attempted to reverse-engineer Havi Brooks’ blog to see how she built such an incredible community in about a year. And she responded with some really eye-opening stuff that answered a lot of my questions.

I have a feeling I’m going to look back on that post later as a Moment When Everything Changed. (I have a couple of those moments actually, but I’ll save that for later.)

My idea of “being real” — it grew. My willingness to dig into some of the actual stuff that me and everybody else with a website struggles with — that grew, too. cj Madigan and I were talking today about this very thing. This writing about things that everybody thinks but nobody says. My homegirl Danielle LaPorte would call it truth. I call it scary.

Egads…I wrote that?!

After that post, I made a commitment to write about what’s really going on. Not just about theory or “best practices”, but about the real ins-and-outs and ups-and-downs of having an online enterprise. And to do that…guess what? I have to write about what I know. Me. My business. My struggles and victories. I have to admit to the universe that I don’t know everything. Surprise! (I bet you had no clue.)

So I’m being more vulnerable, more open. I’m saying what I really think about what’s going on right now. I’m launching out of my current experience instead of the usual “Once upon a time, I used to struggle with fill in the blank. But now, I’m really quite perfect. And I’m here to help you.”

The not-so-good part (You know. In case you wanted to try the same thing.)

I’ll just warn you — in the past couple of weeks, I have squirmed around in my chair, just waiting for someone to point out all of my flaws. I know. Not much faith in humanity and all. But I can certainly see them, and now everyone else can, too.

For example, I still can’t believe I actually wrote about an instrument that would show invisible horns on potential clients who are social media-hopeless. Crap! What kind of awful person am I? Just because some people have a vastly long learning curve doesn’t mean that they’re the devil! (But you know that’s not what I meant, right?) And after I push “Publish” on this post, I’ll probably writhe in anguish until somebody reassures me that they’re not going to abandon me for lost.

The so-good-it-completely-outweighs-everything-else part

This week, I got to help somebody start to break away from their soul-sucking job. I got to reassure them that yes, this online thing really can be done. You don’t have to be internet-famous to have a really, really successful online business doing what sets you on fire. Heck, you don’t even have to be good at getting comments (though Mark over at Heart of Business has really great advice for that.)

I got to connect with super bright, super talented people. I’ve had opportunities to take on new projects and collaborate with people I admire and respect. I got to hear one of my clients tell me that I’m their secret weapon. (Yeah…that was the best thing right there.)

I swear, this correlation between risk and reward is SO powerful. Small risk, small reward. Big risk, big reward. It certainly makes you wonder if the “safe” path needs to be re-named.

Update: Hooray! No more wondering. Havi spills about her “overnight” success.

The original title of this post was “be community-minded” instead of “rebuild your ghost town.” And while putting together a list of all of these things that “supposedly” work to build community, I kept feeling that twinge of Well, yes…these things are supposed to work. But actually, they haven’t worked for me. I suck at “building community”…whatever that means. So I’m totally faking this. And if anything, I’m no faker. So I just stopped writing.

Defining “community”

Erck…community. Call it a tribe, call it whatever you want, but it quickly becomes a tired social media cliche. I get bored instantly when I see the word. But what it represents…ahh…it’s pretty much the holy grail of everything online and in business. True community is a euphoric state of being that barely anyone attains, and once they do attain it, it often becomes so much to MAINtain that they trade it for crowd-surfing.

Defining what a community looks like is a bit trickier. For me, it would be interaction at every level. Giving and receiving, learning and teaching, joining forces to create positive change. It’s actively listening and responding and sharing and growing.

Not getting it yet? Okay then…it’s comments, baby.

Yeah. Comments. I said it. It feels good to be heard. But beyond that bit of narcissism, it provides a level of credibility that beats every other form — proof that your work is changing people’s lives. Plain and simple, it’s good for business. And it’s something that just can’t be bought.

When what we’ve been told isn’t cutting it

Writing your BEST content, selling your soul on facebook, tweeting your pants off. Asking questions, being different, showing that you’re successful. We’ve heard it all, right? And we’re doing it. Our numbers are great. We’re barraged with emails asking for favors. People look up to us and seek our advice and hire us because yeah…we do awesome work. But our communities are still struggling. And that’s downright embarrassing.

But it takes time! Consistency! Tireless self-promotion!

