Business Blogging Pros welcomes our newest client, Seaside Shoes.
Our team has created what promises to be a fun blog. About twice a week, we'll publish some lighthearted trivia or historical tidbit about shoes. We also plan to run a couple of fun contests just to see what happens.
Our desire is that some of the traffic will spill over onto Seaside Shoes' main website and they'll sell a few pairs of Crocs as a result.
Chip Lambert, nationally-known expert on LinkedIn (and a good friend) posted this video on his blog a few days ago. It does a great job of explaining th epower of LinkedIn:
What is LinkedIn? from LinkedIn Marketing on Vimeo.
If you really want to understand how to best leverage LinkedIn, I strongly suggest you take one of Chip's LinkedIn Webinars.
Come to this seminar and find out
Blogging has evolved into a cutting-edge marketing tool that is immediate, personal, and engaging. Blogging can boost your image, exposure, reputation, and revenue. Best of all blogging is within the financial reach of everyone.
Done well, a small company can achieve results that large firms with millions of dollars to spend on marketing would be hard-pressed to achieve.
In this FREE seminar you will learn:
When: Monday July 21, 2008 6pm
Where:
The Growth Coach Business Improvement Group
14819 N Cave Creek Rd
Phoenix, AZ
Map
I am a huge fan of the folks across town at Pragmatic Marketing and am currently waiting for my copy of their new book, Tuned In to arrive.
My prediction is that Phil Myers and his team will have caused the terms 'Tuned In' and 'Tuned Out' to be cemented into our business lexicon.
My nomination for The Most Tuned Out Company of 2008 is Viacom.
In case you haven't been following this case, here it is in a nutshell: Some of Viacom's customers are such big fans of Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, and other Viacom shows that they are spreading the word about them by posting clips on YouTube.
Viacom wants them to stop, and is suing Google/YouTube to make them stop.
I just did a search for Comedy Central on YouTube and the first video clip I found had 1.8 million views. How many of those viewers were exposed to Comedy Central for the first time via YouTube? How many of those viewers have started watching Comedy Central as a result?
Most of us would kill for that kind of exposure. If I discovered a video of one of my seminars on YouTube and that video had been downloaded 1.8 million times I can tell you how I would react: I would be eternally grateful to the person who uploaded it. I would seek that person out and thank them from the bottom of my heart.
Why would anyone in their right mind want to shut down the most powerful form of marketing known to man?
When a company 'gets' social media and truly embraces it, social media will fundamentally change the way that company does business.
One of the most important things I teach my clients is that if they want to be successful turning their product or service into a Social Object (meaning something that people talk about around the water cooler) they must be willing to give up control of the conversation. It will take on a life of its own. The whole Menthos phenomenon is a perfect example. Menthos got out of the way and let the conversation - and free publicity - happen.
Yes, it takes guts, But if you do it, the results will be worth it.
I was reading a conversation on one of the better known sales forums today about the advisability of 'assuming the sale'. In other words, using language such as:
"what we're going to do for you is..."
"what colour would you like that in?"
"what address would you like that sent to"
Blogs, websites, Google, and the internet in general have fundamentally changed the nature of the traditional sales funnel.
Consider the traditional model:
1. Prospect responds to a print ad by calling/writing and asking for literature
2. Prospect contacts us for more information.
3. Prospect asks for a demo
4. Prospect asks for more information..
...
5. Prospect buys
We could track the prospect on his complete trip through the funnel. This is a double-edged sword. On one hand, we can capture great metrics on the conversion rates for each step, but it is also time consuming.
Things are (or can be) very different today. What if your first contact with the prospect was at Step 5?
We can use our websites, blogs, and other tools to provide the prospect with all the information he/she needs. The prospect LOVES it because he can proceed at his own pace without the perceived 'pressure' from a salesperson. (And there is a side benefit in that you are seen as a more open and friendly company that is easy to deal with.)
I am fond of quoting my friend and sales guru Michael Goodman who says that the three elements that must be present before the sale can be made are trust, credibility, and interest.
Consider the way we buy things today. The first step is usually a Google search. We probably locate a small number of likely candidate firms who appear to offer the product or service we want.
Then we perform some additional research to narrow those candidates down to a single selection. When I bought my Bosch dishwasher recently, by the time I visited the local dealer's showroom I had already decided upon the exact model and that I wanted to buy it from him.
Ideally, by the time you hear from the prospect for the first time, you want him to already know three things:
Done well, your blog can satisfy items 2 and 3. You can, through your blog, demonstrate your expertise and knowledge so well that you are perceived as an expert. (Of course, when someone refers to me as an expert, I usually reply that an expert is nothing but a former drip under pressure.)
