A recent trend I’ve spotted among those who coach and advise microbusiness owners is the advice to survey your readers to find out what they want from you.

The premise here is great. Any time I see someone wanting to focus their business expression  on their potential clients rather than on themselves, it’s a good thing.

But — is surveying your blog readership, or even your email subscriber list, a smart way to gather information?

Let’s take a look.

Chances are, if you’re doing a good job of creating high-interest, helpful blog content, you have a loyal core of readers — people who consistently read everything you publish. This core group is most likely a fraction of the traffic to your site on any given day.

Then, you’ve got a bigger group of semi-readers, who pop on and off of your site after clicking a link on Twitter or Facebook, or clicking through a pin of yours. They probably glance at your latest post for two seconds, then bounce. If it’s a particularly engrossing topic, they may read in full, but not comment or share the post. These semi-readers are not part of your loyal core, but they are moderately interested in learning more about what you have to say/teach/model/share (which is good), or in hearing your take in particular (which is very good).

You may have Right People-like buyers hanging out in both groups: the loyal core and the moderately interested peeps. Will the moderately interested peeps click through to your sales page, read or skim to the bottom, and click Buy on any given day? That’s a matter of everything from how much time they have in that moment they encounter your site, their energy level, their predisposition to be proactive (or not) about addressing a problem they’re aware they have, and the balance in their PayPal account.

But your Right People readers? The majority of the time, they will buy your offer if the timing is right (for them), if the price is right (according to the value you’ve demonstrated on the sales page and through the rest of your brand’s suite of signals), and if they believe that you see them and get them and you have the solutions they’ve been yearning for.

Whether your Right Person buyer buys what you’re offering is a function of how well you’ve communicated that you understand what they’re up to, what troubles and concerns them, what delights and serves them, and that you’ve designed this offer with them in mind.

Your brand is not a buffet.

A short personal story:

I like buffet eating. A little bit of this, a little bit of that. As a kid, one of my favorite  “holidays” of the year was our annual Kerr family reunion. Why? Picnic food! Three stretches of wooden picnic table full of it. I like having options.

But great brands that get profitable are not built buffet-style.

Here’s what I mean.

Let’s imagine you’re a graphic designer. Your business is a year old and you get about 1500 unique visitors to your site every month. In the first year of business, you brought in $16,578.43 in revenue from a hodge podge of digital download products, one-to-one services for clients, and one 4-session coaching workshop that 6 people signed up for. You blog inconsistently: sometimes 4 times a month, sometimes none. You use every social media channel you can think of, but you don’t really have a plan for what you’re doing there — you’re just showing up and being warm and engaging, sharing links to other people’s stuff and occasionally to your own. You have an email list of 117 people, but you’ve never had a freebie so you have no idea why most of these people signed up to receive updates from you. You’ve emailed them only 5 times over the course of the last year.

You’re eager to grow your business and your reach, so you’ve decided to survey your blog readers to find out what they want from you, blog-wise and product or service-wise.

You post a survey on your blog, and you also email the link to your subscriber list. There are 5 questions, because you’ve read that you should keep surveys to as few questions as possible, certainly under 10. Two of your questions are multiple choice and three are open-ended. You get 38 responses over a one-month period.

Because you’ve asked so few questions, you have very little insight to work with about who these people are. (But the thought of giving them the third degree, via a longer survey or a phone call, just feels . . . weird.)  Your survey tells you that only 14% of those surveyed are “currently looking for a graphic designer to work with” but 87% of them “would appreciate more free graphic downloads.” (Don’t blame me — you asked them!)

Furthermore, to your open-ended question, “What would you like me to share on my blog?” you’ve received all manner of responses, from “Photos of your creative studio, so we can see what it’s like to be you!” to “How-to articles that help me learn PhotoShop techniques” to “Top 10 lists of your favorite free iPhone apps!” to “How you got into graphic design,” “Tell me whether I need to hire a web designer or a graphic designer or both,” and “Tips for how I can start my own graphic design business, please! I want to be you when I grow up.”

Ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmm . . . that was . . . helpful (?)

The reality is, if you left your brand conversation up to people with the time and inclination to participate in a blog survey (not necessarily your Right People), and you actually implemented what they asked for, you’d be taking a huge risk: a risk that you’d miss the Important Conversations your Most Likely To Buy Person really cares about, wants to engage in online, and wants your take on.

Don’t risk turning your brand conversation into a buffet.

When surveying people can be helpful

There is one group of people you absolutely want to talk with and learn from: people you’ve worked with, who have experienced your offers first hand (i.e. purchased your digital product or hired you for a service). You’ll want to find out what drew them to the offer in the first place, what tipped them over the edge to buy, what they expected to get/learn, what they actually got/learned, and where they’d like to suggest improvements or upgrades.

Will all of your buyers be Right People? Nope. Not all buyer feedback will be useful for you in developing your brand conversation further.

That’s why it’s even more important to intimately know your Right Person — the person whose core needs and developmental desires sync up perfectly with what you have to offer, in the way you offer it.

He or she really is out there. In fact, there’s not just ONE Right Person out there for you, there are thousands of ‘hims’ or ‘hers’ hoping — in the back of their minds, if not at the forefront — to find a conversation online like the one you are uniquely designed and equipped to create and hold.

The question is: will you do it? Will you bring it?

If you’ve been following The Voice Bureau for a while, you know that I (Abby) deliver a high level service called Empathy Marketing, along with my collaborative partner, searchologist Tami Smith.

We launched the service right before the New Year 2013 and have had the awesome pleasure of unveiling Empathy Marketing strategies to 16 high integrity microbusiness owners. We listened closely to their feedback during, immediately after, and months after their time with us concluded. We heard what they told us they wanted more of, what they were empowered to implement immediately, what was most inspiring, and where they needed more support (copywriting!).

And we’ve iterated. We made Empathy Marketing even tighter, more impactful, and more immediately actionable.

We kept all of the best parts in — and made them even better. And we added a few new features we think you’ll truly dig, like ready-to-go titles for your 101-style articleseries, and grab-and-go examples of how to work deep metaphors into your copy that will speak directly to your Right Person’s core needs.

We think you’ll love looking at your business this way, and getting to know your Right Person by standing in his or her shoes. If you’re ready, please take a look at the NEW Empathy Marketing.

We’re currently booking new clients, one per week. Book soon to ensure the Start Week of your choice.

In the comments, Tami and I would love to hear:

What have you learned from surveying your own readers? Have you found a question that’s yielded particularly insightful responses? What have you NOT been able to learn about your Right People, so far?

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Rose, Brooke, and Melanie are all certified life coaches.

In fact, they are all certified from the same school of training.

They’re all hovering around 40 years old, they all have kids in elementary school, and they all practice yoga. They all like to blog from their favorite indie coffee shops, and their coaching businesses are (so far) all one-woman shows. No Virtual Assistants (yet), no web designers hired and paid for. Rose, Brooke, and Melanie are that PTA-going, DIY-blogging, Anthropologie-scoping, kicking-back-in-sweatpants-with-the-hubs-on-a-Saturday night kind of solopreneuring women. [Hat tip to Hannah Marcotti and her Friday blog posts for the construction of that last sentence.]

On paper, these women’s lives appear quite similar, and (one might assume) their values with regards to being coaches are similar, too. To boot, all three women move in the same online space, share overlapping blog readerships and Twitter followerships, and are ‘known’ by the same crew.

So how, pray tell, do Rose, Brooke, and Melanie begin to make their brand conversations stand out from each other’s?

First, let’s think about standout brands: what do we know about them?

They feel authentic.

They look unique.

They deliver consistently.

They act in integrity with what their brand promises.

And true standout brands sound only like themselves. They’ve got an unmistakable voice — not one that appeals to everybody, but one that appeals to its Right Person.

