Last week I was at a workshop and caught up with a friend of mine and of course we got to talking how business was developing and their plans for 2007.
They were excited to be working with someone in the US about branding their business on the internet and creating information products.
Always interested to check out recommended resources and contacts, when I got home I went to look at the programmes and services the expert in branding on the internet provided.
Great they offered a web branding secrets report; so I submitted my email details.
But what happened next was a great disappointment…
… you see they broke two key rules in building your brand online as a professional services expert.
The first rule they broke was that of the basic principles of information product creation.
80 percent of the content was about them and 20 percent of the content was relevant to me and at that was VERY poorly structured.
As a rule of thumb, whether you are writing your ezine or developing a lead generating and free information product to build your list of clients, you must have 80 percent of the content being highly relevant and rich in information for your reader.
The report I downloaded consisted of 4 pages as follows:
- page 1 was the title page and their photo
- page 2 consisted of 20 one line tips – this would have been fine but what would have been more helful would be to put more infomation around the tip: what the tip was, why it is important to implement and a quick tip on how to make this happen
- page 3 was a series of testimonials
- page 4 more testimonials and how to contact them.
I absolutely recommend that you ensure a return on investment from your web site by having a no cost report available for which people will provide you their email address and this enables you to keep in cntact with them over time. However the report is a showcase for your expertise.
If you make sure that your report is content rich and really helpful, it will leave in the mind of your subscriber that if this is what you are offering at no cost an investment in your solutions and services will be worthwhile.
Having read the report, had I been evaluating this service provider about their services on branding on the internet against their competitors, they would have been at the bottom of the list.
You see they just had not recognised that the information they provided in the report was the first stage of building trust with me, the subscriber.
Three quarters of the content being about them, I was left with a sense that they themselves didn’t really understand how we need to position our professional service firm builing our brand on the internet.
I’ll cover the second rule they broke tomorrow.
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