And by sharing bits of your personal side, readers will come to know you as a genuine human being. For example, David Meerman Scott collects Apollo space program artifacts. I am an amateur gourmet chef. Our purpose is to help our readers get to know us. They then relate to us and form a connection. We become the kind of person they are comfortable doing business with. Remember:
Your blogging will have an ROI, even if you spend 10 minutes a week. Of course, the return will be proportional to the investment.
A client who has been blogging for about a year recently emailed me from the east coast. He is on his first very lucrative consulting gig that he can directly attribute to blogging. Tom writes about one blog post a week.
Another client, Mike, who has been blogging about 8 months just landed a consulting contract in Manhattan. He says that he would never have gotten the contact oif not for his blog. Mike writes a new blog post about every other week.
Two examples very close to home that blogging boosts your image, exposure and revenue without giving up your life.
This topic has come up three times in the past two weeks.
Almost everyone is comfortable using MS-Word. Spell-check and all the editing and formatting features make it seem like a great way to compose and format a blog post, right?
Wrong. Or Maybe.
It is easy to be fooled. You can copy and paste directly from MS-Word into the 'New Post' or 'edit Post' form and it looks like it will work just fine. The problem is that the code that MS-Word creates is not web-compatible.
The biggest offender is Word's ability to change straight quotes into curly quotes. (Look for "Replace straight quotes with Smart Quotes" on the AutoCorrect dialog box.) Those curly quotes are not web-compatible characters and will play havoc with your RSS feed, among other things.
It is possible though to use MS-Word as a blog composition tool.
Option 1: Use MS-Word to Compose, Format in Typepad
Use this option when you are mainly interested in using Word for spell-checking and getting your thoughts out of your brain and onto the screen.
Before you copy-and-past your entry from MS-Word into Typepad, locate the Display Options link on Typepad's 'New Post' or 'Edit Post' form. click on it and select 'Markdown'. (None of Word's formatting will be copied to Typepad.)
Then click on Display Options again and select 'Rich Text + HTML' instead of 'Markdown'. You can then use Typepad's controls to format your post.
Option 2: Office 2007
The Word Blogging Tool - included in the new Microsoft Word as part of Microsoft Office 2007 - lets you publish to your blog from inside the familiar Word environment with a single click. TypePad is a default option in Microsoft Word, which makes it simple and straightforward; all you'll need is your Typepad username and password. Better yet, the HTML the tool writes to your blog is in a simple, blog-friendly format.
To use Word 2007 to Compose your posts and publish them right within Word:
1. Open MS-Word 2007
2. Click File -> New -> New Blog Post
3. Enter the information about your blog
4. Write your post
5. Click 'Publish'
Option 3: Other Options
Microsoft has a great new free tool called Windows Live Writer that makes it easy to publish rich content to your blog. If you are familiar with MS-Word, you'll have no trouble with Windows Live Writer:
http://get.live.com/writer/overview
There are several other options and Typepad has a Knowledge Base article describing some of them:
Mike Leeds is one of my clients. Mike works with companies, managers, teams, and individuals to increase their sales and profitability.
I helped Mike start his blog about eight months ago. Mike is living proof that you don't have to dedicate a lot of time to blogging in order for it to produce results. Mike writes a new post on his blog about every other week. He recently told me that he landed a new client in NYC as a direct result of blogging. He received a phone call from a consulting firm in New York, NY looking for assistance with developing a sales process for their team. They read his blog, checked out his website, and gave him a call.
I've known Mike for a long time and I will tell you that he is very good at his craft. The cold hard truth however is that the New York firm would never have known about Mike except for his blog. And consider as well that there are probably dozens of other firms in New York offering the same kind of service as Mike.
To Mike's credit, he is doing everything right:
Mike is building a great example of what Hugh MacLeod calls his Global Microbrand. It's a microbrand because it is what Mike wants to be known for. It's global because Mike can live in Phoenix Arizona and his market is not limited to the people that live here.
Way to Go Mike!
My father is now in a better place. I got a call from the nursing home yesterday saying that the time was near. I arrived at his bedside late yesterday afternoon to find his breathing shallow and labored. I spent several hours yesterday afternoon and evening just sitting there with him, holding his hand.
When I finally had to leave, I knelt over him, kissed him, and whispered in his hear, "Goodbye Dad, I Love You", knowing it would probably be the final goodbye. At 2:09am, the phone rang and he was gone.
The thing I hope everyone remembers about Dad was his sense of humor. He was always saying or doing something to make you laugh. My hope is that everyone will remember him for that.
