In this business and indirect monetization blogging series I have been talking about how you can use blogs to gain attention and generate sales leads. Now we should really take a look at some examples. Here are five great blogs that sell.

english cut: bespoke savile row tailors

Just take a look at this quote.

Because the diary was so full we didn’t get to meet as many new customers as normal. I did think that we wouldn’t take as many orders because of this. However my existing clients kept re-ordering. Thankfully in the end I was busy as ever. I’m very fortunate to now have brilliant people working for me, which makes my average part in the process seem highly skilled. As I’ve said before, you can cut the best suit in the world but if your tailors are poor, then you’ve got no chance.

Read it over again and just be aware of your thoughts as you process what he has written there. In one paragraph he has informed you that

• His service is in demand
• But he is humble and real
• There is scarcity of availability so you had better get your order placed
• Customers are so happy they come back and back
• He has some excellent people working with him

That’s just one snippet from one post. Imagine if you had subscribed and read 7 articles, 20, or more.Would you feel nervous ordering a bespoke suit from this guy? If I ever need to wear a suit again I know what suit I would like it to be!

The Dip by Seth Godin

No “great blogs” list is complete without an appearance from The Godin himself so let’s get his entry out of the way early on. Again, see how you can say so much without any hard sell at all …

It’s a Catch-22 of course (you can’t be a hit until you’re a hit). If you’re in an industry with no bestseller list, do your best to create one. The Dip just hit #1 on the CEO READ daily bestseller list, by the way

Let me translate; “Here’s a useful tip and, oh, by the way buy my book cuz it’s dashizzle”.

Jeffrey Zeldman

Most web designers will have heard of Jeffrey Zeldman, or at least “A List Apart”. In terms of designing with web standards this man is a hero. Therefore while he doesn’t explicitly sell, all that authority has got to work wonders for his design outfit, Happy Cog …

Jeffrey is the founder and executive creative director of Happy Cog™, a web design agency with offices in New York City and Philadelphia. Clients include Advertising Age, AIGA, and Amnesty International USA. Happy Cog publishes A List Apart for people who make websites; a book series is in the works.

If your boss wanted some kick ass standards based design, and you were one goof away from being fired, I think you would be very confident recommending this agency.

Guy Kawasaki

Guys blog is an example of what to do when your product is you.

If you read more of my blog, you’ll discover that I love mantras (as opposed to mission statements). My mantra is: Empower entrepreneurs I try to do this three or four times a week with my blog, one hundred times a year with my speeches, two to three times a year with Garage’s checkbook, and once every three years or so by writing a book.

His wisdom, experience and expertise oozes out of every bit and byte. He sells just by, well, being. There is a saying; “Lions don’t need to roar”.

Woot

It’s all well and good showing you blogs that sell intangibles, what about someone who makes money selling real stuff? Ever heard of Woot?

Woot.com is an online store and community that focuses on selling cool stuff cheap. It started as an employee-store slash market-testing type of place for an electronics distributor, but it’s taken on a life of its own. We anticipate profitability by 2043 – by then we should be retired; someone smarter might take over and jack up the prices. Until then, we’re still the lovable scamps we’ve always been.

People sign up to the RSS, they see interesting product, they stampede to buy before the offer goes away. Every day. The copy is irreverent, casual and chatty not aggressive, the design is elegant and fun, the community is buzzing, and the products are interesting. Woot was launched July 12, 2004 and sold its 1,000,000th item, a 4GB micro hard drive, on February 5, 2007.

Over to you

That’s the end of this series for now, though of course I will still be covering these topics every day in one way or another. I want to hear from you. Do you have comments, suggestions, questions, example blogs I have missed, do you disagree, agree, like, dislike, or… well, just let me know in the comments ok?

Guy Kawasaki writes: “Since I’ve antagonized the venture capital community with last week’s blog, I thought I would complete the picture and “out” entrepreneurs to begin this week. The hard part about writing this blog was narrowing down these lies to ten.” “I get pitched dozens of times every year, and every pitch contains at least three or four of these lies. I provide them not because I believe I can increase the level of honesty of entrepreneurs as much as to help entrepreneurs come up with new lies. At least new lies indicate a modicum of creativity!”

