They’re the kind of people who bait you with comments on your blogs, who directly challenge you to take action & respond to them in forums, who write inaccurate posts twisting events to their own version of what happened. They may even encourage (some might say “incite”) others to leave negative messages & comments about you in various places. In short, they’ll spread their negativity across the internet without a thought for what it actually says about them.

Over the past few years online, we’ve had our fair share of haters. In fact one situation got to the stage where we consulted a couple of lawyers (including the libel lawyer for The Sun, no less). While it was decided that we undoubtedly had a case against this particular hater, who clearly thought that refraining from outright using our names made it “ok”, we decided we didn’t need to take things that far (yet, at least). Instead, here are a few ways to deal with haters & their actions:

Continue on your own path

Never let the haters distract you from your path; they’ll do their best, even going so far as to try & sabotage what you’re doing either directly or indirectly. Don’t pay them any attention or you’ll just give them more power. Instead carry on along your path, focusing on your own game and not theirs.

Take things to the next level

Even better than carrying on along your own path, aim to take things to the next level. Not only will this focus your attention even more on your game and not theirs, it’ll very likely exact the best revenge on your haters…growing, expanding and making more successful that which they want to destroy.

Maintain your dignity & professionalism

No matter what accusations are made, nor how much somebody tries to draw a hasty, emotional response from you, take a step back and breathe. Even if you’re threatened (we were), your haters lose all professionalism (they did) and they use language which should never appear in a professional relationship (they did), no matter what the issue is – maintain your professional behaviour. Even when you think no-one else is looking, how you behave online is important – you never really know who is looking or privy to your interactions or emails.

Rally your supporters

Nobody likes being criticised, accused nor threatened in any format. It’s important that you have some trusted advisors or friends to turn to. It’s easy to respond in the heat of the moment – don’t. Throughout all of our experiences, we’ve had our emails & responses reviewed by a number of people. What’s been even more surprising for me are the unexpected sources of support which have come out of the woodwork to support us in private, behind the scenes.

It’s hard dealing with people who don’t like you, whether that dislike is deserved or not. Most of us have a deep-seated need or desire to be accepted, to be liked. It’s tough when somebody actively dislikes you for whatever reason.

The best thing to tell yourself and to remember is this: You’ve clearly got under someone’s skin badly enough to incite such a passionate response. That’s quite the feat and is likely to affect them far more than it does you, no matter what they do to fluster you. Here’s a quote which sums it up best…

“Hanging onto resentment is letting someone you despise live rent-free in your head”

~ Ann Landers

If you’ve been over to this site recently (versus reading it via a feedreader or via email), you may have noticed a slight tweak to the masthead. The strapline now says “Blogging Behind The Scenes Of A Location Independent Business” – which means that once again, this blog is evolving.

The reasons for this are two-fold:

1 – The fact that I live a location independent lifestyle is what many people find the most fascinating aspect of my life – and on the advice of someone I respect, I am going to be leveraging this more as part of my personal brand – especially now that the Location Independent project is becoming my main focus on a day-to-day basis.

2 – I believe in transparency in business. What this means is that I believe it’s important to understand why businesses behave the way they do and why they make the decisions they make – no matter what size the business is. As far as I’m concerned, this transparent approach benefits everyone – and especially customers and clients.

The kind of business that Jonathan and I are now building with Kinetiva is a pretty unique one (that too is evolving, by the way) and I’d like to be as transparent as possible about how we’re doing this and the decisions we’re making along the way. I hope that you’ll find it interesting and useful too…

P.S. For a pretty exciting event in the growth of the Location Independent project, check out this post on Chris Guillebeau’s phenomenally popular site, The Art of Nonconformity.

• A more strategic plan for the overall direction of the site.
• A more complete portfolio of products/services – working through creating these now and we should soon have a good portfolio that addresses the needs of each main audience of the site at various different price points.
• A more customised user experience for each type of audience.

It’s the last point which I find really interesting when it comes to blogs, as so few blogs do this.

Most bloggers don’t sub-segment their audience nearly enough which tends to result in a generic experience for all types of visitors and readers. If you model best practice marketing & customer experience, then what they really should be doing is looking to provide a more customised experience for each type of visitor…which means they also need to define each type of visitor to their blog.

For a practical example, I’m trying an experiment on the LI blog for the next few weeks & months. If you head to the site, you’ll notice that the home page has changed completely.

And if you delve deeper, you may notice some very subtle changes depending upon which route you take…they’re not obvious but they are tailored to the type of reader that may be reading the post/page.