Errmm…no. It actually doesn’t. Havi Brooks is one of my favorite examples. She’s been writing her amazing blog for what…a year? And she’s so not a social media whore. And you know what? I have no idea how she does it.

Honestly, I have a feeling it just…sort of happened while she was being her awesome self. Sure, she’s strategic about a lot of things. Just like we all are. And maybe she does have a secret ninja formula. I have no idea, and I won’t try to niggle her or the already-struggling Stu into sharing it with me when I should really just niggle my way to her kitchen table if it ever becomes open again.

A not-really-a-case-study case study

Since tried-and-true “techniques” for building community often end up being a huge failure, I’m going to do what I do best: analyze. I’m going to look over Havi’s blog for the past year and try to see patterns. I have no idea how it’s going to turn out. Maybe I’ll be just as bewildered as I am now. And dear Lord, I hope Havi doesn’t shoot me for going back so far in her archives and…umm…studying it (I shudder to think of what I wrote a year ago). But here we go.

• May 9th, 2007: Havi writes an intelligent, useful post about the number one thing that keeps people from changing. She introduces a technique of the month. She mentions Philip Marlowe, and she’s so smart. I don’t quite understand what she’s saying, but she’s so, so smart. No comments yet. (So clearly, she started from scratch.) But wait…this was two years ago! Must have been an old post from an old (not successful?) blog. I’m pretty sure her current blog has only been active for a year.
• July 17, 2007: First comment! Of course, it was written like a year and a half later, so it doesn’t really count. Up until now, Havi’s been writing long, amazingly intelligent posts, still which I don’t understand all too well (but hey…I just heard about mindfulness for the first time last week so be patient with me). It looks like Havi has a lot of really practical, “do this now” type stuff. Hey…that’s what I do, too! But still…the comments are written in December 2008 — nearly a year and a half later. If she did have comments on these posts, and if it was on an old blog, she obviously didn’t carry them over. The posts are written sort of sporadically…sometimes several in a week. Sometimes skipping weeks. (Hey, that sounds familiar, too.)
• November 1, 2007: I’m starting to get the feeling that these articles weren’t on an old blog — they were in a newsletter. So of course there are no comments. Maybe I should just skip forward to the end of 2008…that seems to be when all the comments started coming. But I don’t even want to skip — Havi wrote some amazing stuff in these early posts. A different style than she has now, but extremely, incredibly useful and enlightening. (Maybe “useful” isn’t the magic potion that we thought it was?)
• June 16, 2008: Havi has a blog! And comments! Fully 8 comments from people who apparently got her newsletter before and adored her. The rest were written a little later. And you know what? She actually made it a point in the post to reveal that she had no comments. And then she invited the comments. And then they came. Weird.
• June 17, 2008: Wow…Naomi and Havi go way back. And Havi dropped the bullet points and wrote a really long post (which “experts” say not to do), and she has several comments from real people. I totally recognize her voice now. It’s like as soon as she dropped the newsletter and became “blog”, there she was. All real and wonderful.
• June 19, 2008: Havi already has a Twitter stalker burglar! Man, maybe this wasn’t a normal blog launch. That must have been some newsletter.
• July 2, 2008 – Nathan Bowers welcomes Havi to being internet famous. Okay, really now. She’s not normal. She’s had the blog for what…two weeks? And here’s me thinking that nobody can be successful without a blog. And then she starts one after she was already pretty darn successful. Getting a decent 4 to 8 comments a post at this point. But they’re not just random comments. They are real, I-want-to-be-on-any-team-you’re-on comments. They are well-thought out. They expand the conversation.
• July 16, 2008 – Men With Pens gave Havi some really good website advice. Like making it easier for people to comment by making the “Leave a Comment” link clearer. Interesting. Wonder if it will make a difference. Also, Havi mentions that she hates it when people ask for comments. So she doesn’t ask for them. I like that.
• July 23, 2008 – Havi is still working on her blog. The folks at Men With Pens advised her to change some of her wording. So she asks for help. And guess what? 32 comments. (Don’t you hate it when you ask for something and you get cricket chirps?) Thing I’ve noticed: asking for help is different from asking for comments. Could it be a clue?
• August 8, 2008: The Friday Check-In is born. Except it’s called the Friday Round-up. Man, I would love to do this, but I’m afraid it would suck. And one thing I promised myself was to never fill up inboxes or feed readers with things that suck. Not even because I don’t want to suck. But because wouldn’t it be a much more awesome place if all of the blogs we subscribed to only posted stuff that was worth reading?
• November 4, 2008: Remembering how much I loved the blogging therapy series. Oh wait…this one’s about perfectionism. And I just wrote how I wanted everything I write to be awesome and not suck. I didn’t plan this, really. Another clue? Also, in the last couple of months, Havi’s consistently had 10-20 comments or more on nearly every post.
• February 9, 2009: At this point when every post has 20-30 comments, I’m thinking…
  