Think of the Superstar Brands you yourself know about in your niche, or in related niches. They have their imitators, but no one pulls off moxie/madcap/sexy/vulnerable/hilarious/ballsy/intellectual quite like they do.

Luckily for Rose, Brooke, Melanie, and their respective Right People, they’ve discovered their Voice Values.

They have words for what makes them sound only like themselves, when they’re being themselves. When they’re writing from a place of true conviction, a point of empathy with their Right People readers and prospective buyers.

Their brand conversations have handles that their Right People can hold on to, to pull themselves up with.

They know how to layer their Voice Values in a way that makes their messaging stand out from all the rest.

Let’s take a closer look.

When it comes to the coaching process, all three women say that they value mutual trust, openness to the process, and a spirit of inquiry. All of them create a safe space for their clients to do the deep work of personal transformation. All of them say their clients are engaged in a process of getting to know themselves in a new and important way, and really stepping into whatever work in the world is theirs to do.

All three women like and admire each other, but are scared to death that they will never be able to blog about something other than what the other two are blogging about, and Brooke is by far the strongest writer, so her articles will blow everyone else’s out of the water. Rose is the funniest, so she’s a blast and a half on Twitter and Facebook. And Melanie is beautiful and charismatic and has a really compelling video presence, so she’s a favorite of interviewees.

Fortunately, their Voice Values, even with some Values overlapping between the three of them, shake out differently enough that they can have three very different-sounding, different-feeling, different-landing brand conversations with a similar readership, without fearing that they’re losing any of the idiosyncratic stuff that makes them them.

• Rose’s Top 3 Voice Values are Clarity, Helpfulness, and Playfulness. Her brand conversation is clear, easily accessible, focused on being a resource for readers, and full of humor.
• Brooke’s Top 4 Voice Values are Love, Transparency, then Intimacy and Innovation, which are tied. Her brand conversation is heartfelt, soft, and nurturing, shot through with bolts of exciting inventiveness.
• Melanie’s Top 5 Voice Values are a two-way tie between Audacity and Helpfulness, followed by a tie between Intimacy and Depth, and in fifth place, Clarity. Her brand conversation is bold yet supportive. She moves in close and goes deep, focusing on presenting ideas as simply as possible.

Understanding how and where their Voice Values naturally and spontaneously occur when they’re writing, dreaming up content, and sharing their message with potential clients goes a long way.

Understanding how to layer their three, four, or five top Voice Values across their whole brand conversation goes even further.

And finally, understanding why their Right People are drawn to them for the specific Voice Values they have, well, that right there is a huge part of each woman’s differentiator. And their differentiator is what sets Rose, Brooke, and Melanie apart from each other, in the eyes of Twitter followers, potential clients, and even (yes) search engines. Naming this differentiator and why it’s a selling point for your Most Likely To Buy People is part of the big work of Empathy Marketing.

I hope it goes without saying that because these coaches lead with such different Voice Values, they’re naturally going to draw a different sort of Right Person. And that means their visual brand identities must necessarily look quite different from each other’s (no defaulting to ‘vintage with a modern edge’!). The offers they create are going to speak to different core needs, and point to different results. This, too, is work based in empathy.

If you haven’t yet discovered your Voice Values, now’s a great time.

Subscribe to the site below with your best email address and click Go. We’ll send you our complimentary Discover Your Voice Values assessment, and you’ll be on the road to what Rose, Brooke, and Melanie are figuring out. It’s good stuff.

photo credit: ilmungo via photopin cc

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So you’ve discovered your Voice Values, you’re actively contemplating a rebrand, and you’re focusing on writing for your Right People.

Wouldn’t it be nice to share this experience with other thoughtful types who are doing the same?

Introducing the Voice Bureau’s Google+ Community — a place for deep-thinking business owners to connect and converse.

Tami and I look forward to having a conversation with you.

Please click the image at right to learn more. We’ll see you on G+!

