The evolving design of our tech stack…

As we continue to develop our blog marketing stack here on The Edge, we’re starting to add enough pieces here where we’re going to need to begin to put some order into it. Here’s where we left off…

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Honestly,  it looks a little random at this point. And, if we just kept on tacking tools and pieces onto this thing, it would make no sense by the time it is done.

As we start looking into putting order into this, it brings up a great point about the very structure of our businesses.

Is an online business just a big box of tools and activities, all mashed together, and somehow it is supposed to work? Or… is there some order to it?

Well, there is.

In the end, every business is a SYSTEM. A system is a FLOW, with a beginning and an end. Certain things go in, certain steps occur in an order, and then there’s an output on the other end.

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The structure of your SYSTEM dictates the tools that you’re going to need and how they work together. In other words, FUNCTION determines FORM. Your online business ultimately is a flow of energy… and a transformation for your prospect (your system input) from point A to point B.

Ya with me so far here? This is some birds-eye level view stuff here, but something many people don’t really think enough about and it is why they find themselves getting overwhelmed.

Your SYSTEM is a series of steps designed to move a person from point A to point B. That transition is what I often call, in my training, a transformation.

  • Point A. The current reality of your ideal prospect, your reader, your audience member. They have certain things they want to accomplish or solve.
  • Point B. The NEW reality of that person, with their problem solved, their goal accomplished, etc.

Now, you obviously can’t really design your system (and hence, your business) if you don’t know what point B looks like. You have to know where you intend to take people. For instance, here at the Blog Marketing Academy, the other end of the transformation would be a person with a revenue-generating online business, powered by their blog. They’d be firing on all cylinders, their business is growing, their blog is making an impact, and they’d be winning. That’s my “point B”. What’s your’s for YOUR business?

Now, knowing point B, you have to map out what needs to be done in order to move them from point A to point B. Then, you set up a business structure that will enable that to happen. A typical flow might be something like:

  1. Awareness. They become aware of you.
  2. Engagement. They engage with you.
  3. Subscription. They become a subscriber.
  4. Conversion. They become a customer.
  5. Delivery. You deliver and they get the promised outcome.
  6. Promotion. They advocate and you tell the world about it, thereby bringing in new people at step 1.

That’s your basic flow of a person through your business.

Now, to power that, you’ll also have infrastructure requirements. Things like hosting, metrics and stats. There’s also the executive function which defines overall direction and planning. So, the executive function sort of sits above the whole thing. It determines the design of the system, as well as ensures all the pre-requisites are in place for the system to function.

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So, that’s the basic FUNCTIONS of the business. And as I said, function determines form. And, further to our discussion of the marketing tech stack, form determines the TOOLS you will be using in your business and how they will interact.

Our tech stack isn’t just a bunch of random tools mashed together. It is the infrastructure that empowers the above form to operate as you want it to operate.

With that, I’m now going to go back and re-visit our evolving tech stack diagram and we’re going to organize things and present them in context with the FORM of our business. I’ll see what I come up with. 🙂 And I’ll share it with you next week.

Have a weekend to remember. 🙂

– David

David Risley

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The WP Edge is the official weekly newsletter of the Blog Marketing Academy.