  “Well, Havi writes about life and things that everybody deals with. It’s easy to comment on that. I write about websites. Which is good, but only invites the ‘Thanks for the tip’ kind of comment. Not that I don’t like those comments…I do. But it’s not conversation. I guess I’m just screwed.”

  But I don’t really like making excuses, and I know there’s something that I’m missing here.

• May 4, 2009: Okay, I am just so jealous of Havi Brooks. She has a pirate crew. And even though she was scared to do it, she did it. And that frees her up to be creative and do better work and grow, grow, grow. When I’ve been screaming to myself, “Shrink! Shrink! Shrink! This growing stuff is not worth all the money in the world!” And all because I’m scared of bringing more people onto my ship.
• June 11, 2008: There she goes answering my question. About hiring people. But what about being scared to death of being responsible for someone else’s livelihood? I already take care of two small people and one big one. I already pay nearly all of the bills all while tackling a mountain of debt and refusing to get into more debt and trying to get my house ready to sell (because yes, we may be moving soon).

  Umm…okay. See what she did there? Havi’s so good at building community that I am having a conversation about something totally irrelevant to the point of this analytical experience.

• July 1, 2009: That’s today. And I just love that her Wednesday thing is back.

What we’ve learned

Well, I don’t know what you got out of all of that, but here’s what I got:

• Being an expert isn’t enough. And writing well isn’t enough. Somehow, you’ve got to live your life out loud…and bring it all back to the point of what you do. Yes, you’ve got to be useful. And you’ve got to write your best stuff. But your real life has to come through that somehow.
• Rituals are good. I don’t know why, but they are.
• Consistency is necessary. I still haven’t figured out if it’s critical to write more than once a week. But I think it probably is. Dang it. It all comes back to the pirate crew, seriously. (So jealous!)

My list isn’t finished yet. I’m still processing all of this…this intangible stuff. Trying to make it tangible. Because we don’t need a zillion ghost towns all over the internet. Community is beautiful.

Web design is not primarily about looking good. It’s about appealing to the emotions of the people you want to do business with. It’s letting them know that yes, you get them, and that you have something that they need…and that they can’t get anywhere else.

Think with me for a minute about who visits your website right now. Picture them in your mind. Give them a height, hair color, weight, name…be as specific as you can be. (If you don’t have a website, imagine who would be visiting it if you did.)

Is the picture fuzzy? Could it be anyone from your seventy-year old neighbor to your best friend’s parakeet? Then we need to work on that.

Now tell me who you WANT to be visiting your site. Tell me what kind of clothes they wear and how they like to spend their time. Do they have an accent? Are they a health food nut? Give them a face. Give them a name.

Homework: Take a minute and do a search on flickr for me. Enter in a word or two that describes the basic character of the person who will be visiting your website. A few words to get you going: funky, artistic, athletic, genuine, peaceful, thrifty, professional, driven, laid back. Just enter one or two descriptive words followed by the word “person” or “people”. Make sure you check the Creative Commons box at the bottom of the form is you want to be able to share the images you find on your blog.

Even easier, just click “Explore” and click the “People” tag. As you find images that really speak to you, save them. Post them somewhere where you can see them every day. As you’re writing for your website, write to those people. Here are some of mine:

I like to think that these people are looking up at the building they’re about to rent to launch their Big Dream. Image by bass_nroll.

I love that these people are travelers. Adventurers. World-partakers. Image by Carlo Nicora.

Love this guy’s eccentricity. When I’ve become eccentric, I know that I’ll have arrived. Image by Carlo Nicora.

I have a soft spot for people who are waiting in front of coffee shops. That is me at least twice a week. Image by tanakawho.

