In this third and final post of the series, we look at relationship marketing and sum up all valid points

Internet Marketing has always had very little human interaction involved – with everything prewritten, prearranged and published without really truly connecting with the end user. At last, bloggers now have an awesome opportunity to correct this anomaly. We can generate traffic via our blog’s unique content that is best of all free.

If you are a blogger and are not too into social media using Twitter, Facebook and even Youtube, when will it be the right time?

We had the advantage of starting out with personal blogs so majority of us are comfortable with being human online unlike so many internet marketers who are not into social networking.

Somehow, I think Internet Marketing is the last of the Web 1.0 dinosaurs to become extinct. You can count the number of internet marketers who put out free content. They are too few. They only have huge lists they pitch to and do not much thereafter in terms of human relationship building. What better proof of this fact than the competition to bid for traffic using Google Adwords etc?

Internet Marketing is so Methuselah and PPC advertising, while it is effective bears the stamp of “Strictly Business; No Relationship”

A new era has dawned.

Gone are the days of reading an attractive sales page loaded with carefully crafted long sales pitches and testimonials designed to alleviate your doubts and objections until you buy because who you don’t know, you don’t trust – and these guys want to get you to buy at all cost.

Welcome the days when people buy based on the credibility a blogger has built and the resulting trust that readers have in him or her.  Bloggers gladly talk about an area of interest for free. The readers feel as if they know the blogger once they resonate with him.

Besides, the reader has invested time reading the blogger?s posts and free reports. He is also signed up to his mailing list. He’s seen the blogger on different social networking platforms and might even know about his personal life. So, it is only natural to want to buy when such a blogger recommends a product. He does this armed with an arsenal of trust and the blogger gets rewarded for being a real person adding real value to real people.

Relationships are the future. So do testimonials not matter anymore?

Not really, testimonials still do – a lot. It is just that now, by building relationships, your social network gets to give spontaneous testimonials about you to others in their social network naturally and there is nothing plastic or shady about that.

This is the Federal Trade Commission’s biggest marketing tip to discerning bloggers about how to earn from their blogs. Web 1.0 internet marketers on the other hand are either pulling out of the game or reprogramming their minds to fit into the new order.

We bloggers have the advantage of time and relationship building experience. We just need to keep doing things right and incorporate earning money into what we do without being on the wrong side of the law.

One thing is certain. Not all bloggers will take action and only those who do will be able to survive and thrive.

Group Reflection

In rounding up, here is the summary of the Blogger Awareness Series:

1. Invest your time and expertise in building a quality relationship with your blog’s readers and investing in their emotional and intellectual bank accounts by doing the following:

• Adding value for free;
• Leveraging on a mailing list;
• Using social media (networking and bookmarking) to promote your blog;
• Commenting on various blogs;
• Building your personal brand.

2. Develop a relationship with bloggers, within and without your niche. Of course, do a lot of guest posting with them to increase your traffic.

3. Form what Napoleon Hill said Andrew Carnegie did – Form a mastermind group to help each other succeed now and in the future.

4. Earn from your blogs you are not Santa Claus and do it on the right side of the law. Ignorance is not an excuse

In part one of this series, FTC Regulations and Their Impact on Your Blog, we talked about the Federal Trade Commission’s  new rules and the issue of mandatory disclosure. We now continue here.

The second part of the announcement is a more enormous issue, however. It covers Testimonials.

Before the new regulations, people used testimonials to sell products online. There is hardly any regular internet user that hasn’t stumbled upon one at some point in time. Remember the big long sales pages mostly packed with testimonials of how great the product is? This practice is known as Social Proof.

In marketing, social proof gives a product maker an unusual edge over the competition because testimonials from previous users are used to create such proof based on the idea that people most often do what they see others do. It is the fad mentality, the bandwagon effect and as they say, there is safety in numbers. Is there really? Due to the risk-averse nature of most of us humans, when we see other people saying how good a product is, we naturally think the product is good.

Before October 2009, marketers would put up the most unbelievable testimonial only to include a tiny footnote saying “results not typical”.

Now that practice is illegal as you have to state the typical results.

No more lies and that is a good thing as we would only see genuine testimonials with actual proof of stated results. Lots of products will naturally go off the shelf and even remain there forever.

Will sales dwindle? Yes. But only those of products that weren’t supposed to be made in the first place.

The FTC is essentially collapsing the part of the online advertising industry based on falsehood by removing the marketing equipment used for deception. In the long-term, this is a good thing and many internet marketers have given out products once worth thousands of dollars for free.

The business that got a boost as a result of this shock is – you guessed it – legal consultation as many marketers got in touch with their attorneys to find out what it all implies because governments, generally all over are too bureaucratic and inefficient when it comes to making laws understandable.  I think they need a lesson in keeping track of their own laws. There is also a lot of chaos on how the FTC intends to enforce this new law. Red tape sucks.

Is this new development a reason to be jittery?

I read that the FTC ruling generated much concern at the 2009 BlogWorld Expo. Why would that be the case? Could it be that we have been sold overhyped products by most of the so called Gurus all along?

If so, then this is a victory for everyone that buys information products on the internet. At least now we get to buy original value-adding products.

