The Mindset Difference Between A Blogger And A Business Owner

Hello there! Welcome to the new episode of Coffee Break Blogging!

In this particular episode, I’m actually going to do something different. I’m going to record a video of me actually doing this particular podcast just basically recording it. The video is not probably going to look very pretty, I’m literally just going to point the webcam on myself; but I’m going to try a little different. I’m going to try putting this thing up on YouTube and just kind of see what the heck happens.

But anyway, from there let’s just go and move on to the topic of the show.

Now here is the thing. There is a big thing that I talk about a lot at Blog Marketing Academy. I think it’s a very important fundamental lesson that people who are just getting started out need to know and that is the mindset difference between a blogger and a business owner. Now the mindset difference is pretty stark. But understanding this difference; especially if you are coming in as a blogger is very important when it comes to your attempts to monitor your site.

Many people want to make money with their blogs. They start the blog and even if you don’t want to make money…

Let’s rephrase it this way: Even if money is not your primary goal, you probably still want to make some because it kind of justifies the time you are spending on it. Now maybe on the flip-side, maybe it actually is your goal and you actually want to generate enough money on the internet to maybe put some money aside or maybe as much as quitting your job and to completely and totally support the lifestyle that you want.

Whatever your interest is; there, more power to you. I think it’s a great thing and an actually “can do it”. But you really need to embrace this mindset difference because most bloggers come into this with a very non-businessy attitude. And what I mean by that is that most bloggers come in here thinking, “I’m going to start up a blog, I’m going to build up and audience and I’m going to monetize” and we hear this word “monetize” among bloggers and it generally means you do various things on your site to make money with it and it is generally thought that you do those things after you have built some kind of community around your site.

How Bloggers Come Into the Game

Let’s look at how bloggers usually come into this game and see if any of these looks familiar to you:

The first thing is that most bloggers, they come in with the idea of talking about something that they are passionate about. And you hear those words “passionate” a lot among bloggers.

And I think it’s great. I mean, in the ideal world, that is exactly what you would do with being able to combine your money-making activities with something that you are passionate about. And it certainly is possible to do. It just not is a requirement.

It is not a requirement that you are passionate about what you are doing but a lot of bloggers… they want to do that. We have this vision of taking something that we are passionate about, a hobby that we have, something that you want to help other people with and we start a blog about it simply on those intentions. And then from there, the blogger wants to talk about it. And we want to write really nice blog posts for people and we are hoping that it will go viral on Twitter and Facebook and then we are going to build up an audience that way of repeat readers.

Now generally when it comes to the money part of it, we think in terms of being famous having this big audience of people who respect us and think that we are great and then somehow out of that we are going to make money almost by being a pseudo-media personality in the space that we decide to go into.

And so a lot of bloggers end up focusing on what I think are vanity metrics. Measures of fame like, how many Twitter followers one has, how many RSS feed subscribers one has, how many listeners they have got on their podcast; and I’m not saying these are unimportant metrics. However, they are measuring more of the vanity. They are measuring more of your size and your market and it is not really going to lead to money. Unless you are thinking of yourself as a media source and that is how a lot of bloggers are thinking of themselves.

Most bloggers, when we think of monetization; we are thinking things like advertising and affiliate links. And so it goes down to this pathway of sticking banner ads on your sidebar, running Adsense banners or finding affiliate links and we put affiliate stuff in our blog post or via banners on our sidebar; all these things to try to somehow squeeze money out of this blog that we started simply because we are passionate about it.

Now another thing about most bloggers is that they really don’t want to sell. They are almost afraid to sell. They are afraid of coming across as “salesy”. And so a lot of bloggers tend to run the other direction as fast as they possibly can because we just don’t want to be that salesy person.

And so, that is typically the mindset of most bloggers and then with that mindset you come in here and you try to chase this rainbow of monetization.

Mindset of a Business Owner

Let us now compare this to the mindset of a typical business owner:

Let’s look at any business that you can think of. It doesn’t even have to be on the internet. In fact, it will probably be even more obvious, the points that I am making here if you think of a business that does not exist on the internet.

Now the number one thing that any business owner is trying to do is make sales. They want to make money. That is the reason they opened up shop to begin with. Now, what is it that they are selling? They are selling some type of a solution, some type of a product, some type of a service to people who need and want it.

Now, typically, that is a product or service designed to solve some kind of a problem. That is the reason the business exists.

So that right there is an extremely, extremely important thing about a business owner. They are solving a problem of a target audience and they are doing it by way of some type of a product or service that they provide and not only they have that established, they are looking to sell as much of it as possible. They are not afraid to try to make a sale. In fact they realize this is absolutely necessary, otherwise they got to turn the lights out, give up and go home.

Now the other thing is because a business owner is trying to do those things and looking at it very A to B, they are going to focus on metrics that are going to measure real world value.

And what I mean here by real world value are those things like gross income, what are your sales figures? How many customers have you brought in? How much of your products have you produced? How much will be the dollar value of the services that you would actually deliver this week?

These are all exact metrics that a business owner would look at and the exact measures of the things that would actually put that business on the map. Contrast this of the typical metrics of a blogger would usually look at. Things like, how much their Twitter followership has grown, how many Facebook they have; things like that. A little bit different here. So you can see a very stark contrast between the business owner and a blogger.

Monetization

Now with that being said, let’s talk to you about what I mean by monetization. In fact, I really think that this is the new monetization but it’s actually quite not new. I mean, we really got down to it. The business owner mindset existed way before the typical blogger mindset. But the thing is a lot of blogger who are coming in with what I think is a false expectation, thinking that their way of thinking is the way it has to be.

So the new monetization; and this is what I talk about here at the Blog Marketing Academy has to do with combining blogging and business together into a nice package.

You basically build an actual business. One that actually is in the business of delivering value to somebody else who needs it. You are solving their problem. And yes, you are making sales out of it just like a business owner will do.

Now with all that is happening on the internet, your blog fits into this by being your primary storefront. Your blog is going to be the front facing storefront of your business and it is going to be your primary marketing vehicle. But underneath that, you are going to be making sales and you are going to be selling a product or service to people who need and want it. It is the same foundations that have existed in the world of business for years. Okay?

So that is the “new” monetization. I put “new” in air quotes here because it really isn’t new. It’s just this is the real way of building a real online business. And to everybody else it is going to look like a blog only. And that’s great.

And I think you will probably find your passion here, by the way, because you are probably not going to get this thing to be all that big if you are not kind of interested in it. And the other thing is you are probably going to find the passion in it if you started to see results and you see this thing actually is making money. You are probably going to be passionate about it. Okay?

The difference between the typical blogger and the typical business owner is something I’ve addressed a few times here on the blog, but it is very important that I talk about it on the podcast series, too.

I’ve said it before, but a blog doesn’t make money. It simply doesn’t. This is why most efforts to “monetize” a blog fail… because they are simply done wrong. This is why I concentrate so much on building up a real BUSINESS. A business which just happens to have a blog as its primary storefront.

So that is the primary difference between a blogger and a business owner. I strongly encourage you to think a little bit more like a business owner.

Be thinking about the problem that you want to solve for other people, how you can solve it for them and how you can market that on the internet via your blog content, your videos, your podcast, things like that. At the end of the day, the banner ads and those types of things are not going to work out for most people. It does work for some but those are truly the media sources. It is just not the avenue that I am going to invite you to go down with me because I don’t think it as workable for most of us.

But what is workable for most of us is to build real businesses and that solve real problems. That actually works and will monetize the blog like nobody’s business. Okay?