I love how she looks so intent. Intention is passion. Image by Michael McCauslin.

These people have tattoos AND babies. Perfect. Image by Malkolm.

My people are happy people. Image by s.o.f.t.

Who are your people? Post and share!

If I’ve managed to convince you that our current success just sort of fell out of the sky and into our laps without any prior failed attempts, you’ve been duped. Of course, we didn’t mean to trick you into believing that we are just amazing human beings, naturally skilled in All Things Online. It just never came up.

But there have been failures. Many, in fact. There was that time that I attempted to sell gourmet food mixes at craft shows. There was the fiasco with the makeup sales. There was the eBook that never got finished. The etsy research that was never complete. My dreams of becoming the next Warren Buffet. But mostly, there were the blogs.

One year in fact, I dedicated an entire twelve months to a blog that eventually gained only 150 subscribers. In a year, that’s pretty sad. I made approximately $32.50 from that blog. At one time I was running three unsuccessful blogs at the exact same time. I was pretty much convinced that I belonged in the cesspool of blogkind. But I guess Thomas Edison really was right — sometimes success requires failure. In my case, it required quite a bit of it.

The good thing is, I owe quite a bit of my current knowledge to all of those failures. Yes, I’ve read the books. I have the education. But down-in-the-trenches know-how only comes from being…yes, that’s right…down in the trenches. Here are the top things I’ve learned from my blog failures.

1. Commenting on other blogs sometimes helps. But most of the time it doesn’t.

   I was going to say that commenting on other blogs never helps. But it has for me once (out of about ten thousand million times), so I can’t say that it never does anything. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t comment on blogs. You should. One, because it’s nice to be involved in other people’s conversations. Two, because when you have something interesting to say, you should say it. But don’t make it your core strategy. On a scale of one to ten, commenting on other blogs ranks about a one in terms of marketing effectiveness.

2. Bribery will only get you so far.

   If you do not have an audience, do not do things that only bloggers with large audiences should do. For example (completely hypothetically, mind you), do not hold a huge blog carnival competition, try and recruit a bunch of sponsors to contribute prizes, choose TEN winners, and work yourself half crazy trying to promote it. Because if you only have 80 subscribers, it’s just going to be stinking hard. And you might end up buying all of the prizes and paying for the monstrous shipping all on your very own. Not that I’ve done that. Ahem.

3. Good design does not a blogger make.

   Here I go shooting myself in the foot again. I SHOULD be saying “Great design will solve all of your problems! Hire a designer! Hire me!” But then you might get your fab new site, get all gung-ho in your writing efforts, and be absolutely astonished at the crickets that can be heard every time you say something.

   The point is, getting an audience is more about having a proven marketing plan than anything else. It means getting your hands deliciously filthy in networking. Doing things that are both EFFECTIVE and will not take thousands of years to implement. Blogging for keeps requires your total commitment, just as any other startup venture.

   Sure, you can run a blog in an hour a day, but that just means that your blog will be a slow grower. If you are one of those people who doesn’t need to have results to keep your motivation going strong, then by all means, do it. But it’s been my experience that most people with that strategy quit before they even have a toehold.

4. Don’t blog about something that doesn’t naturally fit into your life.

   I’m on the computer all of the time. I’m not stuck here. It’s more like I’m magnetized in its general direction. So for me to blog about something like…ummm…all of the local restaurants in Virginia Beach, say…pretty much destines me for failure. Why? Because I’m not AT all of the local restaurants in Virginia Beach. My glamorous life is lived largely online (wow, that sounds sad).

5. Don’t promise anything before you’ve actually written/received/purchased it.

   I was always thinking big with my blogs. Because coming up with ideas is what I DO. It really gets my blood pumping.

   But the next time you’re tempted to tell your readers about your upcoming twenty-part series on how THEY TOO can own a Pomeranian, hold off until you’ve actually written it. You might just realize in part three that there really isn’t that much to say about your topic. Or you might get bored with it and just know that if you have to write another word, you will involuntarily implode. It’s never fun to tell your readers (again) that no, you will not be following through.

I still can’t say that I’m the best blogger of all time. But I CAN tell you that I am purposefully not. Getting a billion subscribers is not my primary goal. Writing good content with no expectations or guilt attached is. So I guess it all depends on how you define success.