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Why You Should Build an Audience Before You Build a Business

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Where do great business ideas come from?
What about products ‰ÛÓ how can you know (or at least make a highly educated guess about) whether your idea will actually fly in the market?
In his must-read book Breakthrough Advertising, master copywriter Eugene Schwartz wrote:
‰ÛÏThis is the copywriter‰Ûªs task: not to create mass desire ‰ÛÓ but to channel and direct it.‰Û
Though Schwartz aimed that truth at copywriters, it‰Ûªs also a good starting point in explaining Brian Clark‰Ûªs Minimum Viable Audience model for building businesses and products that people want.
Build an audience through content marketing. Let them tell you what they want. Build products and offer services based on their desires and needs. Prosper.
In this episode we discuss:

  • What is an Entreproducer?
  • Why you should build a Minimum Viable Audience before anything else
  • How to build a profitable business around content marketing
  • How to succeed in business without outside funding
  • Why focus groups and surveys don‰Ûªt work
  • How to find and build a product that people actually want
  • How Brian built Copyblogger with a Minimum Viable Audience

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The Show Notes:

About the Author: Robert Bruce is Copyblogger Media‰Ûªs copywriter and resident recluse.

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Announcing: Rel=Author WordPress Plugin For Multiple Authors

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If you want this little picture beside your search results, install our plugin.

Have you noticed the pictures of authors beside Google search results? These Rich Snippets are displayed by the newly released rel=author tag supported by Google. In order to support this feature, you need to set up a profile in Google+, and then insert rel=author beside your author link into your website templates.
Identity is important
In the past, the authority of the website was a key component to a site‰Ûªs search engine rankings. But thanks to Google+, the company is now developing an entire identity layer where the authority of the author plays an important role in the final search result. For example, a writer who‰Ûªs circled by thousands of people might have more authority than someone who‰Ûªs circled by a handful. Who wrote the article is very important, and some interesting experiments are proving this out.
It‰Ûªs not just about the authority of the author, but also the strength of the personal connections between you. So, people who you interact with might show up higher in the search results. This is the new functionality of Google Search Plus Your World.
Getting rel=author into your WordPress site
It‰Ûªs relatively straightforward to hack your WordPress templates, but it gets complicated when you have a multi-author blog, where each author‰Ûªs articles need to link to their appropriate Google+ profiles. So for example, all the articles written by me would show my picture, and all the articles by Alex would show his picture.
So, we made a WordPress plugin to make it easy.
If you want to enable it for your WordPress website, just do the following:

  1. Create a Google+ profile for each author who will contribute to your blog. For example, here‰Ûªs mine.
  2. Each author needs to edit their profile to list the website in the ‰ÛÏContributor To‰Û field. See how I‰Ûªm a contributor to Universe Today, Astronomy Cast, Keyword Strategy, etc. This step is very important to close the loop.
  3. Install the plugin. It‰Ûªs easiest to go to Plugins -> Add New -> and then search for ‰ÛÏGoogle authorship for multiple authors‰Û in your WordPress admin.
  4. Each author needs to update their WordPress User profile and put a link to their Google+ profile.
  5. It‰Ûªll take time for Google to reindex your pages, but if you want to test it out, copy-paste your URL using Google‰Ûªs Rich Snippets Testing Tool.

Please note, this is the version 1.0. It‰Ûªs working great for our own websites, but please let us know if you find any bugs.
This is free, no Keyword Strategy account required.