The Massive Opportunity

The FTC is now interested in the blogosphere which means a massive opportunity awaits some bloggers.

First of all I think this is a sign that blogging has finally been given its rightful place in the arena of business, commerce and the media.

This is a huge gift to the discerning blogger. First of all forget testimonials – for now. They are practically useless now unless you can back it up with valid, verifiable facts and figures.

The blogging platform gives you as an individual the opportunity to put yourself forth and prove that you are a leader in whichever market you specialize in.

The blogging platform is a social one. You get involved in a community free of charge and create value by posting your writings. You work at notifying members of the community and gradually, they begin to respond (in comments). By doing this, you involve them in a conversation which you mix your personality with, thereby giving your readership an opportunity to bond with you. You in turn are beginning to grow into an authority figure in your market, but more importantly, a trustworthy friend.

A fact in marketing is that people are much more comfortable with buying at the suggestion of a friend than at that of a salesman.

Enter Blog Marketing – the awesome opportunity FTC has delivered on a platter of the law.

Now, bloggers will want their readers to know them better.  They will want to be liked, respected and trusted by them.

The tactic to use is simple and very straight forward: “Use your blog to add valuable information to people and engage them in conversations, persuade them to fill in their emails and use it to bring them back to your blog regularly.”

A good measure of the value you add may now be how qucikly people subscribe to your mailing list.

The blogger in turn protects his readers by all means because you had to gain their trust. When you recommend anything, it is not purely from a profit perspective, it is also because you truly believe it will benefit them as you now have a deeper understanding of their needs based on your interactions with them.

If any high paying product appears on the radar, that you honestly don?t think would be of value to them, you do simply ignore and do not promote it.

Now more than ever, we bloggers need to inject our personalities into our blog posts which is now our major marketing platform.

Be a real person. The Guru days are over and Internet Marketing has forever taking a human face and turned into Blog Marketing. Create a bond and feel your readers.

There has never been a more exciting or a more scary time in history than now.

A lot of things have changed faster in the last two decades than in all of the 17^th and 18^th centuries combined. How people get and digest their information is evolving quickly. Old Media companies are having a tough time. Old economy businesses are mostly packing up or struggling to survive.

And to narrow things down to our sphere, this is also a time when bloggers have been faced with their biggest challenge and opportunity yet.

The U.S. government has now dabbled into the blogosphere. The most notable being the new FTC (Federal Trade Commission) regulations concerning disclosure. The trade watchdog is revising their guidelines to extend into the blogosphere.

All this has got to mean something irrespective of which ever angle you are viewing the situation from.

It’s better to see it as a time filled with excitement and opportunities though.

I live in Nigeria, West Africa where the government is very different to say the least. Fifty percent of the population doesn’t even pay taxes and there is almost no way to collect those taxes until some major policies are changed. There are no signs of that happening anytime soon.

So in reality FTC rules do not really apply to us in the so called “Third World” or do they?

The answer is simple: yes they do.

The world is a lot smaller than we can imagine now and failure to comply with generally accepted laws and standards because one thinks he is not really affected (thanks to geographic location) might be suicidal online where physical boundaries simply do not exist. So I am also very interested in what’s going on as it very much affects us here too.

The goal of this post is to show why 2010 is going to be a great year for some bloggers and a period of extinction for most. Another aim is to get you thinking ahead and moving towards creating a sustainable business based on the old and only sustainable business strategy which is to “Deliver valuable, recurrently needed services or products that can be easily used up and just as easily replaced over and over by all and sundry.”

The duration of use is dependent on the type of product though, as the shelf life of everything has being drastically reduced by design. In the case of bloggers, we can say “Deliver valuable information about …

FTC Regulations – A Blogger’s Doom or Opportunity?

In October 2009, bloggers and internet marketers alike woke up to the shocking announcement that the Federal Trade Commission would be implementing new regulations in regard to the blogging industry.

A couple of revisions were made to the Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising. This was the first update to those guidelines since 1980. And two big issues evolved with this revision:

1. A Policy of Full Disclosure: A requirement of full disclosure any time something is received by bloggers or internet marketers for a review. Posts from bloggers who receive any cash or payment in kind is now considered to be an endorsement.
2. Typical Results Testimonials: Any testimonial or statement relating to results of a product must now be coupled with a statement of the results that consumers can typically expect. Before this revision, a statement of “results not typical” would be enough to be legal. That is no longer the case. The effects of these new revisions to the regulations are actually rather widespread

What do these all mean for us in the blogosphere?

Bloggers now need to disclose any material connection between themselves and advertisers if they blog about any product:

• Commission Sales: If you receive a commission when somebody buys something, you have to disclose it now by law.
• Paid Reviews: If you are paid to do a review, you must disclose it also.

As stated by the FTC announcement, you even need to disclose if you get a free item for the purpose of reviewing that item – even if you have to return it later.

The whole scenario could be summed up in one word: Disclosure.

From an ethical point of view, the thing any blogger should do if there are perks attached to a review is to say so to his readers. Most companies who negotiate paid reviews actually require disclosure anyway.

I suggest you visit DisclosurePolicy.org and create a disclosure policy page on your blog just to be on the safe side of the law. Besides, when you create it, it’s once and for all.

**In part two, we will talk more about the issue of testimonials