It’ll be interesting to see, from a business perspective, whether this has an impact on the key stats for the site – and of course sales of the products. I’ll let you know…

According to the progress tracker on Babycentre she’s apparently practising her breathing technique (and no Daddy, she’s not a fish!), hence the hiccups. Strange sensation and quite disturbing until I realised what it was.

Whenever I mention the mini-me on Twitter (did you notice that smooth transition!!!), I get a wide variety of responses from the cheeky/rude (from the young ‘uns) to the “aaaw tell me more”. It’s weird but quite cool to have so many people “involved” in my pregnancy/life who I’ve never met.

As so many have been predicting recently, Twitter seems to be hitting its stride and gaining popularity amongst non-early adopters and non-geeks (even my Dad’s on Twitter!).

For some time now though, I’ve been noticing a few knock-on effects on blogging and potentially on business – as Twitter gains in popularity. And they’re not all good…

Devaluing expertise knowledge?

It has become quite common-place to ask for (and receive) advice on Twitter about how to do x, y and z – particularly techy things like WordPress stuff. There’s a fine line to tread for any WordPress coaches/consultants out there who obviously want to demonstrate their expertise & knowledge but yet end up often giving a ton of help away for free for something they’d usually charge good money for.

There’s nothing at all wrong with giving away free information, if this is part of your strategy to attract new business – but I don’t believe the “free content” and “free expertise” model is going to be sustainable for many people for too much longer – so it’s not something I enjoy seeing happen on Twitter.

Replacing blogging as a two-way communication tool?

Since Twittering, I’ve noticed that many people who previously would have commented on a blog post now respond via Twitter. The result?

Fewer blog comments – this isn’t a problem at all, unless you subscribe to the idea that people use the number of comments on your posts to judge how popular your blog is (I don’t, by the way). But I’ve seen a number of bloggers bemoan the lack of comments on a post – despite having received feedback via Twitter.

I see this as a positive sign – the more channels readers have to interact with you, the more engaged they potentially become. You just need to stop judging a blog by its comments.

There are a few more things I’ve noticed but I don’t want to turn this into a rant – and I now have a huge, comfy new sofa to go and sit on (yes, we conceded and ended up having to buy a decent sofa for our time in the UK) – you have no idea how an additional stone in weight makes my bum bones feel even more bony!

If you’re like us, you go on a major marketing drive and/or look at why your existing marketing activities aren’t working. But for some businesses (who don’t have humongous marketing budgets to waste), that’s easier said than done. And here’s why…

Of every single person I have ever coached/mentored/consulted, there is one common reason why their marketing efforts fail and they constantly struggle to get business: they have a poorly defined target market.

If you have a clearly defined target market, it makes it simple to:

• Offer people something they really do want and really will buy
• Reach out and contact people who already want what you’re selling
• Communicate with the people who are interested in what you have to say & will listen

But often many people struggle to define their market fearing it will limit the business they attract (on the contrary, it will explode it if you can get laser-focused about who you target) and unsure of what niches are right for them.

If that sounds like you, then here are a few ideas I’ve had percolating in my head for a while now – they’re largely markets that I think are under-served, not yet dominated by a major player and could do with being filled, so feel free to do so :)

Niches for Life Coaches

• Major Life Change coach – or even more specific, focusing on helping a client thrive through one particular life change (e.g. Marriage, Divorce, Parenthood, Grievance).
• Corporate Escape coach – helping rat racers escape the cubicle, much like Pam Slim does but would be great to have a “go to” UK version.
• Location Independent/Digital Nomad coach – I get asked for this on a frequent basis, but I just don’t have the appetite to do it. However there is definitely a market for helping people make the leap into the world of running a business whilst travelling.

Niches for Personal Trainers/CHEK Practitioners

• Conception coach – utilising a full range of holistic health approaches (including the CHEK approach, Functional Medicine, Parasite elimination, hormone balancing etc.).
• Pregnancy coach – both health (MT-based diets) and fitness throughout pregnancy using all above holistic approaches.
• New Healthy Baby coach – covering all the decisions & choices new parents need to make about the health of their baby.

Niches for Blogging/Social Media Consultants

With this one, there are so many untapped niches out there it’s easy. Whilst I know that if you can do it for one industry, you can very likely do it for many others when it comes to social media marketing – from a branding and marketing perspective, rather than calling yourself a Blogging Consultant or Social Media Consultant, call yourself “The Restaurant Blogging Coach” or the “Social Media Consultant for the Catering Industry”. Focus on one specific industry and position yourself as the “go to” expert for that industry.

There are plenty more ideas where those came from – just ask if you want them!