If you were a military leader, how important would it be if you had someone working for you on the other side of the divide? The cold war was famous for secret agents and sometimes even double agents. But as a businessman or blogger, how wonderful would it be to have a secret ally on your side that helps you achieve your goals, all without the prospect or target even knowing about it? That’s the power bestowed by understanding brain function. By using it, you will be able to convince your customers that this is the thing to do simply by treating their mind as your playground.

The mind and brain function is a potent weapon for marketers and bloggers alike. Using it, capturing it and controlling it will help you immensely. Some feel that they constantly need to reinvent their schedule to appeal to their audience. That is not true in the slightest. The thing is, once your prospects are used to something you shouldn’t take it away from them. People don’t like change, especially if they like it and it resonates with them. Change it and you’ll undo all the good work done so far.

But what’s more important is you risk confusing them and their minds, and brain function will struggle to fully interpret different messages. The brain doesn’t want to remember everything, it is selective in its choices. But if something is repeated relentlessly, it will remember it since it figures it is important. This is also true for messages that are emotion heavy and consistently delivered. It’s why you remember your wife nagging you so clearly while you don’t remember where you kept that damn remote/key/pair of socks. Emotional context can be everything for brain function.

Advertisers know this and that’s why we remember advertising slogans dating back to our childhood more than we remember our fourth grade teacher’s name. It’s also why our first crush or love is remembered so vividly since details of him/her are played over so often in our heads. That’s the power of repetition, and that’s the power of harnessing brain function. Get a message and stick to it; the minds of your prospects will thank you for it and retain your message better.

We know of his name and we know of the qualities he espouses. We even know that he wears a wig that looks something like a bird’s nest. But do we really know how Donald Trump came to dominate his niche market? Chances are that Donald Trump has made a building in your city and if he has you will know of it. Chances are that you will know of the buildings he has made in some other cities, such as Trump Tower.  What is it about “The Donald” that makes us know so much about him and his niche market to the exception of others? This hit when I looked out my hotel window and saw the Trump International Hotel, Chicago staring back at me. Just how does he do it? And can his rules be applied to blogging?

Be visible, always

Is your online presence limited to your own blog or website? Are you running a blog sans videos? Then you’re not building your brand through visibility. People relate to a face and the qualities it exudes. It’s part of the magic mojo. It’s part of who you are. There’s no point in being a world-class sage at the top of the Himalayas if you want to get your message of wisdom heard. If no one knows where you are or who you are, you’ve lost the battle.

Cash? Never!

It’s fair to say that Trump has more cash than most. But he rarely pays cash to get new audiences. Many people understand the fundamentals of business but they still do the basics wrong. Robert Kiyosaki doesn’t write books to get his jollies. He does it for a reason. Everything done in a business is for a reason. Everything is strategic. Think strategically of how to acquire something for nothing. That’s leverage baby.

Outperform expectations

The Trump International Beach Resort in Miami caught me by surprise. What I felt I’d get and what I got was very different. The staff was polite, the air smelt great (what a wonderful fragrance it was) and it was all a bit shocking. But it was pleasantly so. You perhaps cannot do a Trump. But you can do the little things exceedingly well and delight your readers or customers so that they want to return.

You too can be like ‘The Donald’ and dominate your niche market. Okay, it’s hard to take someone difficult when he has hair like that. You’d imagine someone worth millions, billions even, would have a good hair stylist. But you can’t argue with his results and how it can work for you. You can’t knock it unless you try it.

I was talking to a client of mine recently, and he was slightly concerned. You see, I was indulging in a spot of business coaching and my client, after heeding my counsel, was in a spot of bother. His traffic and comments had started to tail off. And after three or four sessions, his faith was starting to wane. He had done everything I told him down to the letter and he was having nothing to show for it. The metrics were plummeting southwards. And he was not a happy camper. It doesn’t help that he’s the slightly anxious types that worries more than he should.

To be fair to him, I could see where he was coming from. He hires me, he invests his faith in me and my ability at business coaching and then when he does as told he does worse than he did by himself. That can be very disheartening indeed. But like all arguments, this too has a flip side. He was sweating readership and the lack of comments. I simply pointed out how he had netted some big advertising accounts in such a short span of time. Surely he couldn’t have overlooked that. But he did. He was worried about the zeroes above his comments thread, not the zero’s lining up his bank balance. See what I mean by worrying too much?

And that’s not all. His customer inquiries had soared too. More people wanted to talk to him about his services. So something must be going right for him. Traffic isn’t where it’s all at. He was eyeballs deep in getting as much traffic to his site as possible, but that’s the smaller picture. What’s worse, he wants it to happen right away. I simply told him that traffic is not where it’s at. He needed customers and action takers to visit his site. These are the people who will not just admire him but pay him as well. That’s a lot more valuable than an indeterminate level of traffic.

No matter what kind of business you have, the goal is not to aggregate raw material. That’s just silly. You have to make something of it. For bloggers, that raw material is traffic, and it’s worthless if you can’t make something of it. I’d rather have less traffic but have that traffic be composed of action takers who pay for services. That’s more valuable as a business model. Just because Honda outsells Ferrari in pure numbers they’re not a better car company. One Ferrari is worth so many Honda’s. That’s value, and that’s what you should aim for. To sift through the rubbish and find those that are willing to pay top dollar. That’s when you hit pay dirt as a blogger. And that’s what I’m trying to teach my client.

Almost everyone that has ever blogged as an amateur has done so because they want to make money blogging. There’s nothing wrong with that at all, because you’re not alone. You know who doesn’t like making money? A communist. But bad punchlines aside, an increasing number of bloggers are discovering that you can make money blogging since blogging is now a very successful medium. The amount of money you can make differs. For some, it’ll be enough to set up a live sportscast, for some it will be a nice stream of passive income. For others, it will be enough to make it a part-time or even a full-time job. Thousands of bloggers make money blogging, and you too can be one of them.

Allow me to mention my choice techniques to make money blogging, and I will try to update this topic, if not this post, regularly. Remember one thing though; every blog is unique in its own way and each will have different ways to make money for you. Some of these tips will work better with some sites than others and the key is to figure out what works for you. I earn a very steady stream of income from blogging, and I hope it can be the same for you too.

Adsense

Adsense can be an amazing tool for bloggers. I have set it to show image and text ads that are displayed in 250×300 windows and it works well provided I end up blending it into the whole site design. There’s no point in having those ads stick out like a sore thumb, is there? Their referral programs aren’t that big of a deal for me, but their regular ads still do the job just fine and are a dominant chunk of my earnings.

Affiliate Programs

All of the affiliate programs I have run at some point or the other add up to a nice chunk of money. Individually, they don’t count for much. Together, they are far more significant though. The thing is that I try to pick out affiliate programs that aren’t lousy though. There’s no point in trying to promote something you don’t believe in yourself. Most of these affiliate programs are of such a high quality that they don’t seem to cheapen themselves and I have even had readers mail me and thank me for putting up the recommendation. I think that’s the biggest validation I could have received.

E-books

At one point, when I was looking to grow my income, I realized I wasn’t selling anything of my own at all. Most of my proceeds were fractions of what was being passed on to those whose products or ads were being showcased on the site. That’s when I set about making e-books for myself. While the price tag on most of these e-books is not colossal (and it never will be), they add up to a lot over months and have quickly grown into a key part of the income I receive from the blog. The one mistake I did make was not making a proper announcement or product launch for these e-books. But I do see my income stream expanding from e-books, and it is something I’d advocate for everyone.