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Katya [not her real name] is a prospective new client of The Voice Bureau.

During our exploratory phone conversation the other day, I asked her if she’d considered adding affiliate marketing to her lifestyle brand’s site, since she already has a nicely built-out resources page sharing her favorite picks from perfume to bedside table reading to organic cotton t-shirts. “No,” she told me. “I’d considered it, but my web guy won’t have anything to do with it. He told me he doesn’t believe in affiliate marketing. He doesn’t like that stuff.”

It’s time to take another look at affiliate marketing as a viable income stream for integrity-filled, values-based microbusinesses who market on the web.

First, what is affiliate marketing?

In brief, affiliate marketing is an agreement to promote the work of another business in exchange for a commission when a customer purchases the offer through your ‘affiliate link.’ The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requires affiliate sellers to clearly disclose each and every time they’re sharing an affiliate link, so that the buyer is aware the seller is receiving income from the sale. This is why you’ll usually see people sharing an affiliate link on social media with the word ‘aff’ following it.

In this corner of the online business webiverse, affiliate commissions are generally 30-50% of the product sold. The creator of the offer sets the percentage according to what he or she feels is fair.

Affiliate marketing is one of The Voice Bureau’s ongoing income streams, albeit a modest one in comparison to our service-based revenue.

The same was true pre-Voice Bureau, when I was a freelancer doing business as Abby Kerr Ink.

Since Fall of 2012 alone, The Voice Bureau has endorsed a video-making course from Monica McCarthy at Show & Tell Stories, Paul Jarvis’ digital book Be Awesome at Online Business, a high level mentorship for writers called Your Captivating Book from Jeffrey Davis, and an intensive coaching program for women called Playing Big from Tara Mohr. (Note: none of these are affiliate links, though there are affiliate links in the posts they link to.)

I also frequently promote other creative professionals’ work just because it’s great stuff, with no thank-you monies on the line at all. Sharing other people’s good stuff — no strings attached — is part of doing business in the community of values-based business owners.

Now, it’s important to note that affiliate marketing is a complete business model for some people. Some people set up sites specifically designed to drive traffic to an offer that they’re an affiliate for. Businesses like this don’t create their own products or services, they just hype other people’s. This brand of affiliate marketing understandably gets a bad rap; we mentally associate it with sales pages with cheesy graphics and lots of yellow highlighter. Also, videos in which people gesticulate wildly and use lots of hyberbole (“Within 6 months, you can tell your boss to SHOVE IT and join me on the beach in Bali!”).

Obviously, this is NOT the kind of affiliate marketing I’d advise any client or colleague of mine to get involved in. This isn’t values-based marketing, it’s marketing done with the intent to drive traffic toward cashola, regardless of whether the seller believes in the product or not.

But affiliate marketing can be done with integrity. Here’s my rationale behind affiliate marketing as a small, solo-owned business:

Here are 6 questions you can ask yourself when evaluating whether an affiliate marketing opportunity is right for your business and brand:

Here are 3 things affiliate marketing is NOT:

1. A substitute for a thoughtful business solution of your own, at least not here in the values-based microbusiness community. It’s hard to get behind the value of someone else’s offer when you haven’t any practice making offers of your own.
2. A 100% guaranteed-for-all-time character reference for the offer creator. You can’t control other people’s behavior in business or in their personal lives. You can do your due diligence and vet the offer to the best of your ability.
3. A popularity contest. We see Big Name Brand affiliate pushes every year (i.e. “Buy Such-and-Such Program through MY affiliate link and I’ll also throw in A, B, C, D, E, F, and G!”) and we sometimes grow weary of them. If you are an affiliate for someone else’s offer, or if you’re going to be inviting people to be affiliates for your offer, be very aware of the campaign’s tone and style. Does it resonate with you as clean and in-integrity?

Considering that I’m currently an affiliate for Tara Mohr’s Playing Big, I reached out to her before writing this post to let her know what I had in mind.

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