1. “Our projections are conservative.” An entrepreneur’s projections are never conservative. If they were, they would be $0. I have never seen an entrepreneur achieve even her most conservative projections. Generally, an entrepreneur has no idea what sales will be, so she guesses: “Too little will make my deal uninteresting; too big, and I’ll look hallucinogenic.” The result is that everyone’s projections are $50 million in year four. As a rule of thumb, when I see a projection, I add one year to delivery time and multiply by .1.
2. “(Big name research firm) says our market will be $50 billion in 2010.” Every entrepreneur has a few slides about how the market potential for his segment is tens of billions. It doesn’t matter if the product is bar mitzah planning software or 802.11 chip sets. Venture capitalists don’t believe this type of forecast because it’s the fifth one of this magnitude that they’ve heard that day. Entrepreneurs would do themselves a favor by simply removing any reference to market size estimates from consulting firms.
3. “(Big name company) is going to sign our purchase order next week.” This is the “I heard I have to show traction at a conference” lie of entrepreneurs. The funny thing is that next week, the purchase order still isn’t signed. Nor the week after. The decision maker gets laid off, the CEO gets fired, there’s a natural disaster, whatever. The only way to play this card if AFTER the purchase order is signed because no investor whose money you’d want will fall for this one.
4. “Key employees are set to join us as soon as we get funded.” More often than not when a venture capitalist calls these key employees who are VPs are Microsoft, Oracle, and Sun, he gets the following response, “Who said that? I recall meeting him at a Churchill Club meeting, but I certainly didn’t say I would leave my cush $250,000/year job at Adobe to join his startup.” If it’s true that key employees are ready to rock and roll, have them call the venture capitalist after the meeting and testify to this effect.
5. “No one is doing what we’re doing.” This is a bummer of a lie because there are only two logical conclusions. First, no one else is doing this because there is no market for it. Second, the entrepreneur is so clueless that he can’t even use Google to figure out he has competition. Suffice it to say that the lack of a market and cluelessness is not conducive to securing an investment. As a rule of thumb, if you have a good idea, five companies are going the same thing. If you have a great idea, fifteen companies are doing the same thing.
6. “No one can do what we’re doing.” If there’s anything worse than the lack of a market and cluelessness, it’s arrogance. No one else can do this until the first company does it, and ten others spring up in the next ninety days. Let’s see, no one else ran a sub four-minute mile after Roger Bannister. (It took only a month before John Landy did). The world is a big place. There are lots of smart people in it. Entrepreneurs are kidding themselves if they think they have any kind of monopoly on knowledge. And, sure as I’m a Macintosh user, on the same day that an entrepreneur tells this lie, the venture capitalist will have met with another company that’s doing the same thing.
7. “Hurry because several other venture capital firms are interested.” The good news: There are maybe one hundred entrepreneurs in the world who can make this claim. The bad news: The fact that you are reading a blog about venture capital means you’re not one of them. As my mother used to say, “Never play Russian roulette with an Uzi.” For the absolute cream of the crop, there is competition for a deal, and an entrepreneur can scare other investors to make a decision. For the rest of us, don’t think one can create a sense of scarcity when it’s not true. Re-read the previous blog about the lies of venture capitalists, to learn how entrepreneurs are hearing “maybe” when venture capitalists are saying “no.”
8. “Oracle is too big/dumb/slow to be a threat.” Larry Ellison has his own jet. He can keep the San Jose Airport open for his late night landings. His boat is so big that it can barely get under the Golden Gate Bridge. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs are flying on Southwest out of Oakland and stealing the free peanuts. There’s a reason why Larry is where he is, and entrepreneurs are where they are, and it’s not that he’s big, dumb, and slow. Competing with Oracle, Microsoft, and other large companies is a very difficult task. Entrepreneurs who utter this lie look at best naive. You think it’s bravado, but venture capitalists think it’s stupidity.
9. “We have a proven management team.” Says who? Because the founder worked at Morgan Stanley for a summer? Or McKinsey for two years? Or he made sure that John Sculley’s Macintosh could power on? Truly “proven” in a venture capitalist’s eyes is founder of a company that returned billions to its investors. But if the entrepreneur were that proven, that he (a) probably wouldn’t have to ask for money; (b) wouldn’t be claiming that he’s proven. (Do you think Wayne Gretzky went around saying, “I am a good hockey player”?) A better strategy is for the entrepreneur to state that (a) she has relevant industry experience; (b) she is going to do whatever it takes to succeed; (c) she is going to surround herself with directors and advisors who are proven; and (d) she’ll step aside whenever it becomes necessary. This is good enough for a venture capitalist that believes in what the entrepreneur is doing.
10. “Patents make our product defensible.” The optimal number of times to use the P word in a presentation is one. Just once, say, “We have filed patents for what we are doing.” Done. The second time you say it, venture capitalists begin to suspect that you are depending too much on patents for defensibility. The third time you say it, you are holding a sign above your head that says, “I am clueless.” Sure, you should patent what you’re doing–if for no other reason than to say it once in your presentation. But at the end of the patents are mostly good for impressing your parents. You won’t have the time or money to sue anyone with a pocket deep enough to be worth suing.
11. “All we have to do is get 1% of the market.” (Here’s a bonus since I still have battery power.) This lie is the flip side of “the market will be $50 billion.” There are two problems with this lie. First, no venture capitalist is interested in a company that is looking to get 1% or so of a market. Frankly, we want our companies to face the wrath of the anti-trust division of the Department of Justice. Second, it’s also not that easy to get 1% of any market, so you look silly pretending that it is. Generally, it’s much better for entrepreneurs to show a realistic appreciation of the difficulty of building a successful company.

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